This blog introduces a series of collaborative projects with Bartolo Luque, a theoretical physicist. We plan to present interactive artistic projects and participative interventions which explore relationships between scientific (Physics) understanding of collective human behaviour and philosophical concepts concerned with individual experience, sensation and perception which form part of such social phenomena.
Our practical experiments will focus on social interaction in public places. They will be designed to permit the emergence of heterogeneous, idiosyncratic, anomalous, or shared behaviours, within and across different culturally specific contexts and in pan-cultural contexts such as the internet.
All projects we develop must therefore address how we are influenced by others as we form and communicate across local or universal networks.
We have two initial projects in mind which we plan to put into action in the short term:
1. A public pan-cultural project involving the internet and dispersed agency. A constantly evolving picture, film or story, produced by a large number of online participants, will be projected in real time on a cinema screen. However, each online participant will only be aware of what a limited number of other participants are doing to the ever-changing image.
2. A series of public events. A large group of people will be asked to maintain a certain distance between each other as they walk around a public place in different cities. These events will be documented from two perspectives: the long shot recording the whole group and the close-up recording the individual. These audiovisual recordings from different places will be presented as exhibitions.
While the first project is firmly rooted in “real world” experience, the second acknowledges how the internet has made communication easier and the forming of networks more rapid.
The internet facilitates shared agency and interaction. From this interaction, we can gather data unseen. This data will enable us, as part of this aesthetic process, to develop real-time topological mappings or visualisations of emergent behaviours.
Digital technologies will therefore act as both an interactive tool and as a means to map, visualise and document the complexity of social interaction occurring within these participative events. These visualisations will make perceptible normally imperceptible potentialities, interactions, exchanges, processes and patterns of relations. Furthermore, the transparency of these processes, presented as visual elements, will make complex concepts accessible to a general public audience.
This documentation and server data collected will make it possible to retrace routes and patterns along paths of retrospective possibilities and potentialities. This is essential for our theoretical analysis.
As we attempt to identify collective patterns of behaviour while addressing the behaviour and experience of each individual, we will simultaneously travel along two different but parallel routes, the first scientific (Physics) and the second informed by Philosophy and Psychology.
Mathematical tools can be used to analyse statistical data in order to determine if a law or pattern of collective social behaviour is emerging in each cultural context, always bearing in mind that correlation does not necessarily indicate the cause.
Its models focus on human interaction and networks and can shed light on patterns of autonomy, self-interest, altruism, collective interest, negotiation, translation and cooperation, all concepts integral to this project.
In order to consider interaction itself as an intuitive enactment of our self-awareness as both contingent collective subjects and as individuals experiencing subjective sensation, a dialectical and cross-disciplinary approach is required.
Concepts and theories from other fields can shed light on relations between collective behaviour and individual experience. For example, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela’s biological theory of autopoiesis and contemporary philosophical theories of individuation both attempt to understand the continual process of change or becoming experienced by the individual in relation to the milieu.
An understanding of moral dilemmas beyond the theme of self-interest, expressed by Derrida and others, concerning the impossibility of behaving responsibly to the singular and recognised other without being irresponsible or ignoring our responsibility to other others is also necessary. Deleuzian ideas of the machine, assemblage, and territorialisation also clearly relate to ideas of dialogue, social consensus, cultural tradition, memory and ritual.
Due to this innovative methodology, these projects will clearly be of interest to audiovisual arts practitioners. However, they will equally seek to engage scientists and philosophers interested in the addressed cross-disciplinary themes.
Developments will be posted here.
