Sun Ra and his Stigmergic Digital Arkestra

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"If we look far enough back in the depths of time, the disordered anthill of living beings suddenly, for an informed observer, arranges itself in long files that make their way by various paths towards greater consciousness." Teilhard de Chardin

Sonic Stigmergy

Outside of AI, where wall-following orchestra-forming robots take cues from the insect world to illustrate self-organized complexity, one relatively unexplored rhythmic model comes from the collective constructional behavior of the insects, which entymologist Pierre-Paul Grasse named stigmergy. The OED entry for stigmergy reads "the process by which the results of an insect's activity act as a stimulus to further activity" For example, the

termites' very activity produces the pheromones that stimulate further activity. Joe Gregorio (2005) explains that “termites in Africa can build incredible nests that are up to 30 feet tall that contain many tunnels and chambers. These tall complex structures are used to regulate temperature, humidity and oxygen in the nest which is all carefully controlled to promote the growth of the fungus which the ants eat. The construction of the termite mound is controlled through stigmergy, in particular the construction of columns and arches is controlled by the evaporation of pheromones. The ants place pheremones on the balls of mud they use for construction. The new balls are placed near existing pheromone concentrations. As construction proceeds and the columns get taller the pheromones near the bottom evaporate. If two columns are built near each other then the concentration of pheremones at the top of the columns will cause the two to be joined into an arch” (http://bitworking.org/news/Stigmergy).

Could it be possible--might sound also produce electrical and chemical resonances that can help coordinate the time and space of composition? "Replace ants with neurons, and pheromones with neurotransmitters, and you might just as well be talking about the human brain," says Steven Johnson in Emergence (2001), where he argues that "pattern-matching" algorithms of emergent software designed to "scan the wires for constellations of book lovers or potential mates" are part of a larger evolution of mind (p. 115).

Long ago, Socrates, in the Phaedrus (trans. Hackforth 1972) gestures to the insect world, acknowledging a sort of resonance with the cicadas buzzing in the plane tree that shades Phaedrus and Socrates in this dialogue: “I think too that the cicadas overhead, singing after their wont in the hot sun and conversing with one another, don't fail to observe us, as well” (p. 117). Why did Socrates use the cicadas to set up his meditation on rhetoric and writing in the Phaedrus? Because they were there, in the form of a ready-made pattern, an available order, and a sonic stigmergy. In information-dense ecologies, selecting is a composing gesture: we select what's there.

In "Metabolic Stability and Epigenesis in Randomly Constructed Nets," published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology in 1969, Stuart Kauffman, reports on the order that emerged from random elements entered into a computer program in an effort to theorize cellular differentiation, and described the resulting coherence (in process apparently common to both living and nonliving systems), as "order for free." When Kaufman (2005) later reflects on his most popular sample/soundbyte, “order for free,” he explains how, unlike biologists who “suppose the order of ontogeny is due to an enormous and laborious effort,” he believes that “most of the beautiful order seen in ontogeny is spontaneous, a natural expression of the stunning self-organization that abounds in very complex regulatory networks....order, vast and generative, arises naturally” (p. 25). This is also what Socrates does in the Phaedrus, one the most often-sampled dialogues in the rhetorical tradition; he samples available order, for free, reminding us that rhetoric should always take place in a conducive ecology. Socrates in Phaedrus:

Here is this lofty and spreading plane-tree, and the agnus cast us high and clustering, in the fullest blossom and the greatest fragrance; and the stream which flows beneath the plane-tree is deliciously cold to the feet. Judging from the ornaments and images, this must be a spot sacred to Achelous and the Nymphs. How delightful is the breeze—so very sweet; and there is a sound in the air shrill and summerlike which makes answer to the chorus of the cicadae. (Phaedrus 230d, Jowett transl. http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/jod/texts/phaedrus.html)

Mark Elliot's PhD dissertation, Stigmergic Collaboration: A Theoretical Framework for Mass Collaboration explores the literal aspects of what has often been taken to be a metaphorical connection between emergent properties in biological systems and the coherence that emerges in collaboration unfolding in digital media.

The indirect communication of entymological stigmergy is a good way to understand the stochastic dimension of creative rhythmic action and the depatterning and distribution of what Brian Rotman calls the monoid self into what Donald calls the hybrid mind, our consciousness.