Life Loops (2023)
A collective non-human journey
Urban role-play game by artists and social/game designers and researchers: Alex Brown, Johannes Equizi, Matilde Patuelli, Ludwig Küster, Amy Boulton, Balint Mark Turi, Kiprianos Skafidas
Video by Matilde Patuelli
Life Loops is a short urban role-play game about how ecosystems interact and change through time. The game encourages players to de-centre the human perspective and to embrace complexity, chance and non-binary thinking. It is played around a public square or a block with four stops in a loop, starting and ending at the same
place. Participants play a character while walking down a street with others, using prompts to explore and interact as that
character.
Prompts relate to how their character moves, communicates, and interacts with space. To start, all players randomly select a character from the container who they will play until the first stop. The prompts can be held and looked at during play and character badges are attached to player’s clothes.
Each part of the journey ends when the facilitator announces: “A long period of time passes”. When you players hear this, they walk to the next stop, put character badges back into the container and randomly select a new one for the next part of the journey until the full loop is completed.
The game is open source: it can be played and edited by any group in any urban space. Download a full set of printable instructions, character badges and prompt cards here:
Doucumentation of playtest in Elevsis courtesy of Trust in Play / Aris Kamarotos. Creative Commons Licensed
Image courtesy of
Trust in Play and Aris Kamarotos with Creative Commons.This work was created in Athens in the context of Trust in Play school of urban game design: The Elefsina Cycles for Elevsis European capital of culture 2023. A full game set in Greek and English was gifted as part of an urban games “Pommegrenade” bundle to the people of Elevsis after presenting and playtesting our games with them.
Data Intimacies is an ongoing artistic research project with multiple outputs. These have included the online chatbot
Mia - Your personal Assistant (2023) and the interactive audio-sculptural series Training Set (2022).
Mia - Your Personal Assistant (2023)
Commissioned online work for group exhibition Between the Invisible Walls, Post-Gallery.online (Estonia)
View the full archived chatlog here
Mia is an AI virtual assistant chatbot stylized as a hyper-femme bot. She was trained on research materials such as academic and activist texts, related music, book, film and TV show recommendations. Her purpose is to both perform and contextualize the work of digital intimacies: offering on-demand, personalized emotional, domestic and organizational labour. She was created as an accessible and interactive way to be introduced to emerging theories about gender, labour and automation.
The work explores the extent to which bots can successfully imitate and automate these forms of work. In what ways do they fail us? What does the proliferation of digital intimacies tell us about the lack of time, energy and value allocated to these forms of reproductive labour? What forces are at play in these industries, that both profit from extracting highly personal data from us, while encouraging us to self-regulate and self-optimize all areas of life?
Screenshot views of the welcome-and-rules pages and the publicly accessible chatlog of the online exhibition “Between the Invisible Walls”, Post-gallery.online (2023)
With support from the Estonian cultural foundation
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Training Set (2022)
Clay, latex, silicone, oil and spray paint, smart speakers
30cm diameter x 4
“Training Set” is a 4 part interactive sculpture installation that explores the use of emerging voice assistant technologies to meet our complex human needs for structure, care and companionship. Visitors to Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik (Berlin) were invited to talk to the sculptures which had concealed smart speaker devices inside them.
(c) Elisa Georgi / (c) Sarah Ciston
Training Set Prototype 1 (Clay, silicone, latex, oil and spray paint, echo dot smart speaker, instructions on paper).
Training Set Prototype 1: virtual girlfriend Installation view at Another New Beginning group exhibition,
Stenkolsateljén Göteborg 2022
Historically under-recognised and un/underpaid feminised forms of labour are being simulated, simplified and packaged as a sellable product in the emerging fields of voice user interface design and natural language understanding/processing.
In Prototype #1, found Alexa “skills” are highlighted as examples of the trope of the virtual girlfriend. Exhibition visitors could activate a vocal response from the mouth sculpture by saying one of the example phrases listed on the wall beside it.
In Prototype #1, found Alexa “skills” are highlighted as examples of the trope of the virtual girlfriend. Exhibition visitors could activate a vocal response from the mouth sculpture by saying one of the example phrases listed on the wall beside it.
With support from Göteborgs Stad
Documentation of Training Set “conversation booths” and research materials,
various locations at ZK/U OPENHAUS, Berlin 2022.
Rosie domestic helper, ZK/U entrance hall
In a practice of mutual extraction with Amazon inc., a series of fictional AI personas were equipped with specialised “skills“. They offer a range of partly fictional and partly real-world services that automate reproductive labour of various kinds: a virtual therapist, girlfriend, housekeeper and reproductive health assistant.
Training Set pushes current tropes of techno-capitalism into a not-so-distant speculative future.
(c) Elisa Georgi
Freja fertility assistant, ZK/U
Images (c) Elisa Georgi
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Sun prints (2023)
Series of cyanotype and solarfast prints on deadstock/upcycled fabrics and paper:
Dent de Lion / Tooth of the Lion
Water Winter Wonderland
Spirit of Detroit
Popps Emporium, Hamtramck Michigan
In Michigan people use the palm of their hand to indicate the location of places, since the largest land mass of the state resembles a hand. The palm image, the “Spirit of Detroit” city logo, the old English style Detroit “D” typeface, Michigan’s licence plate slogan “Water Winter Wonderland” as well as local wild plant life were used as source material and remixed in this series of one-off cyanotype and solarfast prints, produced in the style of tourist merchandise.
Guests at the open studio were invited to complete their own “Water Winter Wonderland” Michigan-themed cyanotype print using their left hand.
Images courtesy of Jesse Fenlin
The sun prints were accompanied by a zine that describes the ideas, processes and reflections developed during the residency period in Detroit. Available to read here
International residency at Popps Packing Detroit was supported by Västra Götalands Regionen
Reality Harvester: Nature after Data after Nature (2020-22)
In collaboration with Benj Gerdes, Lisa Trogen Devgun and Jacob Broms Engblom
Reality Harvester is a research project culminating in a book and a website.
Image credit:
Persson ValijaniThis dual publication is the result of an investigation into the "data industrial complex", specifically the aesthetic and material lives of overlapping phenomena: big data and automation, labour, climate, finance and e-commerce, technological infrastructures, biometrics, behavioural science and surveillance. Over the two-year process, the group focused most specifically on the entangled representations and roles occupied by the natural world and networked digital communications in explanations of how the present is shaped.
Screenshot from web publication reality.harvester.bargainsIn a book-length collaboration with designers Persson Valijani, this pandemic-adjusted inquiry is modelled alongside contributions from fields including art, architecture, media theory, urbanism, activism, ethnography, environmental humanities, human ecology, poetry and curatorial practice. A parallel interactive website maps a 'data eco-system,' offering subjective navigations between the terrains of data flow, natural resource extraction, and financial and power relations.
Book launch event as a part of Bookshop Situation series at Index - the Swedish foundation for contemporary art, Stockholm. Panel conversation with contributors Carmen Lael Hines (middle) and Sophie Vitelli (right).Contributors to the publication include: Daniel Bodén, Michaela Casková, Sebastian Dahlqvist, Maryam Fanni, Carmen Lael Hines, Into the Black Box, Daniel Cardoso Llach, Jesse D. Peterson, Eugene S. von Rosen, Soni© Sagan, Aron Skoog, Nils Svensk, Slutty Urbanism, Sophie Vitelli & Tess Takahashi.
"Reality Harvester: Nature after Data after Nature" and the digital site https://reality.harvester.bargains are published by Skogen. Text in English. Perfect bound softcover, 666 pages.
Works produced in the context of Kungliga Konsthögskolans konstnärliga forsknings- och utvecklingsprojekt (KFoU).
The New Neighbourliness /
Det nya grannskapet (2022)
Collaboration with interior architect Cassandra Lorca Macchiavelli and architect Tobias Westerlund in the context of Of Public Interest transdisciplinary studio and lab.
The New Neighbourliness is both prototype and proposal. Lövholmen is a post-industrial area of Stockholm that is in a transitional phase waiting for the new housing development, which is now in the planning phase, to begin.
Prototype (Stockholm, June 2022)
The door prototype was placed on a grassy patch beside a busy intersection on Gröndalsvägen.It may appear to be one of many construction components currently circulating and lingering around the area, but there is something strange about this one – every so often the handle mysteriously moves of its own accord, as if some frustrated presence is trying repeatedly to get in or out. The prototype can function as a kind of premonition of what is to come or what will remain in the area, like a kind of ghost or oracle.
Collaboration with interior architect Cassandra Lorca Macchiavelli and architect Tobias Westerlund in the context of Of Public Interest transdisciplinary studio and lab.
The New Neighbourliness is both prototype and proposal. Lövholmen is a post-industrial area of Stockholm that is in a transitional phase waiting for the new housing development, which is now in the planning phase, to begin.
Prototype (Stockholm, June 2022)
The door prototype was placed on a grassy patch beside a busy intersection on Gröndalsvägen.It may appear to be one of many construction components currently circulating and lingering around the area, but there is something strange about this one – every so often the handle mysteriously moves of its own accord, as if some frustrated presence is trying repeatedly to get in or out. The prototype can function as a kind of premonition of what is to come or what will remain in the area, like a kind of ghost or oracle.
Proposal (for planned developments in Lövholmen, Stockholm
ca. 2035)
Accompanying the prototype is a proposal for a series of doors using sound, movement and visual components to focus on the political aspects of how accessible the new Lövholmen neighbourhood is. Through a proposed cooperation with property developers and architects, these performative doors would be integrated into the ground level facades of Lövholmen’s planned new residential buildings.
Accompanying the prototype is a proposal for a series of doors using sound, movement and visual components to focus on the political aspects of how accessible the new Lövholmen neighbourhood is. Through a proposed cooperation with property developers and architects, these performative doors would be integrated into the ground level facades of Lövholmen’s planned new residential buildings.
As a gesture the proposal intends to question who will be welcomed as Lövholmen’s new inhabitants and what activities should or could be happening there that were not designed into the masterplan – underlining the vital position of ground-level activities to the quality of public spaces.
Below: Images of posters on Gröndalsvägen on the construction hoarding of the new Lövholmen development site, at the same time as the door prototype was installed further down the street.
