Category: collective intelligence

Social distancing – Week 11: The state of our lives

 

In the past weeks, we saw people dying from a new virus. We locked ourselves in our homes and started wearing masks to protect us and our beloved. We started working remotely, and everything went digital. We met on Zoom and had virtual dinners with friends. Exhibitions and art fairs have been converted into VR. Private views happened online. Museum collections have been made accessible to the public online. Gallerists, artists, critics, and collectors talked on live streams. Podcasts and online Yoga sessions boomed. Many of us lost their jobs. Many of us have been furloughed. Nearly two million people claimed Universal Credits. Air transport has been stopped, and planes grounded. We pledged for the universal basic income. We mourned for the killing of George Floyd.  “Please, I can’t breathe” reached the ears of the whole world but the ones of his murderer, the policeman Derek Chauvin. Rage stirred up our hearts. We flooded the streets to protest in support on BLM and against systemic racism. We tore down colonialist monuments of slave-traders. City officials boarded up monuments in London to prevent further damage. Far-right supporters arrived in London to counteract BLM protesters. Protecting British monuments was their pretence. “All lives can’t matter until black lives matter”. We have been alone but together. Parks are full of litter and oceans of plastic. Climate change and global warming are still happening. Our planet is still in an emergency. Now we are preparing for the reopening. Lockdown rules have been relaxed. From Monday, some art Galleries will open again by appointment only. We keep using masks. Planes are still mainly grounded. Anyone entering the UK has to self-isolate for 14 days. France closes its borders to Britons reciprocally. BA, Easy Jet, and Ryanair combined to sue the government over the quarantine. The country GDP reached its lowest record in history (-20% in April). Recession is knocking. Brexit trade meetings are ongoing. Turmoil is the state in which we live.

Social distancing – Week 9: “Piper in the Woods”, an online exhibition

After having visited tons of online exhibitions and VR rooms, I found one show that finally made use of the digital space acknowledging its dimensional characteristics. “Piper in the Woods” (live until 15th June 2020) is an online group show responding to the pandemic organized by the art platform Isthisit?, curated by its founder and director Bob Bicknell-Knight.

Piper in the Woods screenshot
Piper in the Woods screenshot

The exhibition presents five videos and one sound work by five artists – John Butler, Stine Deja, Emily Mulenga, Tamsin Snow and Petra Szemán. The works look at possible futures in which technology and AI impact and govern our daily lives. As Bicknell-Knight explains in the press release, the show takes its title from the 1953 short story of the same name by Philip K Dick.

Imagination_195302_cover taken from Piper in the Woods - Wikipedia
Imagination_cover taken from Piper in the Woods – Wikipedia

The science-fiction plot sees an army doctor, Henry Harris, examining the strange behaviour of several soldiers who, after returning to the Earth from an expedition to asteroid Y-3, claim they have become plants. With this belief, the soldiers stopped working and passed their time in the sun, like plants, meditating about how work is unnecessary and even harmful for our well-being. The story is part of the display and can be read on the left of the screen while navigating the exhibition space.

The videos are arranged to use the space horizontally rather than vertically. Thus, the exhibition occupies a space that goes outside the borders of a standard web page. The background is white mimicking both the white cube gallery space and, as the curator explains, “the soldiers’ deviation from the norm and into the unknown forest.” The only environmental feature in the room is given by the loop of “Last Resort” (2020), a sound work by Stine Deja which accompanies the visitor’s journey by offering the acoustic ambience.

The artists’ works tell the stories of individuals who, in a hi-tech world, spend their lives in solitude with no or little interaction with other humans. “Piper in the Woods” introduces us to a series of unappealing scenarios which, in this time, seems more likely to happen than ever before.

Stay Home Instagram

 

Social distancing – Week 7: Home Cooking – “Collective Intelligence” a collectively owned artwork

Home Cooking, “a digest of new artworks, scores, events, and actions started during this time of suspension.” Its first post on Instagram is dated 22nd March 2020, the day the lockdown started in London. The project was kicked off by the British artist Marianna Simnett together with peer artists and friends. Home Cooking is a platform where artists, creatives, and thinkers from around the world share their ideas and projects. How? Through Instagram posts and takeovers, Livestream interventions, conversations, and interviews on Instagram, Twitch, and Zoom. Art is the beating heart of the project.

It is though Home Cooking that I learnt about the new typeface, “Emergence”, created by artist Agnieszka Kurant in collaboration with designer and typographer Radim Pesko. The font is the result of a couple of years of work during time which the duo has been collecting and analysing 26 different typefaces. Like in a puzzle, “Emergence” has been made by assembling small parts obtained by breaking down the structure of the 26 fonts. On Friday 24th April, during the project presentation in Home Cooking, Kurant and Pesko unveiled the first version of “Emergence.”  They explained that the font could take on different shapes and change by diversifying the assembling combinations. After the initial presentation, Kurant launched an open call inviting artists, writers, and thinkers to participate by submitting a sentence that reflects on the Coronacene. The gathered sentences will form a collectively owned artwork, “Collective Intelligence.”  The open call announces that the collectively made work would be auctioned so to generate revenue to be shared among the artwork’s authors.

From Home Cooking – 12th May 2020:

Dear friends and friends of friends,
A few days ago on Home Cooking, we launched a collective-intelligence artwork that I developed together with the typographer Radim Pesko — the typeface we called “Emergence.”
A video of the presentation and discussion we had for Home Cooking with the sociologist Janek Sowa and the theorist Stephen Wright around the concepts behind Emergence can be found here:
https://vimeo.com/414483803
We are kindly inviting artists, writers, and thinkers to send us a single phrase or sentence, reflecting on the ways in which today, especially during the Coronacene, both the self and the crowd have mutated into new, unexpected forms. Let’s think and talk about collective intelligence, the evolution and plasticity of the social brain and social bonds, self-organization, solidarity, the multitude, the self as polyphony, and the future of singular versus hybrid/collective authorship and sympoiesis/collective creativity. Please send us single phrases or sentences around these questions and we will turn them into individual posters using the Emergence typeface. This collection of posters will form Collective Intelligence: an artwork based on collective authorship, collective ownership, and profit sharing. Our goal is for this artwork/collection to be exhibited as a whole and collectively owned by many “shareholders,” both institutions and individuals. We hope to auction the poster collection’s “shares” several times and each time redistribute the profits among participating artists, writers, and thinkers who need it most these days. It could develop into many interesting directions. Please send your contributions (a single sentence or phrase) to Radim Peško mail@radimpesko.com or myself info@kurantstudio.com. Please share this freely with other artists, writers, and thinkers.

The investigative aspect of “Collective Intelligence” dominates the whole project. The resulting artwork and its potential sales and profit will test not only the possibility to generate income for a group but also the concepts of collective ownership and authorship. Whereas, it is no doubt that thinking about Universal  Basic Income and testing its feasibility is crucial in the age of Coronacene. As the project requires the mental switch from individual to a collective mind-set with the subsequent knockdown of capitalistic ideas, I expect this to generate extensive debate. So, let’s stay tuned and follow the project on #collectiveintelligence and  @____homecooking____

Stay Home Instagram