During wildfires, a single ember can be the leading cause of its rapid spread. In parallel, fake news is spread online ten times faster than truthful reporting - misinforming readers and driving climate change denial.

Much like extreme wildfires, these stories can be compelling, offering explanations in a time of need. But they distract us from the real problems that we need to resolve, to help us prepare for the future.

Building on the concept of the ‘narrative fallacy’ discussed by N. Taleb in The Black Swan, this installation explores our biases and our vulnerability to convenient, compact stories in favour of complex truths during times of uncertainty.

Incendiary invites the audience to participate*, take time to reflect on their exposure to news and media, and consider how conspiracy adds fuel to the fire of climate change.

There are three primary rules that keep a murmuration from falling apart into chaos, followed by each individual bird in the flock: cohesion, separation and alignment.

When followed, these rules produce beautiful emergent patterns that are seen throughout complex systems in nature. When applying these in an algorithmic setting, these three principles have enabled the design of behaviour models allowing humans to make advances in robotics, spatial design and exploration of unknown territories. We can even look at the human collective as a swarm and apply these principles to explore crowd dynamics.

The beauty of these models lies in their demonstration of complex behaviors that can emerge from simple rules, without centralized control. The collective appears to operate as one entity. 

This work explores an existing, online human ‘collective’ using data entry to track, experience and document starling murmurations in the UK. 

When layered up, the translucent pages allow the text to form its own murmurating pattern. You will see a colour coding system in the bottom right corner, which if shuffled out of order, simply shifts the murmuration to a new shape.