If you believe a particular piece of music is popular with your peers, you are more likely to listen. And you are much more likely to enjoy it. That's the conclusion of a recent study at Columbia University, reported in the journal Science. This communal power over what we experience as personal taste may be a manifestation of swarming, "the spirit of the hive," a well-researched but mysterious phenomenon of human and animal behavior, and even nonsentient organization. However, it can't entirely account for the huge popularity of the Fabric Workshop and Museum's "Swarm" among the Philadelphia art community. The show is flawed but also dynamic and significant in its keen intellectual engagement with questions about individuality and groups.

Yukinori Yanagi's America (background); Fernando and Humberto Campana's wood Favela.

Curators Abbott Miller and Ellen Lupton --who will discuss the show and its premise with Deborah Gordon, a biology professor at Stanford University, and Eugene Thacker, an assistant professor of literature, culture and communication at Georgia Institute of Technology, at the FWM on March 3—made eclectic choices. The work of 17 artists, augmented by illustrations of animal and human organizing behaviors, falls into three fairly distinct categories. Some exemplify or demonstrate these patterns and behaviors. Others, which are clearly linked to the first group, employ computers in the process of art-making. A third category, which blurs the effectiveness of the show as an illustration of swarming, consists of layered accumulations.

An inappropriateness to the context is especially obvious in Felix Gonzalez-Torres' mound of pale green candies. Each visitor is permitted to take candy from the regularly replenished source. The curators' gloss suggests this action parallels that of army ants carrying food back to the bivouac. This is a distortion of Gonzalez-Torres' role as giver—not victim. Army ants take things by force. Up to 700,000 march from their bivouac, killing everything in their path, including larger insects and small animals; they then transport their booty to the bivouac larder. A comparison of aggressive gallery hoppers to army ants may be apt, but it doesn't quite illustrate the underlying concept. The FWM guest is simply offered the icy vision of 75 pounds of cellophane-wrapped sugar and Gonzalez-Torres' sweet generosity.

Fred Tomaselli's magical, jewellike scenes encapsulate real dead insects, medications and plant materials, but only one reflects the premise of the exhibition. It's the least memorable but still striking, a Geode incorporating photographs of actual crystals. If pattern and organization are the sole determinants of a swarm, then everything is one and every exhibition is equally illustrative of it. Aside from that quibble, Tomaselli is aesthetically and emotionally a high point of the show.

But real, reconstituted and simulated swarms are the conceptual center. Michal Rovner's surprisingly creepy Seeds, a projection at the base of a petri dish, is a perfect illustration. Yukinori Yanagi is known for making precise enclosed images of colored sand before allowing ants to tunnel through them, randomly editing the design. The colony he introduces is given plenty of food, but it is doomed without a queen. The diminishing survivors neatly remove the dead to an area where gallery assistants can dispose of them, leaving behind their hollow tunnels. At FWM, an expansive 1994 work composed of linked flags is a necropolis, but Yanagi's large One Dollar-Philadelphia C595743941, made for this show, contains a living colony introduced on Dec. 2.

Jason Salavon's mesmerizing Shoes Domestic Production 1960-1998 is a computer-programmed video based on numbers describing guess what—but Salavon tweaks the program to enhance the viewer's experience. Projected onto a wall, rotating spots and columns of color in a black infinity are primordial and dizzying. If it were small, Shoes would be a really good screen-saver. Salavon programs units called cellular automata (mathematical machines sometimes associated with fractal geometry) to evolve and relate in ways that mimic swarm behavior. He tints and freezes these at various points and makes handsome prints. Siebren Versteeg's programmed projection on the floor builds a gleaming grid-based pattern of increasing density. It concludes at a predetermined point, only to reinitiate its random predictable cycle.

Although the power of "Swarm" is diluted by a perhaps too broadly inclusive sweep, maybe just this sort of apparent confusion is characteristic of swarming. In that vein, Sarah Sze's sprawling, almost goofy assemblage Unravel combines chaos and order, natural and manufactured, light and dark, motion and stillness, improvisation and planning. Sze uses the directionality of everyday objects and fragments, like layered curved edges of disposable plastic plates, in ways that really do mimic the logical illogic of swarms.

Unfortunately, the FWM has chosen not to provide seating for any of the videos. Visitors are urged to swarm the reception desk with complaints, but please do not kill the staff and take their remains back to your bivouac.

SWARM, Through March 18, (conversation with the curators, March 3, 6 p.m.), The Fabric Workshop and Museum, 1315 Cherry St., fifth floor, 215-568-1111