Collective intelligence, observed in slime molds, termite colonies, the Internet, social movements, cities, and inside our brains, is a phenomenon where novel forms such as superorganisms emerge in non-linear and unpredictable ways out of interactions between thousands of elements in a complex system. These interactions often arise through collaboration, collective decision-making, or competition.
Contemporary human is one such polyphony — a multitude of agencies operating simultaneously. Microbiome research shows that bacteria and viruses are necessary actants in human immune systems and that our microbiome affects our mental states and decision-making processes. The same processes are constantly hacked by corporations via algorithmic data mining. The concept of individual self has collapsed, and the aggregate collective intelligence which has taken its place — the dominant mode of modern life — is erasing boundaries between impossible and existent, between human and non-human, between life and non-life.
For artist Agnieszka Kurant, to understand the transformation of the human, we should abandon notions of individual intelligence and analyze exclusively this assemblage character instead: the human as a collective intelligence. Kurant develops works that undermine the division of nature and culture and denounce individual authorship and agency with complex, hybrid, collective forms — for instance, sculptures crowdsourced to termite colonies (A.A.I., 2014-ongoing); sculptures crowdsourced to workers of the online labor platform Amazon Mechanical Turk (Assembly Line, 2017); liquid crystal paintings animated by real-time algorithmic sentiment analysis of Twitter feeds from members of protest movements (Conversions, 2019-2020); and the fusion of thousands of signatures into one (The End of Signature, 2018).
Fathomers is pleased to announce support for Kurant and the publication of Agnieszka Kurant: Collective Intelligence, a conceptual monograph of the most recent decade of the artist’s work.
Co-edited by Jenny Jaskey and Stefanie Hessler, and co-published by the Berggruen Institute and Sternberg Press, Collective Intelligence (forthcoming 2021) features a selection of Kurant’s works, as well as images of various collective intelligence phenomena in nature and culture that inspire her projects, and a broad selection of commissioned texts by contributors including Caroline A. Jones, Jussi Parikka, Rosi Braidotti, Manuel Delanda, Ted Chiang, and many others.
