Response to my brief + embarrassed justification of my absence. I’ve joined the group when it was already formed and working. I discussed the idea behind its structuring with Joe - the swarm model - and also the stage the group was at regarding the production of works. After this, I attended a first meeting with Joe, Kat and Katie, where we presented some concepts (we decided to work from concepts that each one would bring in because just coming up with one project would be against our swarm approach). we discussed our thoughts about the concepts and what to do with them. This meeting - and the discussion that followed in Facebook© led me then to prepare a piece of work called ‘cogito’ which was done as a response to the final briefing I received (the concepts were organised into briefs that each one had to develop something from), this is my response to the briefing I was given. My work, though surely affected by the fact that I was not around at the beginning of the group - a fact which I think entitle the group with the right to shut me off if they think I am intruding or simply not working collaboratively - is responding directly to what I see as a structural problem of working in the ‘hive mind’ model, which was a problem that I brought to the discussion at university and online. The concept of a swarm, a group of animals behaving without a leading figure, is a metaphor (because, since we are not instinct-based animals, it can only be thought of as a metaphor) for a de-centered mode of working where there is no ‘authoritarian’ figure, no central Cause guiding everyone’s work. We can find theoretical references to back this idea up in some late texts of Deleuze, Foucault and Derrida, the ryzomatic structure, the deconstructionist perspective and the ‘death of the author’ argument. But this, when put into practice, had interesting results. I refer specially to the meeting I attended: There is a basic problematic with the group's structure, since any idea which encompasses everyone is from an ‘authoritarian’ position, and thus needs to be dismissed. This happened four or five times during the meeting, and was the reason why any concept that was brought as an idea for us to do together could not be used. We sacrificed the chance to actually collaborate in something for the assurance that if we did not interfere in each other's work we would be collaborating even more! The second thing was that it made something really clear: Though the process that we decided on was based on everyone just working within their own practice mediums and ideas, what happened was that everyone’s practice was serving Joe’s idea (not only the swarm idea was his, but his current practice is based on watching and relating to other’s ways of working and works). Anyway, the way things worked is that everyone works as if we were just doing our own things, but it had the purpose of being shown together, which was the collaborative aspect of it, and it had a place within Joe’s concept, which was the Cause - unknown to many, but still. If you ask Joe, he’ll say that his practice is the relational experience which appears just by the fact that everyone is trying to work together. That means that we have addressed this exercise, and didn’t simply do our own work, and that we were under an authoritarian position. In other words, there was no ‘swarm’ or ‘de-centralization’, we just pretended there was, for the sake of Joe’s idea. This is not so much a piece of writing meant to expose or clarify what we did - since I'm sure that it will be read before anything else as a piece of our group's work - but I wrote it with the secondary intention of contributing to the understanding of how most practices within our university tend to be more authoritarian and centred than the type of structure that they try to avoid. The video work I did was a response less to the actual concept of the swarm, and more to the way that certain philosophical and theoretical concepts can be played around with beyond their use into pure rhetoric in order to justify and fill with sense the paradoxes and problems that the failure of putting into practice a ryzomatic structure (the paradox of trying to get rid of mastery). Gabriel