Orgs_Jenna Sutela

Opening: Fri, Sep 11, 18:00
Location: ARTISTIC BOKEH, Electric Avenue
Admission free

>Observe now: Specimen 3: Lush example of Physarum polycephalum, “many-headed” slime mold; terra cereberus! a sagacious sentinel, planetoid cortex

>Observe: All the water on this desert planet has been folded inside a gelatinous bag
>?Theory: Life on land became a unified whole: one flexible body and collective mind, wetware

> Observe Specimen 4: instructions
>”Pull a nerve cell from the brain and put it on the ground”
>?Theory: The Earth is beginning to think, stellAgric think

Orgs is the second exhibition in a two-part program at Artistic Bokeh exploring changing politics of representation and ethics of categorisation in artistic and curatorial practice, necessitated by an increasing blurring of boundaries between the human, the technological, and the planetary. Taking the shape of a dry landscape garden, Orgs opens up a post-apocalyptic view to a silicon-based, techno-corporate environment, as inhabited by an amoeboid intelligence. It is accompanied by a short narrative in the form of a conversational log between two characters, Consti-Scius and stellAgric, arriving on the exhibition site ten thousand years from now.

Slime mold is a single-celled, decentralized autonomous organism #DAO. It processes data without a nervous system, operating in a community of nuclei and using spatial intelligence. It is often referred to as a natural computer and has been popular in scientific experiments and mapping for its ability to navigate a maze using the shortest possible route. In robotics, there have been attempts to use it as a control unit. Slime mold survives by being in a constant state of flux. If it cannot find resources, bacteria to eat or a dark and damp living environment, it will turn into a scab or grow spores and move location. Similar principles apply to amorphous human orgs #selforganizing #agilesquads #holacracy. In management theory, organizations are organisms. Circles and holons replace linear org charts, focusing on fluid role definitions and transient relationship states.

Orgs conflates org charts, or organizational mazes, and slime mold. In navigating our contemporary canals of power, resources and cultural materials, will the organism’s flexible body and collective, spatial mind reveal something about the relationship and exchange between organizations and their environment?

Jenna Sutela is an artist and writer whose recent projects explore interrelations and breakdowns between body time, technological time and deep time as well as related phenomena, such as bio-inspired computing. Her work has been presented, among others, at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma and South London Gallery and writing published by, for example, Fiktion, Harvard Design Magazine and Sternberg Press.

Orgs is curated by Laura McLean and supported by Austria Australia Arts Alliance. The artist would like to thank Diakron, Margaret Hewitt and Ella Plevin.

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