Collective Intelligence
and the Political Economy of Social Creativity
By Agnieszka Kurant
15 July 2020
I discuss the ways in which my artistic practice tries to respond to the questions of the privatisation of the commons, the exploitation of social creativity, the extraction of surplus value by stack platforms and data mining by corporations.
My works are based on collective intelligence, crowdsourcing and often on profit sharing with the workers or contributors. I outsource my artworks to communities of both human and non-human agents (from termites and bacteria to the workers of Amazon Mechanical Turk platform, to the members of protest movements around the globe). I explore the possibility of evolution of human culture in which single individual authorship will be gradually replaced by complex, collective forms. My works are alternately natural and artificial, real and synthetic, living and not, biological, geological, and algorithmic. They often behave like living organisms or complex systems.
