UMwelt-VIRUtopia: Swarming – 2011
Swarming behavior, a phenomenon observed in nature among organisms such as birds, fish, and insects, has long captivated scientific and artistic inquiry. It serves as a powerful model for decentralized intelligence, emergent behavior, and self-organizing systems. Yet, when translated into technological systems—particularly within the realm of automation and swarm robotics—swarming becomes entangled with histories of colonial control, post-colonial resistance, and decolonial re-imaginings of agency.
Between Control and Chaos: The Politics of Swarming
Frederik De Wilde’s UMwelt-VIRUtopia (2011) operates at the intersection of natural and artificial intelligence, staging a micro-robotic swarm as an embodied engagement with space, sound, light, and the audience. The installation is not merely a demonstration of technological prowess but a critical interrogation of swarm intelligence in the post-digital era. Like Jacques Tati’s Playtime, which satirized the alienation of modernist architecture and technocratic rationality, UMwelt-VIRUtopia challenges the logics of control that underpin automation and robotics. By deploying 23 autonomous robots, each equipped with Class 2 laser beam technology, the work generates an emergent choreography of light, sound, and movement within a smoke-filled environment—a dreamscape where the visibility of swarming patterns is heightened.
Swarm robotics, as an emergent field, is deeply rooted in cybernetic thought, itself a legacy of colonial and military-industrial structures of power. Historically, centralized control and hierarchical command structures defined colonial governance, while post-colonial movements sought to dismantle such systems through strategies of resistance and distributed autonomy. Swarm intelligence, in contrast to traditional hierarchical models, operates through decentralized coordination—a mode that, at first glance, appears aligned with decolonial aspirations of collective agency. However, in contemporary technological applications, swarming is often weaponized for surveillance, policing, and algorithmic control, recalling the imperial impulse to regulate, categorize, and dominate populations.
Post-Colonial Swarms and Decolonial Machines
The question then arises: can swarm robotics be reimagined beyond colonial paradigms of control? UMwelt-VIRUtopia gestures towards an alternative future—one where the interplay of machine autonomy and human spectatorship destabilizes fixed structures of power. The installation’s robotic swarm does not adhere to a predetermined choreography but instead generates its own logic through interaction with the environment. This dynamic recalls indigenous knowledge systems and non-Western cosmologies, which often emphasize relationality, fluidity, and non-hierarchical forms of organization. In this sense, UMwelt-VIRUtopia performs a decolonial gesture: it refuses the rigidity of centralized automation in favor of emergent, adaptive intelligence. The micro-robots, much like the organisms that inspire their design, do not function as mere tools of efficiency but as actors in an open-ended system of negotiation. As artificial intelligence and automation continue to shape the infrastructures of the 21st century, De Wilde’s work invites us to reconsider the ethical and philosophical stakes of these technologies. Can swarm intelligence be reclaimed as a force of collective liberation rather than control? How might robotics serve not the logic of extraction and exploitation but new models of interdependence? Through the spectacle of robotic swarming, UMwelt-VIRUtopia reveals the tensions between colonial legacies, post-colonial critique, and decolonial futures. It is a poetic and political meditation on the paradoxes of technological progress—one that demands we rethink the very nature of intelligence, agency, and autonomy in an increasingly automated world.
Production & Support Studio De Wilde – Frederik De Wilde Supported by the Flemish Government & Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT).
