Archive
Library’s Other Intelligences videos
Our show Library’s Other Intelligences is on at Oodi in Helsinki until March 10th and we have now our videos of the three featured pieces! Please find links below:
Jenna Sutela: nimiia ïzinibimi
Jenna Sutela’s nimiia ïzinibimi is a unique book based on an invented new language representing those who lack first-hand access to, or the ability to produce, “natural” language.
Samir Bhowmik & 00100 ENSEMBLE: Memory Machines
Samir Bhowmik’s and 00100 ENSEMBLE’s Memory Machines is a performative art project that explores the infrastructure of the Central Library Oodi
Tuomas A. Laitinen: Swarm Chorus
Tuomas A. Laitinen presents Swarm Chorus. He composed a performative installation and a sound piece with generative tools that are interpreting the construction of medieval musical canons. The work as a whole is likened to an ecosystem of circulating substances, with its words, inspired by ecological science fiction, functioning as fictional recipe poems describing and decoding an alchemistic combination of matter and meaning.
In addition, the Code, Craft, and Catalogues: Arts in the Libraries-seminar will take place in New York on March 9th. It is also part of the Mobius fellowship program.
Library’s Other Intelligences opens
I am happy to share that our joint project with Shannon Mattern, Library’s Other Intelligences, opens in the new Oodi library in Helsinki in January!
Digital cultures of alternative intelligence, library architectures as a stage for performance and imaginary languages, and memory machines tours that take you through the library as a living organism of infrastructure are some of the themes the works by Jenna Sutela, Samir Bhowmik and Tuomas A. Laitinen address!
The opening takes place on January 11th including a small symposium on January 12th. There is also a press tour on Wednesday 9th of January – please be in touch if you want to attend.
Warm welcome to all! A brief blurb below including a link to the Memory Machines tours.
Memory Machines tours: January 11, 12 &13 at 18:30. Sign up here.
The Library’s Other Intelligences, an art project organized by the MOBIUS Fellowship Program of the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York in collaboration with the Helsinki Public Library, will open at the new Central Library Oodi in January 2019. The project features newly commissioned artworks, original research and a series of events, including an opening celebration on Friday, January 11, and a symposium on Saturday, January 12.
MOBIUS fellows Jussi Parikka (University of Southampton, Winchester School of Art, UK) and Shannon Mattern (The New School, US) have commissioned Finnish artists Samir Bhowmik, Tuomas A. Laitinen, and Jenna Sutela to create works that examine the new intelligences represented in our evolving knowledge institutions. These artworks reveal the alien logics of neural nets, give voice to machinic and speculative languages, and make visible the material infrastructures that allow intelligence to circulate. The exhibition’s featured artists are known for work that engages with AI, biological intelligence, digital culture, and the infrastructures of modern societies.
Visitors to the library will be invited to engage with the works – and with the new building – by attending live performances, embarking on expeditions, and reimagining how we will read, listen, and learn in a new techno-cultural future. The opening celebration will take place at Oodi on Friday, January 11, from 7 to 10pm; and the curators and artists will host a symposium about the exhibition on Saturday, January 12, from 2 to 4pm.
Image: Jenna Sutela: nimiia ïzinibimi, 2019
The Elastic System launches online
Richard Wright’s art project the Elastic System has launched now online too. Originally commissioned as part of our AHRC funded project Internet of Cultural Things, the piece was first a temporary installation at the British Library (and subsequently touring to Hartley Library, University of Southampton where it was presented with support from Dr Jane Birkin and AMT). Please find below the Press Release for the online launch. I myself am currently writing a text on art practices, library infrastructures and contemporary cultures of data in cultural institutions.
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Press Release
Follow: https://twitter.com/ElasticSystem
You are invited to visit the new high resolution version of the ELASTIC SYSTEM, an artwork by Richard Wright in collaboration with the British Library.
The ELASTIC SYSTEM was produced during a year-long artist-in-residency at the British Library and is the first artwork to be given access to their core electronic networks and databases.
The work takes the form of an interactive portrait of the C19th librarian Thomas Watts, an obscure but important figure in the early history of information technology. In 1840 Thomas Watts invented his “elastic system” of storage for the British Library to cope with the enormous growth in their collections that was threatening to overwhelm them. This photomosaic has been generated from 4,300 books as they are currently stored in the Library basements at St Pancras, an area not normally accessible to the public. The “Elastic System” functions like a catalogue, allowing people to visually browse part of the British Library’s collections, something which has not been possible since Watts’ time. Furthermore, each book is connected live to the Library’s electronic requesting system. By clicking on a book you can find out more about the item and how to request it from the Library. If you do request a book, it is removed from the mosaic to reveal a second image underneath. This image is a portrait of the staff who work in the underground storage basements, the hidden part of the Library’s modern requesting system.
In order to create the second image, the artist spent two days working with the basement staff at the St. Pancras site, taking hundreds of photographs. With a collection as large and as diverse as the British Library’s, its successful functioning depends on a well tuned human element, which although it is as essential as the electronic networks, is less visible and less appreciated.
After being exhibited as an installation at the British Library, the Hartley Library and the Digital Catapult centre, the “Elastic System” has now been optimised and rebuilt at double the resolution. It is being released as a public web site on September 9th to mark the anniversary of the death of Thomas Watts in 1869.
This work is part of an AHRC funded research project called “The Internet of Cultural Things”, a partnership between the artist Richard Wright, Dr Mark Cote (KCL) and Professor Jussi Parikka (Winchester School of Art) with wide representation from the British Library including Jamie Andrews, Head of Culture and Learning, Dr Aquiles Alencar Brayner and Dr David Waldock. The aim is to use digital data and the creative arts to transform the way people and public institutions interact. The “Elastic System” uses Watts early C19th insights into database access to create a new catalogue out of visual metadata (digital photographs), making it a portrait that is also an extension of his work.
Richard Wright is an artist working in animation, moving image and interactive media. An archive of his work can be found here: www.futurenatural.net
Email: contact@elasticsystem.net
The artist has written three blog posts about their research behind this project:
https://internetofculturalthings.com/2016/06/08/where-is-the-library/
https://internetofculturalthings.com/2016/06/18/what-can-you-do-with-a-library/
https://internetofculturalthings.com/2016/09/01/elastic-system-how-to-judge-a-book-by-its-cover/
Google Photos: https://tinyurl.com/ElasticSystem-images
Oodi Art Project: AI and Other Intelligences
As part of our curatorial project on Library’s Other Intelligences we received an exclusive sneak preview of the new Helsinki Central Library, Oodi. With Shannon Mattern, Ilari Laamanen (Finnish Cultural Institute New York) and our artists we were able to see how the insides are shaping up. The aesthetically and architecturally stunning building is also such an interesting cluster of spaces that one could write about them much more extensively than just a this short posting. That longer piece might follow later, but already now I personally was struck how they deal with media in its multiple forms from analog to digital, from projection to making. From a cinema theatre equipped with also 35 and 70 mm projecting opportunities to a bespoke space for an analog synthesiser, the library offers an amazing platform for a public engagement with media which also includes recording studio space and a maker space – and yes, even a kitchen. The library is catered as a space of media transformations. At the moment the building exposed its multiple wires, cables, ducts and work – the labour of construction as well as cleaning that is already going on for the launch in December.
The top floor is reserved for what one would imagine as the “traditional” library, a space for books and reading, which also opens up to a terrace overlooking the Finnish parliament building. The roof wave is pretty stunning.
I wanted to include some of the visual impressions from the space that shows its infrastructure being built up, a theme that is present in some of the works from the artists Samir Bhowmik, Jenna Sutela and Tuomas A. Laitinen. In general, a key theme of our project concerns architectures and infrastructures of intelligence – both engaging with AI but as an expanded set of intelligences from architectural intelligence to ambient intelligence, from acoustics to amoebas and others layers of an ecology of a library that is a life support system – biologically, intellectually and culturally. It’s these multiple AIs that define the generative forms of languages, materials, and new publics that are present in how we want the space to be perceived. The exhibition opens in January 2019. Updates on social media will use the hashtag #OodiIntel.
Machinology 