Swarm is a breathtaking photographic series exploring the flock movements of migrating birds. The photographs offer a unique view of the beauty but also the complexity and diversity of shape variations. A swarm sitting on the ground mirrors the surface of the earth like a skin, but as soon as it lifts up it becomes a fluid three-dimensional system in constant flux. This aerial ballet reveals a rhythm of upward explosion and downward, cascading movement. At times the forms seem to explode, blooming like flowers or expanding outward like fireworks. At other times they appear more stable, slowly drifting like a negative image of stellar constellations. Swarm looks up into the sky and follows flight through the dynamic landscape of streams of air.
With contributions by Peter Pfrunder, Gordon H. Orians, Deborah M. Gordon, and Wallace Stevens.
Lukas Felzmann, born in Zurich 1959, is an artist who lives and works in San Francisco. His work has recently been shown in Switzerland, Germany, the United States and Egypt. He teaches photography at Stanford University.
“The buzz word is swarm intelligence, which has acquired an unforeseen reality in the era of Facebook and Twitter. The behavior of a collective without a center has become a social phenomenon, which is not only of interest to natural scientists, but also particularly to politicians and economists.”
- Peter Pfrunder in his contribution to the book