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Many living and artificial systems show a similar emergent behavior andcollective motions on different scales, starting from swarms of bacteria tosynthetic active particles, herds of mammals and crowds of people. What allthese systems often have in common is that new collective properties likeflocking emerge from interactions between individual self-propelled orexternally driven units. Such systems are naturally out-of-equilibrium andpropel at the expense of consumed energy. Mimicking nature by makingself-propelled or externally driven particles and studying their individual andcollective motility may allow for deeper understanding of physicalunderpinnings behind the collective motion of large groups of interactingobjects or beings. Here, using a soft matter system of colloids immersed into aliquid crystal, we show that resulting so-called nematoelastic multipoles canbe set into a bidirectional locomotion by external periodically oscillatingelectric fields. Out-of-equilibrium elastic interactions between such colloidslead to collective flock-like behaviors, which emerge from time-varyingelasticity-mediated interactions between externally driven propellingparticles. The repulsive elastic interactions in the equilibrium state can beturned into attractive interactions in the out-of-equilibrium state underapplied electric fields. We probe this behavior at different number densitiesof colloidal particles and show that particles in a dense dispersioncollectively select the same direction of a coherent motion due to elasticinteractions between near neighbors. In our experimentally implemented design,their motion is highly ordered and without clustering or jamming often presentin other colloidal transport systems, which is promising for technological andfundamental-science applications, like nano-cargo transport, out-of-equilibriumassembly and microrobotics.

Out-of-equilibrium interactions and collective locomotion of colloidal spheres with squirming of nematoelastic multipoles