Stigmergia by Karolis Lasys

The cyclical nature of all known living beings is eerily fractal. The birth and death of cells, the aging of animals and humans and even their own creations are mimicking cyclical patterns of growth and decay. Observing our cities from a top view, it’s easy to draw analogies to a living organism: thousands of humans acting like neurotransmitters or blood cells, fueling the urban superorganism. You can start to see it breathe, digest, rationalize, even create and expand itself further until it eventually starts to decay.

Stigmergia was composed from field recordings and impulse responses of spaces in various stages of their life cycles: decaying buildings, set to be demolished, buildings in the process of being built and existing, living spaces. Karolis Lasys understands architecture not only as infrastructure, but also as living organisms in the ecosystem of the city. The artist traces how the relationship dynamics between people and their spaces changes when observing from afar. In these urban scales, human bodies become mere carriers of information – synapses that lie beyond our awareness.

Karolis Lasys:
“I wonder what sort of architectural lifeforms we facilitate, how it goes through the motions of birth, life and decay. These three meditations are composed of field recordings, impulse responses, feedback loops and various subsonic frequencies. In my investigation of planetary organisms, I search for what lies beyond our anthropocentric understanding of the world - a chronicle of life beyond human scale. “

About the concept:

Stigmergy, a biological phenomenon where individuals indirectly coordinate their actions through modification of the environment, is a key concept in understanding the dynamics of complex systems like cities. Just as ants build their colonies through the collective effort of individual insects responding to environmental cues, human societies shape their urban landscapes through shared behaviors and interactions with the built environment.
Differing from the concept of the holobiom, which emphasizes the symbiotic interspecies relationships, stigmergy highlights the collective intelligence emerging from the interaction of intraspecies individuals with their environment. While the holobiont focuses on the biological level, stigmergy may extend to broader ecological and social systems.

Stigmergia originated as part of an architectural experiment called “FromADistantHere”, made for ExP: Experiments’ Platform, run by Architektūros Fondas (eng. The Architecture Fund of Lithuania). It was exhibited in 2021 in Sodas2123. Taking the form of an audiovisual installation and sculpture reimagining the digestive tract of an urban superorganism, the experiment played on the concept of post-anthropocentric evolution and conceptions of life. Stigmergia is the documentation of an attempt to shift the perspective away from humanity as an insulated species to an actor within a larger, broader system.

Read more about the exhibition here: https://exp.archfondas.lt/en/post/eksperimentu-platformos-paroda/ and learn about the platform itself on https://exp.archfondas.lt/en/about/.

re:natura is a non-profit artist collective, music label and experimental laboratory with a clear, shared vision.

With a focus on topics of biodiversity, we explore animals, plants, landscapes and natural phenomena. In the critical tradition of naturalists, we compose, publish, perform and convey experimental musics that are concerned with the specifics of life.

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