Swarmic Trajectories: Mapping the Symbiosis of Social Insects and Biomimetic Automation at Fulfilment Centre Worksites

The key focus of this research project is to explore how modelling a fulfilment centre packaging floor on nature’s examples of swarmic organisation has altered the human, machine and insect worker’s relation to the late-capitalist worksite. The comparison of superorganism swarms to human’ social organisation, modes of manufacturing, and industrial systems has historically informed the studies of the philosophy and politics of swarming. Subsequently, this thesis examines the history of entomological discovery and recent technological developments in the automation realm in junction with an analysis of the politics of swarming and the cultural legacy of the social insect as depicted through western art and philosophy from the 19th century to present day. This thesis additionally elaborates on the key concepts explored within Workwelt Logistics, an exhibition produced in partial fulfilment of the MFA degree that presents an allegory of the industrious nature and turbulent fluidity of the material structure and politics inherent to swarming.
As semi-decentralised robot collectives that perform hive-minded logistics labour, swarm technologies offer a blurring of human/animal/machine relations within automated worksites by opening up rigid, anthropocentric warehouse structures to a certain malleability that resembles the shapeless organisational configuration of a biological swarm. Through investigating the rise of automated swarming as a profitable alternative to traditional warehouse labour, this thesis identifies connections and ambiguities between machines, swarms and evolving forms of capitalism. What became apparent from this audit of western attitudes and political/philosophical interpretations of swarming was the fact that the alien figure of the social insect has been both vilified for its devastating ability to cause agricultural havoc, yet also appraised for its virtuosic organisational methods. Subsequently, this research project has arrived at an understanding of the swarm as a polarising and fluid cultural figure and organisational technic. A potent bio-politic that has historically come to represent a political otherness that opposes the western neoliberal ethos of capitalism, biological swarms offer an organisational framework that can be harvested for designing automation systems that carry out efficient labouring. This phenomenon demarcates a new entangled relationship between swarms, machines, and neoliberalism – a complex symbiosis that is loaded with cultural legacy of the infamous insect social insect figure and its succession from an untameable nuisance to state-of-the-art automation technology. Ultimately, this makes the swarm a paradoxical object: One that has the potential to operate both in aid of capitalist systems of production and to challenge such modes of anthropocentric organisation.