REMESO, Linköping University, and the Royal Institute of Art proudly announce a symposium, organised by Stefan Jonsson and Anna Ådahl, on the future of, and challenges to, collective agency at our political, aesthetical and technological conjecture. With lectures by Matteo Pasquinelli, Jonathan Beller, and Esther Leslie as well as interventions by Karin Krifors, Blaise Kirschner, and Axel Gagge.
Life in digital data capitalism seems infinitely manipulable and traceable. New technological systems of identification, communication, and geolocation, automated systems of spatial, temporal and embodied surveillance, and algorithmic channelling of information, all of them operated by a few for-profit monopolistic companies, apparently foreclose the political agency of collectives and individuals. Still, even as the world is shaped by AI, automation, and algorithmic prediction, collective agency persistently asserts itself vis-à-vis authoritarian systems that thrive on data harvesting from the very same physical bodies and digital platforms as people use to manifest their agency. Political action remains viable.
Through art practices and theoretical dialogue this symposium explores, separately or in combination, computational, optic-visual, and aesthetic modelling of the 21st century collective. In what abstract or embodied forms and settings do collective projects and counter currents assert themselves? The symposium explores the ways in which art practices and critical thinking contribute to the illumination of, and resistance against, late-capitalist digital and authoritarian governance.
Organizers
Collective Agency in an Era of Authoritarian Automation is a fine art practice-based research project funded by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) constituted and conducted by professor and writer Stefan Jonsson and postdoc researcher and visual artist Anna Ådahl (a project hosted by REMESO and carried out in collaboration with the Royal Institute of Art with support from the Swedish Research Council). Through multiple mediums and art practices, we investigate how human bodies are translated into data through multiple harvesting and image-based scanning processes, and we explore how collective behaviour and agency is shaped by computational technologies which align the 21st century crowd with political programmes and market strategies that defy democratic values. Deploying conceptions of porosity, transmediation and figuration, Collective Agency portrays embodied forms of subjective agency and collective assembly that interrupt processes of collective automation. Speculating over future scenarios – including the deployment of digital tools and quantum computing – we seek to make abstract processes concrete. At the heart of our endeavour is an ominous riddle: Will democracy survive the 21st century?