ANTS2026: Entangled Biome

Welcome to the Entangled Biome...

...an alien organism that reacts to interaction.

We invite you to explore and interact with the system.

Consider how the disparate parts form a unified super-organism.

What is your role in this ecosystem?

Entangled Biome

The Echo State Machine

Pet the tentacle leaves

Observe the ball berries

Squish a jelly brain

Audio soundscape

Generated from interaction with objects and from the dynamics of pulse-coupled oscillators.

It consists of three layers: a passive background ambient, reaction synths from object interaction, and pulse synths triggered when oscillators spike.

Each tentacle is modelled as an oscillator. It's phase increments every timestep. Detecting spikes (from other tentacles) causes an oscillator to increase its own phase.

System

[1] Central control: Raspberry Pi to process inputs and trigger outputs. Audio is generated using SuperCollider, a programming language for algorithmic composition. Pi HAT to interface with speakers. Arduino to process inputs from buttons and generate LED output. ESP32 to receive messages from other ESP32's via WiFi.

[2] Jellyfish brains: These are buttons which are connected to the central control unit via the Arduino.

[3] Tentacle leaves: Each one contains an ESP32 and accelerometer. The accelerometer detects movement from interaction (shaking a tentacle) and sends the magnitude to the central control unit as a serial message.

Audio generation

A central controller synchronizes phases through simulation of a pulse-coupled oscillator system.
Each “Tentacle Leaf” is assigned a phase, and movement of the tentacles perturbs the phase of each tentacle, disrupting the synchronised state.

[A] At each timestep, each oscillator increases its own phase, θ.

[B] An oscillator fires when it reaches θ = 1. This event is detected by all other oscillators and they increase their phases according to coupling constant α.

[C] Eventually, oscillators synchronize phases. Interaction with a tentacle will perturb its phase, causing it to become descynchronized.

Behind-the-scenes

Initial concepts -

The intention was to create a system of distributed objects that people could explore and interact with. The focus was on audio (music) output, which would emerge from the interactions with various objects.

Grace's DIY skills in action: sewing + crafting.

Thanks also to Usama, Ecem (and her brother), and Grasiella for their help in this!

The day of the ANTS conference - as the local organizing committee, we are up early to transport things to the venue including the art :)

ANTS2026 is an international conference on swarm intelligence, held every two years. It brings together researchers in diverse topics, all related to swarm intelligence. The theme for 2026 is "reaching beyond - swarm intelligence across systems, disciplines, and communities". We were excited, then, to bring our weird and wonderful art installation to the swarm community. Our goal: Use art to demonstrate principles of naturally occurring steady state systems, and demonstrate the impact of human perturbations. The result is feedback loops produced by human interaction and emergent output from the system.

Created by

Co-Leads: Suet Lee & Grace McFassel

Usama Ali, Khulud Alharthi, Avgi Stavrou, Alexandra McFassel

With support from the CA::VE team.