An exhibition and a series of lectures proposed by RYBN to recontextualize the crisis, its mediatic and politic strategies, on the topics of disaster, structural instability and financial markets mythologies continue
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What happens to your online profile after you die? Do you want it to remain online, so friends can leave a message in your memory? Or do you prefer having it deleted, so no confusion can arise about your death? These questions are the inspiration for the new exhibition Ik R.I.P., the third in the series about self-representation on the internet. continue
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Public Receptors: Beneath the Skin — A Textile Installation by Gabi Schillig :: April 2-17, 2009 :: Opening Reception: April 2; 6:30 pm :: Van Alen Institute, 30 West 22nd Street, New York City.
Van Alen Institute is pleased to announce Public Receptors: Beneath the Skin, a textile installation by New York Prize Fellow Gabi Schillig, a conceptual artist and architect based in Berlin. Schillig’s wearable spatial structures mediate between private users and public spaces, provoking new relationships between bodies, clothing, and the built environment. Redefining the garment as tactile architecture, Schillig explores the potential for soft geometries and surfaces of textiles, conventionally associated with individual bodies and human scale, to generate alternative arrangements of social space and modes of interaction in the urban fabric. For Schillig, multiple users, desires, and urban contexts are necessary to materialize her work. Designed to be interconnected and shared, her second skins evolve an architecture built upon the creativity of its participants.
Over the course of her fellowship residency, Schillig has developed a new set of textile structures she calls public receptors, and she has conducted a series of site-specific experiments for their implementation in New York City. Made from felt, latex, and a variety of fastening devices, the structures are designed for attachment to specific building surfaces and street conditions, to be improvised and appropriated for clothing, furniture, habitat, or other uses. Upon contact, they transform in geometry, texture, and color from two-dimensional and often camouflaged elements in the city to three-dimensional interfaces that sensitize and reassociate urban bodies to environments at multiple scales.
Public Receptors: Beneath the Skin assembles Schillig’s textile structures in Van Alen Institute’s gallery for staged and spontaneous performance, interaction, and play. They are presented alongside footage of Schillig’s experiments in the city, with documentation of her research processes and material investigations.
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Thursday Club: Rachel Armstrong:Bio Feminism — Move Over Darwin with respondent, Joanna Zylinska :: March 26, 2009; 6 -8 pm :: Seminar Rooms, Ben Pimlott Building, Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross, South East London.
A significant change is occurring in the biological sciences with implications for feminist identity politics. This illustrated presentation examines cutting edge developments from pioneering laboratories and invites the audience to engage with the notion that Bio Feminism is set to play a pioneering role in the science of the third millennium. Modern science rests upon philosophical pillars that originate from 19th Century principles of logical analysis, reductionism and machines, particularly with respect to the organism. Feminist writers such as Evelyn Fox Keller and Donna Haraway, both of whom were trained biologists, have raised objection to this hierarchical, traditional view of science and made provocations for change towards a more inclusive feminist model of science whose organizational agenda is ‘cyborg’.
At the start of the 21st Century there is a convergence between feminist and biological scientific agendas, which propose a more complex view of life and cell mechanisms than stated by traditional science and is the basis for a new reading of biological identity that Armstrong has called Bio Feminism. This engages with a mechanism for the evolution of Haraway’s cybernetic entities and also embodies the unique politics of the cyborg. Despite counter arguments that feminist agendas have no contribution to make to scientific practice, feminist scientific thinkers have proven to be prophetic. The emerging disciplines of synthetic biology, Alife and chembiogenesis are more in keeping in their methodologies and rhetoric with modern feminist principles than their 19th Century scientific counterparts and as such, mark the emergence of a mainstream branch of science that could be regarded as inherently sympathetic to the feminist critique. Bio Feminist science promotes the treacherous biology of the cyborg challenging notions of aliveness, performing every transgressive act possible within autopoietic systems at a molecular level and redefining our view of evolution.
RACHEL ARMSTRONG is a medical doctor, author and arts collaborator who has worked at the intersection of art, science, technology and human space habitation. She has appeared regularly in the media and at international conferences speculating on the future of humankind, non-Darwinian techniques of evolution and the challenges of the extra-terrestrial environment. Her work includes collaborations with the artists Stelarc, Helen Chadwick and Orlan in the field of radical body modification and anatomical design. Armstrong is an academic architect working at the intersection of biology and design of autopoietic materials that facilitate the construction of autonomous architecture. She is a member of AVATAR, the advanced virtual and technological architecture research group. Armstrong has also written a number of Science Fiction narratives. Her
current affiliations are with the Bartlett School of Architecture and SMARTlab Digital Media Institute UEL.
JOANNA ZYLINSKA is a Reader in New Media and Communications at Goldsmiths. She is the author of three books: Bioethics in the Age of New Media (MIT Press, 2009), The Ethics of Cultural Studies (Continuum, 2005) and On Spiders, Cyborgs and Being Scared: the Feminine and the Sublime (Manchester University Press, 2001). She is also the editor of The Cyborg Experiments: the Extensions of the Body in the Media Age, a collection of essays on the work of performance artists Stelarc and Orlan (Continuum, 2002) and co-editor of Imaginary Neighbors: Mediating Polish-Jewish Relations after the Holocaust (University of Nebraska Press, 2007). Most recently she has been combining her philosophical writings with photographic art practice.
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Random Rules - A Channel of Artists’ Selections from YouTube; curated by Marina Fokidis; with Andreas Angelidakis, Aids 3D ( Daniel Keller and Nick Kosmas), assume vivid astro focus, Pablo Leon de la Barra, Eric Beltran, Keren Cytter, Jeremy Deller, Cerith Wyn Evans, Dominique Gonzalez Foerster, Dora Garcia, Rodney Graham, Annika Larsson, Matthieu Laurette, Ingo Niermann, Miltos Manetas, Ahmet Ögüt, Angelo Plessas, Lisi Raskin, Linda Wallace.
The history of moving image seems to have ’seriously’ diverted from its canonical route ever since the launch of YouTube, in 2005, the website which made possible for anyone who could use a computer to post a video that millions of people could watch within a few minutes. More effectively than ever before, amateur videos, music videos, footages of films, commercials and news segments as well as artists’ videos (in lesser numbers) mingle together, in a random way, free of any short of predetermined hierarchy or system.
Does amateur culture have undervalued artistic expertise?
Some would argue that this is true; however, it is neither a major concern nor a pragmatic threat. During the last decades, there have been a lot of debates about expertise versus amateurism or around the idea that everyone is an artist, etc, that it would be redundant to renegotiate these notions anew. Maybe it is more interesting to focus on the gaps and the relations between the systems of the art market and a more open mass culture market, to find some answers, which will not be fixed in anyway. Even if artists, in some cases, are reluctant to upload their works in there (at least up to now) due to reproduction and copyright issues, they still seem to frequent YouTube for inspiration, collecting information, socializing, communication, activism or entertainment, among other reasons! Active use of YouTube is a short of curating, where different ‘playlists’ of people are the exhibitions and ‘tagging’ is a process of a random archiving.
In a time that invitations for YouTube-exchange private gatherings become regular, seemed to make lots of sense to explore what YouTube means to a specific intellectual community, by asking a number of artists to select videos already exciting in YouTube and create their own playlists. The idea was to form a YouTube channel, a short of a paradoxical archive, or an emission in an independent media (such as YouTube) which includes all these playlists, each under the name of the artist-selector. In that plot, the uploader or the broadcaster becomes the artist, the artist becomes the curator or the collector, and the viewers exceed by far the number that can be contained into a normal screening room, since the channel is to be watched in a black cube setting and online at the same time.
Through the combination of this specific set of artists -as selectors- the aim remains always to come up with an anthology of different voices existing within the YouTube context. Perhaps, by watching this channel one could come across the notions of political, private, humor, narcissism, pop and DIY culture and distribution, -among others- as they result from various personal accounts in YouTube today.
Launched at Pulse, Contemporay Art Fair NY, 5th March 2009
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Interdisciplinary Experimental Laboratory Curatorial Production Workshop @ Arte Nuevo InteractivA ‘09: International Biennial of the New Arts, Merida, Yucatan, Mexico.
The fifth edition of the international biennial exhibition of New Arts, Media and Electronic Art, and Interdisciplinary Experimental Laboratory has initiated activities which will culminate in the inauguration of the exhibit Art with Internet Technology, at the Museo de la Ciudad de Merida on May 28, 2009.
The workshop, Curatorial Production, is offered by Raul Moarquech Ferrera-Balanquet, executive curator of the project, and includes among its participants artists, historians, gallery owners and theater directors from the city of Merida.
The Interdisciplinary Experimental Laboratory of Arte Nuevo InteractivA ‘09 has scheduled a series of workshops, among them: Mobility and Distributed Intelligence to be led by artist/academic Giselle Beiguelman (Brazil) at the Universidad Tecnologica Metropolitana (UTM); Audiovisual Narrative for Youths directed by Arlan Londono (Colombia/Canada) and Digital Literature, offered by Raul Moarquech Ferrera-Balanquet, both to take place at the Escuela de Creacion Literaria del Centro Estatal de Bellas Artes; Techniques of Contemporary Drawing by Salvadorean artist Mayra Barraza at the Licenciatura de Artes Visuales of the Universidad Autonoma de Yucatan (UADY); and the master class Performance in the Americas given by the well known artist Coco Fusco (US/Cuba) at the Escuela Superior de Arte de Yucatan (ESAY).
Arte Nuevo InteractivA: Merida Biennial, Merida, MX is considered a cutting edge project in Mexico, Latin America and the world. It has been presented in UNESCO’s Cultural Portal, the New York Whitney Museum’s Internet ArtPort, and it has been highlighted in newspapers and art and cultural publications such as El Universal (Mexico), ArtMedia (Costa Rica), Art Forum (United States of America), LuxFlux Arte Contemporaneo (Italy), Diario de Yucatan (Mexico), Arte al Limite (Chile), NetArt Review (United States of America), Teknokultura (Puerto Rico), and Fine Art Outline (Australia). In April, 2008 the biennial was presented at the Tate Britain Museum in London during the annual conference of British art historians. The Evento Teorico of the X Havana Biennial (March 31-April 3, 2009), will host the presentation of the curatorial project of Arte Nuevo InteractivA: International Biennial, Merida, MX. This project has marked a break within the processes of artistic and independent curatorial social networks in the Americas.
Arte Nuevo InteractivA ‘09 is organized by the Cartodigital Interdisciplinary Laboratory, a project of the new arts originated in the Centro Yucateco de Escritores, A.C., with the support of the Direccion de Cultura del Ayuntamiento de Merida, the Direccion de Artes Visuales del Instituto de Cultura de Yucatan, the Prince Claus Foundation of The Netherlands, the Universidad Tecnologica, and Escuela Superior de Artes de Yucatan (ESAY).
Executive Curator/Academic Director: Raul Moarquech Ferrera-Balanquet
Creative Director: Jose Luis Garcia Perez
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Building_Space_with_Words by Anne-Laure Fayard and Aileen Wilson :: until March 27, 2009 :: NYU-Poly, Wunsch Building, 311 Bridge Street, Brooklyn, NY + webcam.
Like its co-creator, Anne-Laure Fayard, a social scientist whose background spans the disciplines of philosophy to human-computer interaction, Building_Space_with_Words doesn’t fit into a neat category. The month-long art installation is part experiment, part research artifact, part think-piece. Ms. Fayard, an NYU-Poly assistant professor of management, and co-creator, Aileen Wilson, an associate professor of art and design at Pratt Institute, designed Building_Space_with_Words as a hybrid offline/online environment that asks:
What happens when the physical properties of space are changed and discourse becomes the main material?
In other words, how do people build a sense of place (or what the artists describe as “we-ness”) in online settings (e.g., Facebook, blogs, Gchat) when, unlike in the offline world, all they have is words?
See: Ms. Fayard and Ms. Wilson will transform an ordinarily staid space into a maze of semi-transparent hanging panels covered in flickering digital text. Some text is expected to stream in real-time from blogs and other online venues focused on topics related to the creations and interactions that take place in virtual communities/exchanges.
A significant portion of text will come from the online companion piece to the installation, the Building_Space_with_Words blog. For several months, blog contributors from the fields of art, architecture, design, organizational behavior, and sociology, have posted articles, questions, and comments related to space — how it’s created, modified, experienced, and even studied.
The artists intend for the text “to envelop the visitor, creating the feeling of ‘being in discourse’ and to suggest the physicality (or materiality) of words and the idea of living in language, while also to suggest the virtuality of online interactions.” They describe the transparency of the panels as a “suggestion of the non-materiality of space that supports the words much more than the material representation of the walls.”
Hear: Because sound – or the lack of sound – plays such an important sensory role in how a space (virtual or “real”) is experienced, the artists have included an audio component. Visitors will hear a soundtrack composed of recordings of public spaces, of “online” sounds (e.g., keyboard and mouse clicks), and voices reading excerpts of texts related to the exhibit’s central themes. The voice element will feature different accents and the readings will be in different languages. The effect will “remind visitors of how virtual space is global and how our definition of geography is redefined in online settings.”
Touch: Touch screens will allow visitors another way to “enter” Building_Space_with_Words by taking them on a “semantic voyage.” The artists have worked with a developer to build a software application that will unite the exhibit’s physical space with its virtual space (the Building_Space_with_Words blog), and with the larger World Wide Web.
Each Building_Space_with_Words blog post is associated with “tags,” or keywords that describe its content. Visitors can select one or more of those keywords to see articles, videos, images, and other content that web users have “tagged” with the same word. Exhibit visitors can then select a content item they’re interested in, see its tags, pick one of them, receive another batch of related content, and, in theory, repeat the process ad infinitum.
Learn: A strong educational and research bent to the installation fits with its campus setting. NYU-Poly will host visits for students from local middle- and high-schools. And the exhibit itself, which builds on journal articles the artists and other scholars have previously published, is meant to challenge the traditional peer-review process of presenting research.
Ms. Fayard and Ms. Wilson want “the language of art to provide a medium to present, embody, and materialize ideas from the social sciences.”
“Quite often,” says Ms. Fayard, “discourse from the social sciences offers a theoretical framework for a work of art, putting words around the piece and verbalizing and theorizing its meaning. In Building_Space_with_Words the approach is reverse.”
Anne-Laure Fayard, Assistant Professor of Management at NYU-Poly, is a social scientist with a multidisciplinary background in philosophy and cognitive science, and experience in ethnography, human computer-interaction, and organizational studies. Her main research interests are: discourse, socio-material practices, space, distance collaboration and culture. Prior to moving to New York, she was a faculty member at INSEAD, both in Singapore and in Fontainebleau.
Aileen Wilson is Associate Professor, Art and Design Education at Pratt Institute. Her research looks at drawings by adolescents and the role of violent content in their work. Her involvement in Building Space With Words grew from an interest in the role of online communities in education and in visualizing research design in art education. She will be on sabbatical from Pratt in Spring 2009, working on Building Space with Words and on her doctoral research.
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Radiant Copenhagen is a future version of Copenhagen. Using Google maps and Wiki technologies, the group has created a Copenhagen dressed in dystopian scenery and amusing attire. You will find stories and images about peoples and places, atypical architecture, fictional art projects, suspended gravity, environmental peculiarities and the wonders of future transport, literary permutations and poetic vignettes. Radiant Copenhagen takes the internet project as its base, but spreads into the real city, with enactments of staged reality appearing without warning.
The artists Anders Bojen, Kristoffer Ørum, Kaspar Bonnén and PhD (Comp.Lit.) Rune Graulund have worked with a team of architects, artists, designers, engineers and musicians to create an alternate vision of Copenhagen. All contributors share an interest in alternative realities and how these, through the internet and other media, play an increasing important role in our common understanding of the world.
The internet project as well as the physical interactions with the city are intended as devices to challenge conventional thinking, an assault on the collective imagination of Copenhagen by which new possibilities for change are established. Be there for the opening March 27, check out radiantcopenhagen.net and remember to keep an eye out for a new Copenhagen.
Contributors to Radiant Copenhagen includes Kristoffer Ørum, Anders Bojen, Rune Graulund, Maja Zander, Kaspar Bonnén, Stig W. Jørgensen, Palle R Jensen, Ida Marie Hede Bertelsen, Peter Rasmussen, Kasper Hesselbjerg, Ulrik Nørgaard, Daphne Bidstrup, Andreas Pallisgaard and Kristian Haarløv.
Radiant Copenhagen is supported by projektpuljen – City of Copenhagen. Book a seat for the bus tour on March 28 at 12 noon or 3:00 pm by emailing booking [at] radiantcopenhagen.net. Departure is in front of Christiansborg - duration 1 hour. Opening is at 5:30 pm at Gallery Overgaden - Institute of Contemporary Art. Overgaden Neden Vandet 17, DK-1414 Copenhagen K.
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Heard this nice buzzphrase: “fifth scenario planning.”
In much conventional scenario planning, two essential questions are turned into axes on a graph, creating four sectors, each of which becomes a world or scenario. By finding strategies which perform well in each of these worlds and comparing them, planners can find the set of strategies which are most robust in all of the worlds, and thus, hopefully, most vigorous in real life.
The idea of fifth scenario planning is to anticipate a realistic event or a series of events which is low-probability but highly disruptive, and then test the assumptions from the other four scenarios against it. By doing so, planners can find strategies which are not only robust but rugged. In theory, it introduces not only vigor, but resilience.
By extension, fifth scenario thinking is being ready for things to change rapidly (not necessarily to collapse: the Fall of the Wall and the collapse of Apartheid were both rapid changes, after all) in previously unbelievable ways. If that isn’t a needed skill these days, I don’t know what is!
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Been slacking a bit with my reports on the work in progress show I saw wow! months ago at the Royal College of Art in London. As you might guess I’ll keep on focusing on the works from the students of the Design Interactions department.
Meet Cesar Harada!
Together with , Hiromi Ozaki, Martin Gautron, Nasser Moustakim, Adrien Lecuru, Valérie Pirson and the help of a whole range of collaborators and experts, Cesar is currently busy developing the Open Sailing project, a floating architecture that evolves like a living organism, a laboratory for techno-social experiments.
The aim of Open Sailing is not to fashion new kinds of entertainment for your holidays but to propose a way to cope with impending natural and man-made disaster, while stimulating people’s ingenuity, fostering hyper-connectivity and sense of solidarity. To make the project all the more relevant, a map has been compiled that visualizes areas of looming crisis: overpopulation, tsunami risk, violent conflict, nuclear fallout, pandemics, global warming, etc. No place on Earth appears to be safe. Except maybe a few large spots above the ocean. And that’s the area where Open_Sailing villagers would drift and live. Each village unit is made of comfortable shelters surrounded by ocean farming modules : reconfigurable, sustainable, pluggable, organic and instinctive. The Open_Sailing_01 is about 50 m in diameter, for 6 persons.
Open_Sailing aims to ask questions about the way we currently inhabit our planet. Can we reach a harmonious dynamic state of interdependence with each other and the earth? Is this the next step for civilization? Will we disassociate our concept of progress with rigid infrastructure and metropolis?
The prototype Open_Sailing_01, currently under construction, will set sail in May 2009, attempting to drift from London to the Netherlands. If the first journey goes well, Open_Sailing_02 will embark on a trip around the Mediterranean with enhanced fleet operating and hardware system, then Open_Sailing_03 will head to the Azores Islands (Portugal). Finally Open_Sailing_04 will set sail from The Azores and drift to Brazil.
I was fascinated by the mix of Archigram-esque vision, the gutsy ambition behind the idea, the sheer beauty of the installation at the London show, and that hint of micronation ambition I thought I could smell (but how wrong I was!) around the project. So, as usual, I had to ask a few questions…
Why 2012? Does it have to come so soon? Do you want to spoil the London Olympics euphoria?
Ollie: We’re not particularly in the market for disrupting athletics events!
The project started with research into fear being used as a driving force of mind control. Unfortunately fear is often used as a way of controlling peoples’ actions and justifying things that would otherwise seem irrational. Through this research, Cesar found that a lot of people are predicting bad things for 2012, ranging from the semi-logical to the outright wacky. It’s the end of the Mayan Long Count Calendar, for example, which some New Age figures have heralded as a sort of spiritual renewal, people talk about the galactic alignment and the apocalypse…
Instead of seeing this doom and gloom as something negative, we have taken the fears and used them as design constraints, designing for the apocalypse. By compiling a list of the fears surrounding 2012, and overlaying these onto a series of maps, we have created a series of safe_zones where you can be assured to be free of pandemics, earthquakes, tsunamis, pole shifts, nuclear disasters, violent conflicts, etc. The recurrent safest places are in the middle of oceans : open_sailing aims to make the ability to live there comfortably a reality.
Cesar: I hope the open_sailing is going to continue long after 2012, and actually by 2012 we may have a series of serious prototypes ready for a real sport challenge, steading an ocean for good for example!
Is it a project you plan to pursue as your final project at RCA? Can we expect to see a more advanced version of it come June?
Cesar: This in just the beginning of the project. The bigger picture is to develop technologies and everyday life solutions for a future International Ocean Station. We have an International Space Station, we need an International Ocean Station, there is so much to discover about the blue planet! At the 25th of June 2009 at the Royal College of Art SHOW in London, we want to show prototypes of the tested shelter, energetic modules, aquaculture facilities etc. We are working on the design of the prototype at the center for the study and practice of survival technics in Lorient France. In April we are building it, in May we will depart from London river Thames and attempt to drift across the north sea escorted by a regular boat for safety. Follow us on the blog. We are still looking for scientists, partners, sponsors, funders : please contact anyone you think could be interested by this project.
I suspect that your project might have given way to feedbacks, questions and reflections during the work in progress show/ How did people react to your project so far?
Abigail: One big difficulty we’ve had so far is creating an explanation of what the project’s about, simply because there are so many different parts to it. There are a lot of people working on this project, a lot of new ideas. Some people seem to have misinterpreted Open_Sailing as being some kind of crazy ‘Apocalypse Boat,’ but it’s not like that at all. This is a very real, very exciting project where we’re developing a lot of innovative technology. Non-sustainable living; overpopulation; global warming… The way we’ve been doing life so far could do with a rethink, don’t you agree?
Cesar: Most people are very excited by the idea to live on the sea, most of them think it is impossible. The people who started to dig and understand a little bit more about our project were fascinated, there are so many different perspectives! The Open_Sailing is a floating laboratory in the first place, we are attempting to address many issues in “labs”:
- open_farming : a new way of doing aquaculture and fishing, creating nomadic open ecosystem toward a full nutritive autonomy at sea and more
- swarm_search_engine : an artificial swarm algorythm that runs on geoRSS mashup maps, suggesting safe_zones and structural organization
- energy_animal : an ideal energy module that combines solar, wind and wave power to provide renewable energy in any kind of weather
- life_cable : a connection norm, and API that enable living modules to exchange electricity, water, air, data in one single cable.
- instinctive_architecture : which is a new family of ship design that adapts to the most extreme weather conditions by changing shape and texture.
Abigail: Instinctive_architecture behaves a bit like a sunflower. It opens out when there’s lots of light and nutrients, and closes in on itself when weather is bad, stretches to move quickly.
Cesar: There is a lot to do, we address many real problems and people are interested because we are developing all these hardware and software technologies open-source.
Can you describe and explain the vessel prototype you were showing at the RCA work in progress exhibition a few weeks ago?
Cesar: What we showed was a 1/20 model, one open_sailing “family” facility, for 4 to 6 people. From afar, it looks like a “floating bunker” surrounded by a large ocean farm (~50m diameter), lines of algae, inflatable fish nets, plankton basins, floating gardens, underwater sea-shells pods, energy_animals…
Imagine the open_sailing in the ocean, it will be covered with fouling, algae and all sorts of parasites everywhere, shrimps, hundreds of fishes swimming around it, birds in the sky attracted by the fertile drifting structure. Maybe I should describe the instinctive_architecture : when the weather is nice, the open_sailing is spread over maximizing the farming surface, that’s what we showed as a model. When the weather is bad or a danger approaches, all the modules amalgamate and compact to resist. When the open_sailing is moving pulled by a traction point, it becomes long and thin. In many many ways the open_sailing behaves like a living organism, or an adhoc mesh network. The labs I presented before are the first, we will host many more researches on site if it works well.
I know you’d rather shun the reference to art but have you heard about the floating cities of Tomas Saraceno?
Cesar: I don’t shun the work of Tomas Saraceno at all, I think it is beautiful and visionary. We are sharing a very similar perspective about the transformation of the society with technology.
We are trying to make the open_sailing exist as soon as possible, so we’d rather show shorter term objectives and use a simpler vocabulary to appeal both general public and partners. Please find more details in the pdf on our website.
Have you thought about the status of Open Sailing villages, would they have some sort of sovereign independence similar to one of the micronations?
Abigail: That’s a really interesting question. In short, we’re not interested in establishing any sort of sovereignty. We don’t have a political agenda.
Cesar: We are trying to avoid problems. Sovereignty is a problem, as it implies that you’re being recognised by other states, we are people, we are not a competitive group, our perspective is more practical. Maybe our status is closer to the one of the International Space Station…
Ollie: We’re a floating socio-technological experiment. We’re part of many disciplines (art, architecture, science, etc) but not really bound by any. We’re an international team, and we don’t feel allegiance to any country or political stance - at least within the framework of this project.
Cesar: When you develop a technology, you can’t predict how people will use and modify it. We don’t want to determine how Open_Sailing is used by other people, that’s the openness of it, or a form of respect, an invitation. There must be something more advanced than “nation”. Nation is constitution, hierarchy, pride, it is slow, inefficient - we don’t have the time to be a nation!
Hiromi: We have a sort of operating system, the “swarm search engine”, it is an object oriented politic computer program, managing in real-time weather, available resources (food, water, energy etc.), people’s desires and fears (threats, attractors), moving the fleet into its optimum geographical positions and proposes a general arrangement of the structure.
Ollie: A country by definition has an intrinsic value - in the form of minerals, farming space, infrastructure, buildings, etc. Open_Sailing doesn’t. Open_Sailing is more like an organism. The whole thing is alive - it moves, it reacts to its environment, it evolves, it grows. The people onboard are its source of energy - if you take the people away, it would be like starving an animal of food. In this way we’re different to a country, we are neutral and don’t want to become involved with unnecessary legal issues… for now.
Thanks a lot for your time Cesar, Ollie, Hiromi and Abigail!
Thank you very much for yours.
All images Cesar Harada.
This piece originally appeared in Regine Debatty’s blog, We Make Money Not Art.
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