Studies for Life in Our Minds celebrates the power of the human brain as a meaning-making machine. Through the expressive power of movement, presence and absence, the flock generates an apparent agency, exploring our urge to engage emotionally with possibly sentient, artificial entities. The studies’ source material is the studio’s own BOID simulations based on Craig Reynolds’s 1986 artificial life programme, one of the earliest digital attempts to simulate flocking behaviour.

Here, Random International experiments with the instinctive abilities of the human visual system and how reducing information can intensify its impact. The flock’s behavioural traits alter as it moves throughout its spatial domain, which extends through and beyond the frames of each screen. Whilst it is fragmented, split up across multiple screens with gaps between them, the flock inhabits the entirety of the space and is aware of the physical boundaries of its habitat. Through Studies for Life in Our Minds Random International aims to better understand how we, as humans, perceive and respond to simulated collective intelligence, asking what this might mean in today’s environment of rapid, ubiquitous, and subtle technological advancement.