Pherogenic Drawings - Generating Colored 2-dimensional Abstract Representations of Sleep EEG with the KANTS Algorithm

Social insects and stigmergy have been inspiring several significant artworks and artistic concepts that question the borders and nature of creativity. Such artworks, which are usually based on emergent properties of autonomous systems and go beyond a centralized human authorship, are a part of a contemporary trend known as generative art. This paper addresses generative art and presents a set of images generated by an ant-based clustering algorithm that uses data samples as artificial ants. These ants interact via the environment and generate abstract paintings. The algorithm, called KANTS, consists in a simple set of equations that model the local behavior of the ants (data samples) in a way that, when travelling on a heterogeneous 2-dimensional lattice of vectors, they tend to form clusters according to the class of each sample. The algorithm was previously proposed for clustering and classification. In this paper, KANTS is used outside a purely scientific framework and it is applied to data extracted from sleepElectroencephalogram (EEG) signals. With such data sets, the lattice vectors have three variables, which are used for generating the RGB values of a colored image. Therefore, from the actions of the swarm on the environment, we get 2-dimensional colored abstract sketches of human sleep. We call these images pherogenic drawings, since the data used for creating the images are actually the pheromone maps of the ant algorithm. As a creative tool, the method is contextualized within the swarm art field.