Stigmergy

Mark Elliott, VCA PhD Candidate



My PhD research represents an application-oriented investigation into collaboration with a special focus on Internet-based mass collaboration such as http://Wikedia.org etc. My arts practice consists of composing larger-scale collaborations of a great variety, ranging from an online collaborative research project investigating collaboration across all disciplines ( MetaCollab.net), to collaborative educational environments for the VCA student body, and to participatory policy drafting (http://ABRI.org.au). My thesis puts forward generalised theoretical framework for collective activity, collaboration and mass collaboration drawing on theories of swarm intelligence, stigmergy, and distributed cognition providing a transdisciplinary architecture for describing the underlying mechanisms which have enabled the emergence of many activities associated with Web 2.0. I will show examples from my collaborative projects while discussing my research findings.