M.M.A. -Massive Mesh Ambitions- Special Feature #02 / Hisashi Murakami, “Taming ‘out-and-out muddle’—Swarm as ambiguous Body, or body as ambiguous swarm” English version also available

A media project to speculate and discuss about GHOST IN THE SHELL “M.M.A. -Massive Mesh Ambitions-.”

 

The theme of ISSUE #02 is “Outlaw.”
Hisashi Murakami, “Taming ‘out-and-out muddle’—Swarm as ambiguous Body, or body as ambiguous swarm” is now available in English.

 

Anyone who has traveled through central Mumbai in the back seat of a rickshaw likely has vivid memories of that city’s intricate transit systems—a woven, seemingly chaotic network of motor vehicles.

 

The cars are packed so densely it’s as though leaving space is an alien concept. Drivers make sudden lane changes, merging across six lanes of traffic on a four-lane street. To Japanese sensibilities, all of the drivers seem entirely composed as they narrowly avoid accidents at the last moment amidst this chaos (although of course, accidents must be happening, statistically speaking). Though it looks completely uncoordinated at first glance, apparently there is a cohesive organization to it. Faced with such a mysterious scene, one can’t help but ask a question.

 

How is this sort of situation possible?

 

On that point, Hisashi Murakami—a researcher who uses mathematical models of animal swarming behavior for analytical purposes—can offer a few persuasive answers. What does it take to make a swarm with individual dynamics? Swarms aren’t just formed for the purpose of surviving outside disturbances. Once one understands that they also require internal disturbances to exist, it becomes easier to see the hidden order underlying the chaos of those six lanes of traffic. The outlaw organization Public Security Section 9 is no exception to that rule.

 

As Sakae Otsugi would put it, there is “beauty in disarray.” Or as Murakami might say, “there is order in chaos.”