ABSTRACT
Under the concept of deformations, this chapter presents crucial aspects that link the phenomena of swarms to media theory. Here swarms are treated as a materialization of Serres’s figure of the ‘parasite.’ By attending to disruptive potential, swarm research has yielded new information in the context of a comprehensive media theory of interference. This includes methodological insights that are productive for concepts of media historiography. The chapter closes by tracing the epistemological and cultural-technical expansion of the zone affected by swarms. The conversion of the swarm as an object of knowledge into an operative figure of knowledge by computer simulation signifies a general shift in epistemic strategies: self-organizational phenomena came to be applied to the study of complex interactive processes.
