Today, we live in a world where one event generates a huge number of images. In 2011 alone, more photos were taken than in the entire history of photography. New technologies are accessible to all, creating a tsunami of images available on a massive scale via the Internet. What role can the artist play in a world of excess? Should they still create images themselves? Or should he take the archive of already existing and expanding sequences, and fuse these images into new meanings? While I was working on “The Swarm”, this and other questions kept nagging at the back of my mind. I also recognized that this expanding archive of footage could perhaps provide a more complete picture of reality. Evgeny Morozov’s disturbing book The Net Delusion makes us aware of the potentiality of total observation of the data we compile every day on the Internet, something Snowden later confirmed. I gathered the videos filmed on May 5, 2012 at the Cologne soccer stadium and posted on YouTube and other platforms to find an answer to my questions. During the soccer match, Cologne hooligans threw a smoke bomb because their team had lost. Several people who were there filmed the moment with their cell phones. I merged all these films into “The Swarm”. The event is thus documented, as it were, by a detached collective of informants or referents. Each referent has its own position in the grid of the video collage, they are synchronized on the timeline that leads to the organic character of the film. The finished video may represent a more “total” truth, but it at least confronts us with a truth that shows this event in all its complexity. Today, I’ve abandoned the choice of combining only existing images that I find on my way through the virtual world. I began to investigate the problem – which in a way was already present in “The Swarm” in the form of a smoke bomb. The problem turns out to be an important subject for asking new questions about technology and contemporary art. JD