The Aesthetics and Politics of Collective Agency in a Postidigital Era of Automation
By The Collective Agency (Stefan Jonsson, Anna Ådahl)
Inside the Postdigital Crowds.
The Aesthetics and Politics of the Governance and Representation of the Digitised Crowd.
Practice-based Phd at the School of Fine Art at the Royal College of Art, London. 2022.
The Aesthetics and Politics of Collective Agency in a Postidigital Era of Automation
By The Collective Agency (Stefan Jonsson, Anna Ådahl)
Research project and postdoc at REMESO (LiU) and Royal Art Institute, Stockholm, 2022-2026.
Collective Agency in a postdigital era of automation is a fine art practice-based research project funded by Vetenskapsrådet (The Swedish Research Council) conducted by The Collective Agency which is constituted by professor and writer Stefan Jonsson and postdoc researcher and visual artist Anna Ådahl.
Will democracy survive the 21st century? Through artistic practice and theoretical dialogue, this project explores how collective protests, migration, and authoritarian populism shape today´s politics while also being modeled by digital regimes and automated systems that apparently foreclose the political agency of collectives as well as individuals.
Our aims:
To understand the impact on today’s democracy of collective protest, authoritarianism, migration and computational modeling.
To investigate the ways in which collective behavior generated by digital technologies align crowd behavior with political programs and market strategies that defy democratic values.
To investigate how embodied subjective agency and collective assembly interrupt such processes of collective automation.
To show how artworks can spark conceptual development, innovative methodologies and theoretical insights into the relation of aesthetic expression and democracy.
Speculating over future scenarios – including the deployment of digital tools and quantum computing – we seek to make abstract processes concrete. The project is articulated through installation, performance, sculpture, drawing, film, and writing; it will organize workshops, performances, and theoretical debates, gradually shaping a theoretical investigation and artistic montage of the 21st-century crowd and its algorithmic modeling.
Inside the Postdigital Crowds.
The Aesthetics and Politics of the Governance and Representation of the Digitised Crowd.
Practice-based Phd at the School of Fine Art at the Royal College of Art, London. 2022.
Overview
This practice-based research project uses artistic practices and processes in various mediums to analyse the aesthetics and politics of crowds in a postdigital era. In the production of this thesis, the art practice and theoretical writing have been evolving in parallel and in dialogue. I have sought to let their different heuristic frameworks confront and complement one another, as parts of a composite yet integrated methodological approach. A sensorial, and experience-based knowledge of artistic practice with the abstractions has been combined with the speculations of theoretical reflection.
In order to study digitally operated crowds in their proper conditions, this research project actively affirms its situated and embodied perspective. The project is conducted from within a postdigital reality, a reality itself integrated with the circuits of global capitalism. In the twenty-first century surveillance economy, every crowd subject is entangled with and defined by technologies that track and model its behaviour.
An “automated crowd” as a digital, operational representation of an “organic”, analogue crowd, generated through tracking, data-gathering, and modelling of that organic crowd and its subjects. The automated crowd is, within this research, considered as a crowd constituted by multiple, digitally “programmed” bodies. Any attempt to approach the automated crowd as both theoretical and practical research object must consequently account for the investigating subject’s own situated and embodied status, and for the way the human body may function as at once a reference and a tool for investigation.
The artistic components of this research project use methodological processes and mediums appropriate to the specific topics or subjects of investigation, articulated in visual and material compositions, with the overall aim of producing a sensible and experienced rather than an exclusively cognitive mode of knowledge.
Among those artistic components are: transmediated sculptures and installations where digital forms have been translated from the immaterial to the material; scripted performances where professional dancers conjugate/reenact the behavioural grammar of digital agents; assemblage works based on documents and images drawn from online archives; and finally essay films that combine found footage and newly shot images using methods of intellectual and associative montage.
Already during the initial phase of research, it became clear that two concepts would be important for my work: the notion of “default” settings and options, and the concept of “flow”. These two concepts both name prominent strategies and mechanisms through which the crowd is today digitally mediated and organised. They have therefore served both as objects of study and as heuristic tools for my theoretical and practical investigations.
The first step of research consisted in identifying and mapping the crowds and the technologies relevant to the investigation. The first chapter studies the representation and the construction of these crowds through an analysis of a number of mediating technologies and platforms: crowd simulation software packages, and their connected databases, through which digital crowds are constructed; surveillance and tracking systems that employ associated techniques for dynamically mapping, governing, and organising “analogue” crowds; and the non-playing characters which composes the interactive “background” crowds in video games. This later study was made in dialogue with the gaming company Ubisoft via a partnership enabled by the NPIF TECHNE award (AHRC).
The second chapter seeks to understand how a crowd can be administered and its collective behaviour can be standardised, such that it can be operated and governed as a standardised mass. Most digital systems employ interfaces that individualise the user experience, establishing a personalised space where the user may exert a highly scripted and circumscribed mode of control. These interfaces are designed to be experienced as individualised, but are in fact systems of mass governance, programming the behaviour of thousands, even millions of people, depending on the platform’s reach. By necessity, such operations of mass governance must make use of a limited range of default modes, in order to address the multitude of individuals in a “user-friendly” way. Those default modes may facilitate access and navigation, but are regularly interconnected with data harvesting systems that generate vast sets of data concerning user behaviours, from which patterns and predictive models can then be derived. Those patterns and models are in turn “fed back” into the user interfaces, further circumscribing the range of the user’s autonomy, in the name of enhanced “user-friendliness” and utility.
“Automated” crowds are therefore operated first of all in default mode, since their size can range across millions or even billions of individuals. Consequently, a “default crowd” is not an average crowd, but a crowd operated by statistically informed, average-based systems. The average is not merely derived from the crowd, but informs default systems that govern the crowd’s behaviour, which in turn affects the statistics that can be drawn from that behaviour, so that the “average” (a standardisation) is in fact also prescriptive, generating a “default crowd” (a phenomenon referred to in this research as the ‘loop’). In crowd simulation software, default modes create default agents acting together as default crowds, all in accordance with a library of predefined aesthetics
and behavioural patterns.
In the artistic, practical components that correspond to this chapter, I have therefore devoted my attention to the programmed bodies of digital default agents available in crowd simulation software. Seeking to understand the “default” behaviours prescribed by these agents, I have studied their features, their physical traits, and the gendered choreography of their behavioural vocabulary. I have then translated and conjugated those forms and patterns into different mediums and materialities, seeking to reveal the ethical and political norms that they embody and enact. My aim here has been to set up a new choreography of analogies to explore contradictions between material and immaterial bodies, digital and analogue agents, where the latter draw from, enact, and diverge from the default modes set by the former, as can be seen in the performance And or Or (2018) and the essay films Default Character and Di-Simulated Crowds (2018).
The third chapter, finally, maps and analyses the notion of “flow”, aiming to show how various “natural flows”, on different scales – from the individual human body to planetary ecosystems – are being rechanneled in accordance with a profit-oriented logic, producing a range of effects with momentous social and ecological implications. In an accelerated, postdigital society, the crowd may become a vehicle of homogenising subject-formation, relaying social and psychic “flows” into a programmed, quantified, and performative “mass”. I have sought to address these problems theoretically, but also practically, in two film-based works: the essay film The Power of Flow, The Flow of Power (2020), which uses an associative editing technique in order to generate an immersive yet critical experience of how micropolitical and macropolitical “flows” intersect and interact; and the performance film The State of Flow (2020), in which a performer enacts the antagonisms of the various, differently scaled “flows” that converge in and thereby constitute the human body. By presenting the results of this research project in a variety of different discursive modes and aesthetic arrangements, my aim is not only to establish a theoretical understanding of the forms and instruments that are used to mediate and govern crowds, but also to facilitate an embodied, sensible and visual experience of those forms, and their political implications. In the end, this research project combines theoretical and practical modes of knowledge in order to establish a more complete and versatile image of the agency of the postdigital crowd.
Abstract
My research analyses and explores, through different artistic mediums and processes, the aesthetics and politics of today’s digitally governed and simulated crowds. To materially/physically address the urgency of a phenomenon where the employment of computational tools and mechanisms representing and governing today´s crowds and collective behaviour are becoming increasingly opaque while facing political and ethical dilemmas where digital authoritarianism is looming. Proposing a new understanding of the agency of today´s digitally tracked and surveilled organic crowds in correlation with the agency of the simulated crowd agent.
The specific inside perspective (of being one of the crowd) proper to today’s postidigital condition is articulated throughout the research and embodied within the practice. This inside position allows a critical approach to the neoliberal intensification of individualism while deploying a collective understanding of these crowds, shedding light on their fragmented and atomised online and intimately tracked physical existence.
The key terms and notions of ‘default’ and ‘flow’ are central in the methodological investigative nature of the research and act as guiding clues exploring the links between the digital operations of crowds and contemporary economic currents and political strategies while establishing a direct correlation between written theory and the embodied and spatial articulations of the practice.
Drawing on Sigfried Kracauer's 'study of surface level expressions’ today's crowds are analysed through their digital representations, media and technologies, such as crowd simulations for film and computer games (the latter in partnership with the gaming company Ubisoft), as well as singular and multi-target tracking systems.
Through embodied experiences, this practice-based research uses multiple mediums in the form of spatial narratives, such as sculptural installations, collages and performance where the organic human body is used as reference and tool of investigation. This unraveling uses a process of (re)-mediation to physically understand the digital conditions in which the postdigital crowd operates with the aim to materialise the immaterial from a critical standpoint. But also, to visualise the dissimulated articulations and strategies enabled by these technologies. The data generated from these various methods of approach are synthesised in a series of essay films forming the core of this research. These films propose an associative and critical analysis of how the computational tools operating today's postdigital crowds are modelling the politics of future collective behaviour.
In the post-Fordist era where we have a 24/7 online everyday life and working body framed within an accelerated economy affecting our collective behaviour and production modes, this practice-led research attempts to contribute a new material understanding and visualisation of the aesthetics and politics of today’s operations of postdigital crowds, drawing from various artistic mediums and methods to establish a multi-faceted and embodied analysis with spatially articulated and filmic outcomes.