The Only Flowering Plant in the Ocean

Hi, my name is Naveen Dossos. Hi, I'm James Bridle. And we are really happy to be with you today talking a little bit about our practice. Thank you to Hito and Francis for inviting us. Sorry we're not there in person. We called this talk, The Only Flowering Plant in the Ocean, because that's the name of the most recent work that we did for the Venice Biennale of Architecture. And it's a kind of nice, kind of circular beginning and start to our talk to explore a little bit about where our practices have got to, but also some of the feelings that came up through doing Venice and how our work sat within a kind of broader, context of doomy future casting that we have talked quite a lot about. Yeah, the tenor of Venice and so many other exhibitions at the moment seems to be around this kind of fraught prediction of terrible futures rather than perhaps enactments of better presence. The reason that became so apparent to us and why it interests us so much will probably become apparent, hopefully, during the course of this discussion. So we're going to start a little bit about our practices and how that developed.

So this is an early painting of mine from 2006. And the reason I put this in here is just to sort of quickly mention that I come from an art history background and I specialised in Islamic art, orientalism, post-colonial theory. And I was studying that and started painting just when 9-11 happened. I was 19. I was reading Edward Said and it had a profound effect on me. And after studying, I moved to Kuwait to learn Arabic. And it's also where I started painting. And this was during the second invasion of Iraq. And it really occurred to me that the war on terror, which had really become this kind of background to an entire kind of cultural moment, was what I was making work about. And I was also grappling a lot with how to use Islamic art and thinking about the grid and the matrix of geometry as a way to kind of express the world that we're in and to kind of use that grid as a means of exploring how to kind of speak about different realities at the same time. But yeah, I want to sort of say that when we both started practising, certainly I did, this was very much the kind of background of what we were working with.

Yeah, and it was present in my work in similar ways. Even if one was making work about digital technologies or about the internet as I was at the time, this was what the work always sort of tended towards. This is a project of mine from 2010, which was looking already at using digital infrastructures, the nature of technologies, to talk about larger political issues. You know, in ways that I'm sure will be familiar to most people in this room. In this work, I took the whole changelog, the history of one Wikipedia article, The History of the Iraq War, and printed out in physical form. This was a kind of trick that I performed quite a lot at the time, and probably still do, of physically manifesting digital objects of various kinds in order to sort of interrogate them. But the choice, obviously, is deliberate. To point at the fact that digital objects always construct politics, they construct our memory and our history increasingly powerfully. For me, that was always about saying, like, the interesting thing about these technologies is not the technologies themselves, but what they tell us about the wider political and social networks, matrices, to use Naveen's word, in which they're constructed.

And I met James in, well, we met each other in 2013, and one of the first things that just came to mind that James invited me to do was to do the Iraq War March again from scratch on the 10-year anniversary. So on February 16th, 2003, was the date of the largest UK anti-war march just preceding the second invasion of Iraq, with over a million people in the streets. It was a huge event. It was a very powerful event, and as we all know, it achieved practically nothing. And so, ten years on, I organised this reconstruction of that march, produced the same banners, walked through the same routes, invited people to come, and only Naveen and my friend Joanne turned up. So the three of us did that walk. And it was a very strange experience, but I think, looking back on it, it was also, in large part, about this question of what political action looks like, works, and means. I thought at the time it was questioning how commemoration worked, and how simulacra worked. It was getting harder and harder to protest at the time at all, and it's getting harder and harder to protest now.

But if you re-enact a protest, did that make it OK? That was what I thought was the interesting question at the time. Now I think that question is more about what is the efficacy of protest at all? What is our relationship to protest? And what is it that we can actually achieve? Yeah, and I think also for me, it was really important because when the first demonstration happened, I actually was too scared to attend it. I felt very kind of confused, and I was very shy of protest. And so for me, it was almost like a second chance. And I was really, really pleased that you invited me to kind of re-enact or enact something that I hadn't done and that I'd regretted, and to still show my commitment to those values. And, you know, I think it was one of the first things that we really did together. I mean, I know that… It was our second date. It was our second date. Yeah. Strong. Yeah, around that time, I was making paintings that were still looking at this idea of matrix, but had moved… I'd read a beautiful book by Laura U. Marks, who's writing about Islamic art and the digital realm and new media art, just completely exploded how I thought about the work of her.

And I was making… It was called Involvement and Infinity. And I started to make these images of grids that were based on my BlackBerry phone at the time and the fact that when I was loading an article or an image, the screen would have this transparency grid, and then slowly it would load in kind of sections. And I was very interested in this kind of moment that just doesn't exist anymore, really, where you input something that you want to see or something you want to know about, and there would be this kind of moment of a few seconds between being committed to that desire to see or to know and that thing actually appearing. And it was this kind of transparency grid, this moment of, like, sort of pure potential. And at the time, again, 2012, 2013, 2014, there was a lot of kind of violent imagery online, and I was really interested in this kind of violence of the surface. And these paintings also are very digital in a way, but I think it's important to also say that they are incredibly kind of physical, craft-based work. So this is made out of egg tempera and gouache on wood, which is basically what icon paintings are made from.

So they have this kind of very, very embedded… You know, it's embedded as an object in these kind of physical products of paint. They are paintings, you know. And this is kind of very much the kind of work that we first kind of engaged about. Yeah, at the time, I was working on a project, broadly, that I called, The New Aesthetic, or that had become known as The New Aesthetic, that was really interested in this increased appearance of digital textures, surfaces, aesthetics out in the world. It was a point in the early 2010s when it really felt like internet had not just become, like, popular and widespread, wasn't just a weird thing for nerds anymore, but had really expanded out and kind of averted into the world and was appearing in the world in quite a radically new way. And that included both the things that we saw but the nature of relationships. And again, as I said about with the Wikipedia changelogs, it also became a way of interrogating the world, that you could start to pick apart these digital tools in certain ways in order to understand them. One of my obsessions at the time was these things called the rainbow planes.

Planes had been photographed from the air by satellites as they flew past. And because satellites have these multispectral cameras, it would produce this rainbow, red, green, blue, black and white, of the different scanning apparatuses of the satellite. And for me, that was this introduction to the whole world of the glitch, kind of reverse engineering of technological apparatuses and kind of society more broadly. The feeling that if you could start to look hard at images and the products of computer systems, digital imaging systems, you could start to one-pick the politics that lay behind them as well as the kind of technological apparatus. And start to really understand the way these systems were connected in various ways. The phrase that springs to mind really is, actually when I start to talk about systems like this, in hindsight, is Stafford Beer's POSSEWID. I think that might be a useful concept for thinking about AI in our times as well. Stafford Beer's POSSEWID is an acronym for the purpose of the system is what it does. Meaning that whatever we informally or formally call systems, whether we call them financial systems or democratic systems or whatever they are, the purpose of the system is what it does.

And so we might as well call a financial system an enrichment of the rich system or whatever it is. We shouldn't take the names we are given of systems for granted and accept them wholesale. We should reverse engineer and think about them in order to describe them for ourselves as what they actually do. And I think it's also important to think about, we started off talking a little bit about this idea of the matrix and this kind of network system. And certainly in Islamic thought, there was a kind of invisible grid that connects everything. And then what we see in reality, what appears in reality, is a kind of flowering out of that grid, a kind of seeing in the world something that is connected in this invisible way behind everything. And I feel a little bit like that about these glitches that we were so fascinated by, and these kind of moments of refraction or things going a bit wrong, but also that being a form of flowering in the matrix, this kind of visibility of the system. Because these works we're looking at now, they were an insight through a digital system into something that lay behind it, right?

Yeah. This is actually a work, again, done on panel with Gouache. So again, sort of, a traditional technique, but these images, it's actually the layout of an ISIS magazine called Dabiq. And it was at the height of ISIS. They had a publishing wing and they were kind of creating this online propaganda that was circulating in various languages. And I was interested not just in… I was actually not interested in the content or reproducing the content, because it was obviously hideous. But I was interested in the kind of structures, the structures of propaganda, the fact that this was a magazine, that this magazine had a format like so many others. It was a PDF and it was using technology to emulate certain kind of very legible forms, but to spread this message. But at the same time, you were talking directly with people, right? Yes. At the same time, you were using, like, Tumblr to speak directly to young women within ISIS, within ISIS communities. Yeah. At that point, at that point in sort of like, just a little bit before this work was made, there were a lot of young women who were, who were, who had blogs, who were talking about their experiences that, I mean, all that got shut down very quickly, but it was possible to communicate with, I was particularly interested in women who had joined, who had fled European countries and moved to Syria.

And I was having conversations with them about, about their, their choices and, you know, using technology. They were using technology as a way to, to speak about their experiences. And then, and then, you know, there was a moment where that is shut down and all of those blogs disappear and their use of Telegram disappears and they just disappeared. But it was this, you know, it was this window into someone else's reality. And it was this, this, you know, string that developed for a very brief moment. And it was very human. And a very non-human reality. I talk about it in such a dry way of talking about the, like being able to look through these technological apparatuses up to see broader technological and political social systems. And you dive kind of, not in the opposite direction, but through as well in order to, to continually remind us that there's, you know, people in the most basic sense behind this, like behind these printed pages of this PDF with some guys in an office somewhere using InDesign. And, and then you put together these kind of images of atrocities. And that attempt in a world of dehumanizing technology to always hold on to the fact that there are somewhere within these systems other humans to whom we can speak and whom we can remember and recall.

Yeah, I did, I did email ISIS at one point. Yeah. To ask if I could be put in touch with their graphic designer. Yes. Yeah. Let's move on to another work. Oh yeah. And at this time I'm writing a book called The New Dark Age, in which these various thoughts about the violence of technology, kind of I tried to put them into my own kind of order. I'd always been entranced by technology. I'd always loved the internet. And I always thought I'd write a book about the internet and it would be a book about how great the internet is. And then I sat, finally sat down to write that between Brexit and the first Trump election. And it became very obvious that it was simply not the case. That there was something deeply awry in that, you know, early teenage naive view of these technologies. And it called for reassessment that I had to rethink a lot of my ideas about what the benefits of knowledge and information availability and so on and so forth were. And I did so and sort of started to come to terms with technologies, relationships with politics and particularly the environment, actually.

There's a chapter in that book that is about the relationship between technology and the ecology. Like the energy usage of data centres, the way in which material extraction creates our technological environment, all these things that I really hadn't spent so much time with. And doing so was devastating. To really spend the time with those numbers, as most of us probably have at this point, is deeply destabilising and frightening. And I think almost all the work I've done since then is a result in part of that reflection on the costs of the technological opportunities and the optimism that I might have at one point possessed. And this is a work that was kind of, I would say, also moving my practice from one type of politics to another. We made a really conscious shift in our practices. We saw the subjects that we were dealing with, violent conflict, colonialism, digital and physical, military violence really in all its forms was something that we spent a lot of time in our work focusing on. And perhaps in a parallelisation, in a parallelisation to the Iraq War protest war that we talked about before, that work started to feel futile at a grand scale and also began to feel damaging at an individual and community scale.

That both in ourselves and many of the artists and other practitioners and activists we saw around us were being traumatised and burned out by this kind of practice. And so we were actively seeking other ways to work that we felt were, that continued to be helpful and useful and beneficial to us and our communities but with a different focus. In this work, Naveen was focusing on a super political subject which was… Which was the laws in the UK that developed out of the war on terror. Sort of a set of laws that look at the radicalisation of young people in particular. Those laws became insidiously read through asking organisations like schools, schools, hospitals, workplaces to keep an eye on people's behaviour and if they seem to have radical views to report them. And then that those people would be put through a programme of like de-radicalisation without having actually necessarily done anything. And it was extremely problematic. But what I found interesting at this point as well is that these same laws that had been developed for anti-terrorist laws that had been developed with Islamic terror in mind were now being used more and more in terms of environmental activists.

I was noticing this kind of shift of the same frameworks and ways of stopping protest. Just shifting who the enemy was essentially. And at the same time I made a work with artificial intelligence. I studied computer science and computer science and cognitive science 20 years ago. At the beginning of the last AI winter, if that makes sense, at the end of the previous wave of AI. So we were studying neural networks and expert systems and various things just as they completely fell out of fashion and everyone thought they weren't worth anything. And it's extraordinary to see them come roaring back almost 20 years later and therefore be able to see that what's shifted in that time is not really any major technological breakthrough. There's been no conceptual technological breakthrough. There's just been an increase in power and an increase in data availability. That's why the big five, the social media companies and the software companies are at the forefront of this because they spent 20 years gathering vast amounts of data to input into things that we knew about 20 years ago but didn't have the chips and the data centers at scale to run on.

Which is why I was just the idea of this kind of AI as being something very new. Already at that time, this is back in 2019, I was concerned about the way in which AI was becoming deeply oppositional. I didn't have a good way to talk about it at the time. I later started with this idea of corporate AI, of AI as inherently capitalist in the way that it's being developed at the moment. Back then I was just concerned about this competitive nature. This was the time when Google was building vast supercomputers to beat humans at Go and other games. And it seemed to be all about winning. And so I was looking for ways to interact with this interesting new technology as I tried to interact with most interesting new technologies not from a position of competition or antagonism but of cooperation. And so that involved at that time trying to build my own self-driving car. So I was working with open source driving programs and I was driving around in the mountains in Greece where we'd quite recently arrived training this car to drive by driving with it. By treating the software as a kind of colleague, companion, comrade, rather than as an antagonist.

And again, this is one of those cases where I really thought that's what the work was about. I really thought it was about trying to have this different relationship with technology. A technology primarily that I'd been more involved in the creation of. So something that was more self-built that I had a greater understanding and therefore agency with. And that also there would be this different outcome because we'd had this different relationship in the creation of whatever we were creating. And I did that. But actually something else kind of emerged from that work as well which was not just about having this kind of technological co-creation but this beginning to think of intelligence itself as something kind of broader and more interesting and about relationships. And again, in hindsight it's super obvious that what I was interested in was when the things that we learn from the technology transcend the technology itself. When we understand the technology as being a mirror of deeper social and cultural relationships that it is useful to think about. The tool is something to help us think about these things. And that was really my strong feeling about AI then and probably even stronger now that the interesting thing about whatever this thing called AI is and we can talk about that endlessly is less of a thing in itself but a tool that allows us to think interestingly about relationships between intelligences.

So this is a work that kind of spans this period of time. It's called No Such Organization. I started it in 2018 just after we moved. We had been in Istanbul working on a project and we moved back to Athens. We'd been there for a few months. And just as we were leaving, our Khashoggi was killed in the Saudi embassy. And I made this work over two years. This is an installation of it in Richmond, Virginia. But each of these sections is a separate painting on paper that is based on an article, a news article about the death of Khashoggi. But I followed that case for two years and I ended up being in touch with his fiancée and I ended up being in touch with a special rapporteur at the UN. Again, the way I work and my practice is very much about being in touch with people and talking about it and making work about these conversations, not just experiencing it mediatically, let's say. Out of this case, we start to open a window onto surveillance through phones, the use of technology that's been developed to track people, to listen to people, often developed by Israeli companies that have a kind of defence background.

That technology is sold to, again, stop terrorism. It's anti-terrorist, it's anti-enemy. But all of this is so dependent on who you consider your enemy to be. Like, who is the enemy and why? And I think what particularly came out of this work, in Naveen's case, probably more so than most of my work in this period, though we were dealing with the same subject, was our own implications in it and the implications of the institutions that we worked with and much else beside. Firstly, we should say that, you know, we… Naveen was working on this work just as it became evident that the then chair of the Serpentine Gallery, one of the most influential art institutions in the UK, was financially invested in the spyware company that the work was dealing with. And this was a brief, huge shock to the art world. They moved on, they're now head of art at Chanel, and we sort of carried on as normal. As though… Not entirely. Not entirely? Well… Well, because we were also working with Guardian journalists and there was a case that went to court and we were asked at one point to be witnesses.

And we were given advice not to get involved in these people and it was really very personal and very stressful. Oh, and that person also wrote in the New York Times that artists should be careful about what they said. And since I was named in the same article, yeah. These things felt intensely personal. And that was… You know, that's… I'm sure, again, some people in the room have had similar experiences. It's… You realise that… Like, I know. It makes you feel like the work matters to some degree. Also, it makes you consider whether you want to expose oneself to those levels of risk, if one's completely honest about it. And one again thinks about… I think again… What this protest achieves and how. Because this also came at a point of… When I was really struggling to ask what the… What the role of these works was, I also was making a lot of work about surveillance in this period. As were a lot of my peers. And a lot of us were making works about digital surveillance and these kind of things. And I have deep, deep concerns about these kind of works that essentially re-perform, re-enact the logics of surveillance.

For me, Naveen's work escapes this very successfully. But a lot of the technological works at the time, and continue to do so, and particularly continue to do so when it's working with artificial intelligence in various forms, is that we recreate the logics of the systems that we're attempting to critique. That work about surveillance so often essentially did more surveillance. Certainly in my work that was true, and I saw it in the work of others. That to the publics who are engaging with these works, we're essentially just doing more of the thing that we're critiquing. And the effect of that is not to warn people or to educate them. It's to traumatise them to some extent, and mostly to normalise the fact that these are technologies and these are in practice. And these are the ways the world works. And I think as artists and other practitioners dealing with the effects of these technologies, it's really incumbent upon us to question to what extent we are implicated in their normalisation and the way that they're understood, even as we try to critique them. And I think a big shift happens around this point. Personally, we also became parents.

And we went through COVID. And we've been living in Athens for five years, and we decided to relocate temporarily to an island called Aegina, very close to Athens. And because of COVID, we ended up staying there. And so we became rooted in this very, very different landscape to the urban landscape. This is an ancient olive grove right behind our house. That is probably one of the major reasons we ended up moving here. And I think it's just important to sort of speak to the fact that there is this shift, major shift, in our practices that has to do with where we were living and our environment. Yeah, and this is the book that followed New Dark Age that came out of that, in which I found myself becoming more and more interested in non-human intelligence of all kinds. I feel strongly that my background in machine intelligence gave me something interesting, I hope, to say, about non-human intelligence more broadly. This is a view of non-human and more than human intelligences that emerges from a long time thinking about artificial intelligences, but which ultimately led me to kind of discard the artificial altogether. I don't mean to stop being interested in it, but to start to realise that there's no such thing as artificial intelligence.

There is only intelligence. So this was a work that I made in Dublin called Kind Words Can Never Die, and it was specifically looking at the language around climate collapse and how we can explore psychological states, specifically things like anxiety, anger, depression, that are coming out of climate crisis. Quickly, what we didn't say about the Tina work earlier was that it was fundamentally a community-focused work. Yes, it was. That this was a work… These paintings were developed with community in discussion in terms of a collective response to things. Yeah. And I think that's what we wanted to emphasise, was that the work started to become less about prediction and about showing what was frightening in the world, simply reflecting back what was dangerous or difficult, and started to be concerned with repair and regeneration. Yeah, and also kind of setting parameters in which work is created. So in these paintings, for instance, you can see the paintings themselves are based on diagrams that I found online that were to do with climate change. And I removed the data from those and then allowed participants to re-inhabit them with colours that they had related to certain emotions.

So there are kind of frameworks and protocols around how paintings are created, but ultimately I wouldn't know what the paintings were going to look like at the end, and I reproduced the paintings that were made by people rather than enforcing the end result on them. So it's a really kind of very participatory process that I think both of us care a lot about now. Yeah. And it's related to something that's come up in my practice, which is… that developed in my practice, which is what I call works that work or works that do work. It was… It's kind of my main ongoing and, you know, still incomplete response to this awareness that my work in… on surveillance technologies, on AI and so much so forth was just repeating the logics and reflecting them back rather than actually engaging meaningfully with the subject. And I think it's probably best encapsulated by the realisation that you can't make work about ecology because you can't stand outside it. And I think this is ultimately true of all things. Ecology is such a very good example. When I say I wanted to make works that work, works that do work, I want to make ecological works that are embedded meaningfully in the context that we're talking about and that also do good work within that ecology.

In this case, this is a part of a series of solar panel works in which decorated solar panels, solar panels artistically engineered in some way to make them acceptable to the public and curators as art objects also do the work. These are plugged in. They're making power. They're changing the composition of the atmosphere through changing the energy mix. So what we also do is, now that we've developed the route to Nagina and decided that this is where we wanted to be, we opened up, we founded Vessel. And Vessel is where we are right now. It's a shared studio space for people who live on the island. And it's also a collective. And we're working more and more under the title of Vessel. We're a non-for-profit, so we can apply for funding now. So we're really looking at other models of how to make work, how to rely less on institution, how to rely less on selling, sort of work within the art world, and to make different things. And this is us developing the studio. We found that when we rented it, we were gifted a huge amount of horrific, very thick MDF wood. And we used Enzo Mari's designs to create all the furniture in the studio.

And again, this is this thing of building and making and having this relationship with every single piece of furniture, every sort of prop that we needed to create this space was made by us, for us. And I think it's really worth emphasising again how this attitude emerges for me, and I think for us, from the digital, from learning from the digital that we can make things ourselves, like grounded in ideas of open source and the OI, and even source codes and viewing source. These are things that are essential to our practices to look within that have now turned around a little bit to look at the broader world and finding common histories within the built environment, within architecture, in this case with Enzo Mari's design practice of design for all, anyone's ability to engage with these things. Yeah, we are not great carpenters or builders. I'm a pretty great carpenter. You are now. I'm learning. I'm learning. This is something that I tried to do last year that I think sort of makes sense. I think it's important to take some of this point. While back in Athens last year, I asked ChatGPT to help me make a chair.

I asked several AI systems to help make chairs. I feel like this might be the last AI work that I make. I thought there was something interesting about certain qualities of these new generation of large language models. So I tried to do what I'd done with a self-driving car, which was to collaborate and cooperate. And so I told ChatGPT the different dimensions of various bits of scrap wood and the different dimensions of the material. And so I built a chair. And we built a chair together. I actually built several of these chairs based on different LLMs. And it was so… They're not very interesting. Like, an LLM is both not capable of coming up with an interesting form of chair. It's also not capable of actually building one properly, sort of unsurprisingly, because it works entirely in the domain of language. And so it's essentially like sitting in a chair designed by someone who has never sat in a chair before. It's slightly weird, slightly outsized. You have to make a lot of decisions as a designer or carpenter in order to actually make them hold together, which makes it a collaboration. But it really enforces the distinction between the kind of thinking that these machines do and the kind of thinking that actually enables manifestations in the real world.

That, through our ecological thinking, we both, I think, understand as being largely beyond language at this point. And so talking endlessly about machines which only operate within the domain of language started to feel further and further from our reality. We became quite obsessed with Walter Segal's work. Again, very much open source, early open source ways of building. Walter Segal was a German-British architect who designed a framework for self-building houses based on the principle that anybody can build a house. And that turns out to be true, because we've taught the method to various people. This is a kiosk that we built for the Sasaniki Biennial a couple of years ago. Where we worked with architecture students and others to teach them a framework for building, people who'd never built anything before. And it was extraordinary to see how quickly they adapted to the method, to the point where we arrived with an idea of how they might build. We started building, and by day two of the seven-day process, they'd taken it on themselves. Yeah. And I think that this really started off this process of this idea of, yeah, this very kind of core value that I think we have now, which is we learn to build, and we build to learn.

Yeah. It is inherent to, you know, instead of building these systems, like looking at all these things that, you know, all of this labour and all of this data that we're inputting into social media systems, that we're actually, you know, helping passively to build systems that actually, you know, if we can take a step back and actually learn to build physically ourselves, perhaps it might inform how we take part in those systems as well and what we want from our… from our relationship to them. Yeah. What we're attempting to build is a sense of agency and relationship to systems in general. If the problem that we face at the moment, and it seems quite clear that it is, is lack of agency within very large systems, whether those are technological systems, communication systems, financial, so-called democratic systems, one of the fundamental problems of our time seems to be a lack of agency within those systems. And you can develop agency in those systems in multiple ways. I feel like I did so initially by learning to program and learning to code, and then I realized there were a lot of other ways I could build things and put them together that would have similar and perhaps greater agency-building powers.

And so let's finally talk about the only flying car in the ocean and why we think it's an interesting thing for this discussion. So do you want to describe what the work actually is? So, yeah, the work is a series of boxes made from pallet wood that are stuffed with seagrass, and each one was filled with a box with overall there are about 100 ceramic objects that were made from clay from the island of Aegina. Aegina, where we live, has a very, very long history of ceramics. There is an incredible place on the island that has been used since classical times and before. So we really got our own clay from the island, processed it, created ceramics, and then boxed them up. These wooden boxes here that you can see in the front, those are also architectural materials made with seagrass. So the seagrass is a traditional material that's used on the island and all around the Mediterranean historically as insulation and fertilizer on the fields and other things. We've been using it as insulation in our buildings. We also discovered it was used as a packing material in Venice for glassware, which is why we sent these ceramics.

All of this stuff comes from the island and all of it will also return to the island. This whole installation is entirely circular, entirely recyclable, and will continue on in this kind of fashion. It was quite extraordinary seeing it set within the quite confused mass of this year's architecture biennial. There were many other wonderful works not dissimilar that were exploring the use of different natural materials, sustainable materials, and so on and so forth. There were also crazy installations with robots and various technologies. We were trying to understand what it was that the place that our work had within this kind of… these wild imaginings of the world. One thing that we really noticed and that really struck us is that so much of this work, which in this case was largely concerned with climate change and the climate futures of the planet, was predictive and was again, like we spoke about at the beginning, focused so strongly on a future that might occur and the ways in which we could speak about or warn of that future, rather than addressing the ways in which that future is being produced right now. Any possible future will only emerge from the actual actions that we take in the present moment.

And we felt that particularly strongly because there were multiple installations of various kinds that talked about the future of Venice or Paris or other mostly northern European cities, what they will be like in 2050, 2100. And most of them were basically what our home in Greece is like right now. There was a big installation at the start which said, oh, in 2100, the temperature in Venice will be 43 degrees. And we're like, well, that's what it is here in July and August right now. That future… Is here. Is here. Is here. And it's true of so much. The future we were talking about, of algorithmic prediction, of artificial intelligent agents, of collaboration between fascists and technological systems, that is here. And there's no point making work that warns about it or even really tries to unpick it at this point, I feel, very strongly. The work for us to be done is the works that work, the works that do work, the provision of tools for addressing the situation that is already occurring. And, you know, if most of those tools are simply based on responses to tools that are built by states or large corporations, then they're not going to be the things that help to unpick it.

Yeah. And I think also we should look at this work kind of again in the kind of circular gesture that the seagrass, you know, seagrass is not just important as a material that we can use in building or insulation or sending work. It's also protecting our coastline when it washes up in this form. It's also protecting our coastline under water. It's also acting as a huge barrier to the future. It's also acting as a huge carbon sink. It's something that we need and we can look after. And, you know, we can think about it as a form of protection in so many ways, but also as a form of matrix. Like it is a matter of life. It is a matrix of life. And if you look at this installation, essentially we are presenting a matrix of material, a matrix of seagrass in which things are flowering. And these ceramics are really flowering out of that. So we're not, in a way, even though we've come up in a huge circle round, we're still talking about a matrix, a network in which things appear, things flower, things come up, whether those are glitches or pots or, you know, conversations.

The same, I think that there is this kind of underlying, similar concern. It's just that the matter, the matter has changed, but the intention hasn't. And I think the, yeah, the political, the political hasn't. I think we're just as committed politically as we've ever been. It's just that it's… In an ecological world, everything is related. Yeah. I think that's probably a good place to stop because we're going to have to edit this down already in order to have any time for Q&A. I hope some of the things that we've discussed as varied as they are, provide interesting fuel for further conversations you're going to have in person over the course of the day. And we look forward to having a brief chat about that with you now. Thank you so much for your time. And have a great day. Thank you. As per usual, your work leaves very little to be questioned and very much to be admired. Maybe I start with something that interests me probably most about your work, which is the way that it translates into community and commons. So this is not so much a question as more than a request to explain a little bit more how this has been for a long period of time been translated into actual community practice, into a shared space.

Can you talk about this more? Yeah. So one thing… You know, I'm a kind of peasant. I realized that making work alone in my studio was not as interesting as making work with people and allowing there to be parameters that through workshops could be explored and allowing other people into my process. And I also found that when people recognized their own work in the final product of a given project, it also gave them a sense of… ownership and pride in that work rather than just visiting something that… that was kind of disconnected from this and was created from solely my own reality. And I recently worked on a project with the Tama Gallery in London… in Eastbourne, sorry, where we created a fabric in the community setting. And through a series of workshops, we did… we did these paintings from stencils to do with the neighborhood. And finally we created a fabric and we printed 500 meters of the fabric. And the show was essentially these huge rolls of fabric where you could come and take as much as you wanted for free of the fabric. So it was like, yeah, half a kilometer. And it all went and people took it home and they made their own objects out of it.

And the only kind of contract that we had, that's a social contract, was that if you made something, that you would take a photograph of it and upload it onto the online archive. And we were amazed by how many people took on this opportunity and shared their work with us. And I think this idea of dissemination of work, that it doesn't just exist in a gallery space and that it exists in people's homes, in public space, and that there is this kind of diffusion of an idea and of a surface of a pattern or a decoration, can really link people and make them have a sense of community in a physical, visual form. And I found that quite powerful. Yeah, and I've released various artworks under Creative Common Terms for people to make themselves, like the Drone Shadow project, which I didn't talk about, but essentially releasing these frameworks for artwork creation rather than the finished artworks. And I think that's a really good point, because I think what we've both come to understand is that when we talk about community work, as much as we do, and we don't want to make too many claims for it, the main thing is agency building, is increasing the capacity for other people to work with some of the tools that we've made, but also ultimately to develop their own.

And the best way to do that is to make stuff for themselves. So the more that those frameworks and knowledges and skills can be distributed, the better, really. But then also that they continue to circulate as they're being said and continue to stay visible and continue to be part of an ongoing conversation. I think one of the biggest discussions we keep seeing to be happening around AI in tech is this kind of collapse of attribution, which is also a collapse of the kind of conversations that can happen around work, because we don't know where material stuff is coming from. So I think a lot of this, you know, part and parcel, I think, for me, is community work, is attempting to essentially build new models of attribution, which make new forms of relationship and discussion and development possible. Thank you. Does anyone in the audience have a question, maybe? We have about five minutes left. I hope you can hear the question. Can you hear me well? Okay, then that should work too with the microphone. Okay. So I loved your observation that you can't really make work about ecology because you can't stand outside of it.

And this made me think about the way a lot of art is being made about AI, where artists tend to essentialize the tool without really talking about the… or giving attention to the fact that there's always human counterparts, and they're needed in the network to produce any output. So going back to the statement on art about ecology, is it possible to make work about AI or only together with AI? And, you know, my feeling is, like, I and lots of us have been making work for a long time with technology of various kinds, advanced or very simple. And there's always a shared, um, authorship behind that. Like, any time you use any piece of software, let alone a piece of intelligent software, like, a huge amount of your, uh, capabilities, what you can do with that thing, um, and how it gets presented, various outputs, the defaults, presets, all this kind of stuff, how much you can push the capabilities of that system has been decided by anyone else. And I'm not entirely sure that AI is different in kind to that. Um, I do think it's different in sort of scale, um, in the fact that, you know, if you're operating with a commercial machine learning AI system, the amount of agency that you've given up already at that point is huge, just in terms of the number, the amount of other influence that's occurring on that work.

Now, that's, you know, not the case if you're actively developing in some way, if you're contributing to that system. But I think any time you make any kind of work about it, um, you know, you've got to think about these questions of authorship, to what extent you want to claim authorship over that work. Um, and I don't just mean authorship in terms of copyright situation. I mean a bit like I was talking about before, in terms of kind of attribution and responsibility of how much you're really bringing to something, um, uh, versus how much has been decided and what the costs of giving up on that decision. Thank you. Maybe one more question? Thank you so much for the talk. Um, for the sake of time, I'll keep my question short. Um, James, how would you situate the new aesthetic today? I mean, you started it as an ongoing research project over 20 years ago as a way to kind of bring digital imaging technologies and their embedding into social, political, economic systems into view. Um, so yeah, I would just like to know how you would define it in situations, um, that you would have created today.

Sorry, Francis. Can you repeat it a little bit louder? Or maybe you can want to come up here. Can you just say it into the microphone? I will just repeat it briefly for you. The question was about the new aesthetic 20 years on. What's your… I get this question a lot about the poor image as well, so I'm very curious about how you answer it. Thank you. Okay. I think a lot of what was described, or I described, or was trying to describe in Formulation of the New Aesthetic, as open and ongoing as it always was, was trying to, um, to point towards, um, the fact that digital aesthetics were emerging into the world faster than what underlies… was underlying and was visible. Um, and new aesthetic was always not about aesthetics. And was about trying to point, uh, towards and develop a language for talking about and describing the systems of power that underlie, um, the kind of visible screens and shades of digital experiences. Um, that doesn't really seem to have changed. I think we're absolutely talking about the same things today. We're talking about how to, um, uh, describe, uh, analyse, explore networks of power that technology deliberately has to do with.

And that's something that I think is really, really obscure. That deliberate obscuration is still going on. Um, I think maybe I'm slightly disappointed that we haven't really, um, developed better ways of, um, uh, of talking about power within those systems beyond these quite, yeah, simple descriptions of, of large corporations. I mean, the question that was just asked about AI, I think, and authorship and stuff, means that we're still absolutely struggling with these same questions. So, yeah, I think it's just, it's an ongoing project and this work is as much part of it as the original formulation. Thank you so much. Uh, unfortunately we are out of time now. Um, we have to proceed with the next lecture by media in Gruppe Bitnik. Uh, Navin and James, thank you so much for joining us. Uh, hopefully next time in person or we come to visit you on the island. Um, have a great day and thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you.