Collective Intelligence is an innovative monograph that documents the last ten years of Polish-born conceptual artist Agnieszka Kurant's interdisciplinary practice. It also includes newly commissioned texts by renowned thinkers in science, philosophy, technology, anthropology, and economics. Dispersed throughout the book, the Phenomena section adopts a quasi-encyclopedic format to highlight and expand on Kurant’s research on collective intelligence.
Agnieszka Kurant (born 1978 in Łódź) is a conceptual artist whose experimental work investigates collective and nonhuman intelligences and their impact on transformations of the human, the future of labor and creativity, and the exploitations within digital capitalism. Questioning the ideology of individualism, Kurant proposes that we rethink human and more-than-human worlds from a perspective of plural subjectivity. Her work probes the replacement of individual authorship with collective intelligence—a phenomenon observed in slime molds, termite colonies, social movements, cities, the internet, and inside our brains. Collaborating with scientists and academics, the artist investigates emergence, cybernetics, automation, artificial life, mining industries, and energy circuits to explore our collective evolution and the shifting status of objects in relation to agency, value, circulation, and re-distribution. Through crowdsourcing the production of her artworks to thousands of humans and non-humans, Kurant creates unstable, hybrid forms that constantly evolve. Her works, oscillating between biological, digital and geological embody the crumbling distinctions between what is natural and artificial, real and synthetic, life and nonlife.
