DJing as a Way of Exploring Cybernetics: The Dancefloor as a Petri Dish

April 18, 2014 Alan Cross 0 Comments

Here’s your word of the day: stigmergy. It describes “a form of indirect coordination of actions,” like how ants work together to deal with a complicated situation at the ol’ anthill.

So what does this have to do with spinning records? Plenty, apparently. From Nautilus:

[Johan] Bollen and [Luis] Rocha are experts on stigmergy—for real. They DJ by night, but by day they study cybernetics—how people, animals, and machines control and exchange information—at Indiana University in Bloomington. A focus on feedback runs through their both their research and DJing. And while they really just want to orchestrate a raging party, the crowd is, in a sense, an experiment.

This is a completely new take on DJing. Give it a read.

Alan Cross

is an internationally known broadcaster, interviewer, writer, consultant, blogger and speaker. In his 40+ years in the music business, Alan has interviewed the biggest names in rock, from David Bowie and U2 to Pearl Jam and the Foo Fighters. He’s also known as a musicologist and documentarian through programs like The Ongoing History of New Music.

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