Hivemind

Hivemind is a knowledge game for artists to navigate the inner workings of their practice. The game is part of the Serpentine R&D Platform’s continued effort to reimagine how artists and institutions can bring audiences into the research phases of their work. Created by Trust members Calum Bowden, Will Freudenheim and Joanna Pope, the game allows for narrativised walkthroughs by artists of their back-end working environments. The artists approached the creation of Hivemind with this question in mind: how can you build a game that allows artists to archive and share, not only a finished artwork, but the tools, data and experiments they’ve built to bring their work into existence?

Hardwired
FILE FESTIVAL
“Hardwired” consists of around 18,000 LED-lights that symbolize the transfer of knowledge. Individual luminous pixels connect and then disappear. In a process of constant transformation, new patterns, interrelations and complexities emerge.
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Epistēmē
Titled with the Ancient Greek word for knowledge and understanding, the installation is born of the belief that we absorb knowledge through the senses, with the skin acting as an interface between the body and the world around us. ‘To illustrate the skin in states of transformation, I imagined it as a canvas for sensations felt and information absorbed. The digital manipulation in each film melds body and sensation, skin and material, reality and virtuality to express the effects of each product,’

Tear Gun
For Yi-Fei Chen, a graduate from Design Academy Eindhoven, her impossibility to speak up in self-defense during a confrontation with her tutors resulted in an internal burst of frustration, but externally only defenseless tears emerged. After that she decided to acknowledge this weakness, but reacting to it through her graduation project: “Tear Gun”, a minimal device that freezes tears instantly, ready to be fired in self-defense.

RAIN PART I – THE OWL – KYBDslöjd
“We live in a time where hardware and software become obsolete even before we have learned how to use them. KYBDslöjd is a brutalist storytelling about technology and keystrokes using Commodore 64 computer, Teletext System, and typewriters. These technologies are not souvenirs from the past. They are hard-won knowledge.”more…

VANGELIS
R.I.P
Horizon
In amongst the rings of confusion
Silencing the thought powers one by one
It seems all so incredible
Our own ability to confuse – to sacrifice
To enlighten like a shakespearian play
We foolish and happily hold on to sanity
While all around the pushing feelings
The twisting and turning of our hearts
Displaying an almost indefinable strength
Of purpose – a reason a reason a reason
Where no reasons seems to exist
Yet, as in a vision, a voice transcending
All our imagination, jewel of life
Guiding light heralding a joyous new dawn
Clear and gifted time
Divine nature – super nature
The supreme gift of knowledge and space
In this cacophony of life
Peace will come

Heliocentric
“Heliocentric” is a lighting sculpture represents the movement of universe. It dialogues to its history (from temple to school to creative hub) and its functionality (welcoming people connect and learn the universe)
With the lighting arrangement, kinetic movement of the light, and the performer , it shows the relationship between universe, knowledge and human.

Planet City

Planet City, by Los Angeles-based film director and architect Liam Young, explores the productive potential of extreme densification, where 10 billion people surrender the rest of the planet to a global wilderness. Although wildly provocative, Planet City eschews the techno-utopian fantasy of designing a new world order. This is not a neo-colonial masterplan to be imposed from a singular seat of power. It is a work of critical architecture – a speculative fiction grounded in statistical analysis, research and traditional knowledge.
It is a collaborative work of multiple voices and cultures supported by an international team of acclaimed environmental scientists, theorists and advisors. In Planet City we see that climate change is no longer a technological problem, but rather an ideological one, rooted in culture and politics.

Présage
Nurtured by a dual artistic and scientific background, Hicham Berrada’s work combines intuition and knowledge, science and poetry. In his works, he explores scientific protocols that mimic different natural processes and/or climatic conditions as closely as possible. “I try to control the phenomena I mobilize as a painter controls his pigments and brushes. My brushes and pigments would be temperature, magnetism, light.”

Mud
Nicole Clouston is a practice-based researcher currently completing her PhD in Visual Art at York University. In her practice she asks: What happens when we acknowledge, through an embodied experience, our connection to a world teeming with life both around and inside us? Nicole has exhibited across Canada in Montreal, Victoria, Edmonton, and Toronto. She is currently the artist in residence at the Coalesce Bio Art Lab at the University at Buffalo.

Botanical Pavilion
To realize the ‘Botanical Pavilion’, Kengo Kuma worked alongside Geoff Nees — a melbourne-based artist and curator who has also worked on a number of architectural pavilions. Made in the japanese tradition of wooden architecture, where pieces interlock, held by tension and gravity, the structure at the NGV triennial features a tessellated interior lined with timber collected from trees felled or removed over several years at Melbourne’s royal botanic gardens. Some of the trees used within the architecture pre-date european settlement, while others signal the development of the gardens as a site of scientific research and botanical classification. Prioritizing natural phenomena over scientific order, the botanical species used are color-coded, rather than following any taxonomic order. this approach offers a statement by the designers against the reductive nature of science during the colonial era — a mindset at odds with many indigenous cultural beliefs and knowledge systems.

Through the Membrane
We define the space around us by observing and perceiving light and shadow. That is to say, our perception shapes our basic understanding of this sensory world, and hence the “reality” we believe in. If our experiential knowledge and awareness of space are challenged, would our definition of a “real phenomenon” also be changed? Through the Membrane utilizes optical polarizers to change how light passes through space. The installation does not rely on any electromechanical devices. Simply with creative use of material and structure, it presents a super-sensory experience in space where reality and illusion are inextricably juxtaposed.

Credo

A radio telescope scans the skys in search of signs of extraterrestrial life.
The received raw signals serve as input data for a neural network, which was trained on human theories and ideas of aliens. Now it tries desperately to apply this knowledge and to discover possible messages of other civilizations in the noise of the universe. Mysterious noises resound as the artificial intelligence penetrates deeper and deeper into the alien data, where it finally finds the ultimate proof.The sound installation revolves around one of the oldest questions of mankind – one that can never be disproved: Are we alone in the universe?

גיאורג קנטור, לודוויג בולצמן, קורט גדל, אלן טיורינג
dangerous knowledge documentary
whose genius has profoundly affected us (infinity; entropy; incompleteness; thinking machine) , but which tragically drove them insane and eventually led to them all committing suicide.

The form of becoming
In this abstract system, each intelligent agent is embodied as a motor, the states in its environment is represented as an angular range of rotation and the actions as one of two directions in which each agent can move a linear actuator. Each linear system holds a segment of a long black string, this translates as a point in the represented line. Once the system runs, each agent learns, from informational equivalents of pain and pleasure, to move towards the highest values within its environment, this means ultimately to displace its position from point A to B. In order for an agent to learn, it needs time, generations of exploration, each agent will get punished for bad decisions and rewarded for appropriate ones. Every time a learning generation is finished, a light will blink for that particular agent, indicating the end of a cycle and the achievement of new knowledge; the agent becomes more intelligent. Once all agents learned to be and stay in point B, the system, as a collective, has successfully mutated into a stable, balanced, symmetric and silent form; a straight line. Finally, after a few seconds, the sculpture forgets, all agents are rebooted and the cycle of creation, chaos and order restarts, this time with a totally different and unique behavior.

Ad Infinitum
Ad infinitum is a parasitical entity which lives off human energy. It lives untethered and off the grid. This parasite reverses the dominant role that mankind has with respect to technologies: the parasite shifts humans from “users” to “used”. Ad infinitum co-exists in our world by parasitically attaching electrodes onto the human visitors and harvesting their kinetic energy by electrically persuading them to move their muscles. The only way a visitor can be freed is by seducing another visitor to sit on the opposite chair and take their place. Being trapped in the parasite’s cuffs means getting our muscles electrically stimulated in order to perform a cranking motion as to feed it our kinetic energy. This reminds us that, in the cusp of artificially thinking machines, we are no longer just “users”; the shock we feel in our muscles, the involuntary gesture, acknowledges our intricate relationship to uncanny technological realm around us.

Abysmal
Abysmal means bottomless; resembling an abyss in depth; unfathomable. Perception is a procedure of acquiring, interpreting, selecting, and organizing sensory information. Perception presumes sensing. In people, perception is aided by sensory organs. In the area of AI, perception mechanism puts the data acquired by the sensors together in a meaningful manner. Machine perception is the capability of a computer system to interpret data in a manner that is similar to the way humans use their senses to relate to the world around them. Inspired by the brain, deep neural networks (DNN) are thought to learn abstract representations through their hierarchical architecture. The work mostly shows the ‘hidden’ transformations happening in a network: summing and multiplying things, adding some non-linearities, creating common basic structures, patterns inside data. It creates highly non-linear functions that map ‘un-knowledge’ to ‘knowledge’.

Syntopia

With ‘Syntopia’, Iris van Herpen explores the new worlds that arise within synthetic biology and the intertwining relationships between the organic and the inorganic. ʻSyntopiaʼ acknowledges the current scientific shift in which biology converges with technology and visualizes the fragility and power within.

photo: Morgan O’Donovan

“Adam Ferriss is one of those technologically-minded creatives who is able to put his ever-growing knowledge of code and processing to use building aesthetically wondrous digital art for the rest of us to enjoy. His images make me feel like I’ve just taken some psychedelics and stepped into one of those crazy houses you get in funfairs, where there are giant optical illusions on every wall and the floor keeps moving under your feet, except these are made using algorithms and coding frameworks […]”

Library
The library is a potent metaphor for knowledge that evokes images of organization, study, research and discovery. Libraries build relationships and connections and act as catalysts or laboratories for creative thoughts. Chun’s project is inspired in part by Jorge Luis Borges’ celebrated text, ‘The Library of Babel’ that compares the library to the universe with the grand idea that it is a repository for all knowledge and every individual truth. The universe is governed by an order that we can perceive only partially yet it evokes ideas of the infinite and the eternal – like matter it is neither created nor destroyed – it just is.

Reality is not Always Probable
‘Reality is not Always Probable’ is constructed from tens of thousands of colourful dice and is generated, line by line, by manually emulating the rules of a simple computer binary program. Its title references a quote by Jorge Luis Borges and men’s disquiet towards a lack of controllable or predictable events and the belief that complete knowledge is impossible.

The Admiral’s Garden
Christine Ödlund’s work explores the borders of our knowledge of the world around us, connecting such themes as the chemical communication of plants, synaesthesia and theosophy. She works in a variety of media, including drawing, sculpture, video, watercolour and sound works.
Stress Call of the Stinging Nettle: When a plant reacts to a butterfly larvae feeding on its leaves, it releases chemical substances, or compounds. The characteristics of these compounds have been analyzed in collaboration with the Ecological Chemistry Research Group at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and then transposed into amplitude and intensity of sinus tones, recorded at EMS (Electroacoustic Music in Sweden), Stockholm. Thus these beautiful graphic score and soundtrack by Swedish artist Christine Ödlund are direct transpositions of “the plant’s life, struggle and death”.

Echoes
Marguerite Humeau’s design is used to explore the means by which knowledge is generated in the absence of evidence, or in the impossibility of either reaching or analysing the object of investigation. Humeau weaves factual events into speculative narratives, therefore enabling the unknown to erupt in grandiose splendour. The work is presented as a series of live science fictions: semi-real, synthetic, supernatural events.

精美雕塑艺术 非常设计师网
The work of Laurent Craste lies at the crossroads of two mediums, participating in the world of visual arts, but never stepping beyond its borders. Ceramics, linked by tradition to crafts, requires a technical knowledge and know-how so restrictive that artists are prompted to remain within canonical forms, never pushing their limits. Video art, the recent avatar of the moving image, does not always acknowledge its main ancestor, cinema. The innovative aspect of this work is the combination of the two mediums with the addition of humorous or dramatic short stories, encompassing an autobiographical element that never descends to self-righteousness.

アン·ハミルトン
앤 해밀턴
habitus
Ann Hamilton began habitus by exploring Philadelphia’s textile collections and visiting some of its generations-old textile producers. Seeing looms that have been in operation for decades and watching raw material become a single thread, then a warp, and then a weft of a cloth: these experiences inspired the making of habitus. The artist says, “Just as cloth is a structure binding individual threads into a larger whole, this project is designed to encourage associative links between texts and textiles and their individual forms of knowledge and experience.”

Before an object, material, or idea is understood – before it has a name – language relegates it to being a ‘thing.’ Not until it is cut open, taken apart, appropriated, used or misused, do we begin to know it, and consequently title it appropriately, as needed. It is then that this thing can become ours to categorize and organize within our systems of knowledge. Dutch-born, Berlin-based artist Rachel De Joode inverts this process in her study of “things,” and returns them back for refreshed and deconstructed viewing, wherein we once again feel unsure or almost suspicious about the objects with which we co-exist.

マイケル·ヨハンソン
Майкл Йоханссон
The Move Overseas

Created by contemporary Swedish artist Michael Johansson, these “real life Tetris” installations see other people’s unwanted objects methodically and painstakingly packed together into neat, colour co-ordinated blocks. Inspired by real life coincidences, such as two people passing each other dressed in the same outfits, Johansson has been constructing the sculptures since 2007, installing them in public areas like tight alleyways and strangely shaped doorways as well as showing them at group and solo exhibitions all over the world. Speaking to PINCH magazine, Johansson said:

“These irregularities, or coincidences, are a great source of inspiration for me. I have also as long as I can remember been fascinated by flea markets. And in specific a fascination by walking around to find doubles of seemingly unique, though often useless objects I have already purchased at another flea market. There is something irresistible in the knowledge that if you don’t buy that particular object right away, the opportunity might never come back. I think the same rules compelling me to select things at flea markets are also central to my art practice, that you need to combine something very familiar with something very unique to create an interesting art experience.”
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crocheted membrane

‘Crocheted Membrane’ experiments with creating a momentary fiction through fashion artifacts. Starting with the physical needs of one individual human body in an outdoor temperature of 10 degrees Celsius, seven hand-crocheted body forms were produced. The clothing’s texture got thinner or opened up completely on areas of the body that needed less warmth and were thicker where warmth was lacking. In this way, a fundamental change in the aesthetic and function of clothes was displayed. Fixed forms, such as trousers, were recreated into new, unique body forms. Instead of one uniform surface, the textures became alive and inimitable. “Her concept of clothing does not derive in the same way as most fashion design, from shape or historically patterned form with embedded social hierarchy and material richness, but is instead determined by the needs and sensations of the human body – performing in the same way that bacteria populations individually respond.” (Villeré 2014) The resulting fictional artifacts illustrate how we could use knowledge about our unique bacteria population to create a novel layer.

Multiple Identities, Sustainable Development
The focus is on multiple identities. There are pale, milky plastic pipes attached to the ceiling of the concrete interior, inside which, moved by fans, roll white balls. One after the other. If the one arrives, a new one is sent to another tube.Such works breathe inner unity. This closeness is sometimes a closeness, if not encryption. Because the language of contemporary installation art is foreign and difficult to read. The viewer’s gaze likes to evaluate subjectively and is always shaped by environmental influences such as culture, trends, styles, beliefs, experiences and politics. This makes the interpretation uncertain, it becomes subjective, often tempting to misconduct. Because anyone who claims that the work of art is created in the eye of the beholder and means that everyone, regardless of where they come from and how educated, can make a valid statement about a work of art is wrong. What Marcel DuChamp meant is that it unfolds in the eye of the beholder. But this development should not mean that simply opening the eyes also brings with it knowledge and insight. These qualities are developed through active participation, through perception. This, in turn, is not only feasible through the visual stimulus in the eye. It is possible, however, if you know who the artist is, what he is doing, what he wishes to express and with which underlying design principles the view is guided in what way to what. Only then does the processing take place, a connection of the causal relationships, which ultimately leads to art in the eye of the beholder. To an inner feeling outside of the spontaneous feelings.

As We May Feel
file festival

“As We May Feel” A parody of the 1945 text “As We May Think”, by Vannevar Bush What enduring benefits did science and technology bring to human beings? First of all, science and technology have extended the humans’ control on their material environment, helping them to perfect their food, their clothes, their dwelling, and gave them more security, allowing to live above the level of mere subsistence. Later on, they have permitted a wider knowledge of the biological processes that occur within our bodies, allowing the control of a more healthy and lasting life, always promising an enhancement of mental health. Finally, they contribute to the effectiveness of our communication. We have therefore a reason to live beyond survival — abundant health and efficient communication. And how do we deal with our existential feelings and conflicts? We don’t have time for our feelings, we can no longer ruminate them. We bury them in secret wishes without bigger consequences. Should we care more for our feelings? Negligence has been our way of cleaning our lives of sentimental values. When we cannot sweep them, we zip them and eventually access them to solve conflicts and/or to organize our thoughts. This project offers the access, through a click, to a central that points to a series of paths toward “As we may feel”. The content of this simulation of a phone center has as its aim to create an encyclopedia of existential feelings and conflicts that represent human life in contemporary society. Welcome to our call center!

UNKNOWN PLANET
The Latvian sound artists collective “Clausthome” (Lauris Vorslavs, Girts Radzins) and video artist Martins Ratniks will present a sound and video modulation performance unclosing saturated sound landscapes and collages of the electromagnetic waves, created by scanning and retranslating a real-time audio and video signal modulations. In their daily practices “Clausthome” collective is engaged in experiments with modulations and sound feedback as well as in collecting diverse radioa signals and scanning of radio frequences. Martins Ratniks is one of most renowned Latvian video artists, whose experiments in the field of art and technologies has been acknowledged both in Latvia and abroad. This will not be the first collaboration between “ Clausthome” and Martins Ratniks, previously they have been working togeher on such projects as “ Spectrosphere” (2006) and “ Unknown Planet” (2012).

Do You Remember When?

The hole and exposed earth of Do You Remember When? becomes a spiritual, cultural and physical portal – a point of transformation between worlds – from which emerges an Indigenous worldview engaging a discourse on sustainability. The block of concrete on the pedestal – the foundation of the institution constructed on top of tribal lands – functions as a trophy celebrating Indigenous intervention in opposition to a Western scientific worldview. The closed-circuit audio broadcast of a Pee Posh social dance song performed by the collective provides the psychosocial soundtrack of the transformation process. The work shifts the sustainability from a focus dominated by Western science to a balanced approach inclusive of Indigenous knowledge systems.

pavilion of knowledge

Михаэль Ансмейер
Subdivided Columns

The subdivided columns are purely algorithmic forms. They are undrawable using conventional means – whether by pen or by mouse – as they have too much detail and differentiation. Knowledge and experience are acquired through search, demanding heuristics that work in the absence of categorization.

video