Risk Management

Risk Management is artist Agnieszka Kurant’s global survey of outbreaks of social contagions, panics and collective delusions and their impact on the global economy and politics – from 17th-century tulip mania to modern mass hysteria about UFO sightings and laughter epidemics. Despite today’s advanced AI technologies that claim to predict and mitigate risk, this map of collective beliefs and delusions suggests the difficulty in accounting for human irrationality and complex social behaviour.

Bodily

Paulo Cirio’s Bodily investigates the ways we are subject to bodily surveillance, both with and without our consent. This image uses the language of the thermal body scanner, a technology that has become increasingly common since the pandemic. The artist’s project uses a diagnostic algorithm that operates like a ‘slot machine’, randomising treatments and diagnoses for participants, ranging from sitting down for anxiety to quarantine for the flu. Thermal scanners have changed what we can see and the way we see it. But who decides what is made visible and why?

Center for Technological Pain

Have you ever had neck ache from looking down at your phone? Dry eyes from staring at your computer all day? The Center for Technological Pain (CTP) offers DIY and open-source objects, classes and self-defence techniques to counter such aches and strains. Artist Dasha Ilina founded this mock-company to offer tutorials, tips, worksheets and workshops designed to draw attention to the social and health consequences of our ‘always on’ culture: Is human-centric design really human? As remote working becomes commonplace and we are increasingly inseparable from our smartphones, CTP uses humorous interventions to ask serious questions.

Anarchonaut #12

Anarchonauts are the imagined inhabitants of a speculative future version of Lagos, rendered by architect and visual artist Olalekan B. Jeyifous. Within this somewhat dystopian vision of the city, Shanty Megastructures (SMS) dominate the skyline: vertical slums that tower upwards acting as beacons of the future, calling attention to the current lack of agency and infrastructure of slums and informal settlements, from Lagos to Rio to Chicago.

Choreographic Camouflage

As AI surveillance becomes more commonplace in our surroundings, how will we behave in public? Filmmaker Liam Young and choreographer Jacob Jonas developed Choreographic Camouflage in response to the introduction of ‘gait recognition’ software implemented by the Chinese government to quash civil unrest in Hong Kong in 2018. The dance embodies the artist’s desire to escape the robotic gaze through a series of human movements designed to be disguised.

blessed kirby : r/blessedimages

Everything Will Be Fine

"Everything Will Be Fine" is an exhibition by Tactical Tech, in co-production with HAU Hebbel am Ufer. Through the work of artists, researchers, technologists, the exhibition explores the ways how people get informed, form opinions, make decision and respond to current global crises like climate change, pandemics or political polarisation.