Agnieszka Kurant Collective Intelligence

Conceptual artist Agnieszka Kurant’s work alongside newly commissioned texts by renowned thinkers across science, philosophy, technology, anthropology, and economics.

Collective Intelligence is an innovative monograph that documents the last ten years of Polish-born conceptual artist Agnieszka Kurant’s interdisciplinary practice. It includes newly commissioned texts by renowned thinkers in science, philosophy, art, technology, anthropology, and economics.

Kurant’s 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, and, through this fundamental shift in perspective, posits the possibility of alternative political imaginaries. 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.

In her collaborative practice, the artist investigates artificial intelligence, 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 redistribution. Through crowdsourcing the production of her artworks to thousands of humans and nonhumans, 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, and life and nonlife.

Dispersed throughout the book, the Phenomena section adopts a quasi-encyclopedic format to highlight and expand on Kurant’s research on collective intelligence.

Contributors
Monika Bakke, Philip Ball, Shumon Basar, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Nicolas Bourriaud, Rosi Braidotti, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Kate Crawford, Diedrich Diederichsen, Graham Harman, Stefan Helmreich, Caroline A. Jones, Nora Khan, Esther Leslie, Jussi Parikka, Matteo Pasquinelli, Tobias Rees, Jessica Riskin Elvia Wilk

Copublished with Berggruen Institute, Ed and Dillon Cohen, and the Blessing Way Foundation

Stephanie Hessler is Director of the Swiss Institute, New York. She is the author of Prospecting Ocean (The MIT Press, 2019) and editor of over a dozen volumes including Sex Ecologies (The MIT Press, 2022), Tidalectics: Imagining an Oceanic Worldview through Art and Science (The MIT Press, 2018) and Life Itself (2016).

Jenny Jaskey is Director of American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, and former director of Artist’s Institute, New York; she is the editor of Pierre’s, on the work of Pierre Huyghe (2017), and Realism Materialism Art (Sternberg Press, 2016).

Conceptual artist Agnieszka Kurant is the recipient of the 2020 LACMA A+T Award, the 2019 Frontier Art Prize, the Pollock-Krasner Grant Award and the 2022 Google AMI Award. Exhibitions include solo shows at Castello di Rivoli (2022–2023), Hannover Kunstverein (2023), the Sculpture Center (2013) and at the Polish Pavilion at the 12th Venice Biennale of Architecture with A. Wasilkowska, (2010).