a comparison of artistic structure and ants foraging for food
“Additionally, all artistic structure is essentially polyphonic; it evolves not in a single line of thought, but in several superimposed strands at once.”
from The Hidden Order of Art” by Anton Ehrenzweig
The idea of maze or trails of options is an interesting comparison to what it is ants do best, forage. Ants are fairly simple creatures who manage to complete ultimately complex tasks. Imagine a bunch of ants wandering around each independently making decisions and each leading a trail of pheromones behind them. Now say one ant stumbles into a picnic, completely by accident as ants don’t have senses which lead the to food, and then a second ant also completely by accident comes to the same picnic. The pheromone trail they both walked is now doubly active and a third ant and a forth ant follow and are lead to food. This continues until there is a nearly singular path and all the food is eaten or gathered and taken to their nest and then the process begins again with blind searching and chance. Art it seems may begin in the same way perhaps clumsy at first and without a plan in mind equipped instead with the ability to make simple decisions (equivalent to that of the ant deciding to walk right or left) until you have stumbled into something that is a success for the time. And perhaps another person is making the same discovery making it easier and easier for more and more people to join until the thing everyone has been working on is exhausted and the process starts all over again.
An applet which demonstrations the formations of paths in foraging ants can be found here.
