Collective Agency in an era of Authoritarian Automation: Artistic Research on Protest, Populism, Migration and the Computational Simulation of Crowds

Abstract

Connecting artistic research and practice to aesthetics, sociology and computational modeling and visualization, this project asks: What is a crowd in the 21st century? We explore how collective protests, migration and authoritarian populism shape today's politics while also being modelled by digital infrastructures and automated systems.
Aims:

To understand the impact on democracy of collective protest, authoritarianism, migration and computational modeling.

To investigate how 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 interrupts such processes of collective automation.

To show the ability of artistic research to spark conceptual development, innovative methodologies and theoretical insights into the relation of aesthetic expression and democracy.

The project assembles photography, film, digital aesthetics, literary essay, choreography. It will organize workshops, performances and theoretical debates. Output is a collaborative film essay, a literary essay and anthology, and exhibition.

Keywords:

Description

Few would deny that political institutions are today under tremendous pressure from economic, demographic and technological forces. Popular protest movements, migrants in unprecedented numbers and new communication habits in social media transform the political terrain. In this situation, now aggravated by global pandemic, democracy’s future appears to hinge on the capability of political institutions and civil society to handle political passions that erupt in collective protests and authoritarian populism as well as in manipulation of public opinion and behavior (Mouffe 2005, Bertho 2009, Therborn 2014, Balibar 2015).
Such challenges are magnified by the impact of digital infrastructures, i.e. social media platforms, enabling innocent ‘cultures of connectivity’ (Lagerkvist 2016) as well as insidious ‘data harvesting’ (Stalder 2016; Castells 2015; Roberts 2019). Artistic practices have responded swiftly to these transformations. So has conventional academic research in the humanities and social sciences, where scholarship on collective protests, migration, authoritarianism and crowd manipulation is mounting (for overview: Marlies & Pleyers 2013, Gerges 2014; Müller 2016; Kriesi & Pappas 2015; Rydgren 2013; Bridle 2017). However, as such research is often empirically selective and crippled by disciplinary boundaries, there is a need for connective research concepts and bold collaboration that are able to comprehensively address current challenges to democratic societies.
The proposed project is animated by a conviction that artistic research, particularly as regards experimental methods in visual art, film, choreography and literature can offer such concepts and collaboration. We will therefore connect artistic research and aesthetic practice to sociological inquiry and research on computational modeling and visualization in an effort to understand current challenges to democracy. To this aim, we ask: What is a crowd in the 21st century? How can we understand the crowd’s mode of political emergence? What are the consequences of crowd action and digital crowd modeling and control for our understanding of democracy? What agency does the crowd have in a postdigital era of surveillance capitalism?
Combining the ingenuity and expertise of a writer and theorist of crowd phenomena and migration with the prowess and skill of an experienced visual artist and expert in crowd visualization and digital aesthetics, the project answers these questions through experimental investigations of representations of crowds and collective movements in contemporary aesthetic practices and in digital and computational modeling. Most importantly, we embark on an exploratory dialogue, what we call transmediation, between aesthetic practices in different media and materia: image, text, voice, body, matter. Our primary outputs will be as follows:
(a) A pioneering artistic research and aesthetic practice in visual art through a sequence of workshops including performances of choreographic nature and interactive digital projects, in addition to practice-oriented and theoretical conversations – all of which will be documented and exhibited.
(b) A concluding ‘diptych’ consisting of a collectively produced film essay and literary essay that do in-depth investigations of crowd representations and computational techniques of crowd manipulation and its effects on the emergence of democratic protest, migrant activism and authoritarian populism.

Our project are informed by the following aims:
(1) To understand the transformative impact of collective protest, authoritarianism, migration and computational modeling on today's democracy.
(2) 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.
(3) To investigate how embodied subjective agency and collective assembly interrupts such processes of crowd manipulation.
(4) To show the ability of artistic research to spark conceptual development, innovative methodologies and theoretical insights into the relation of aesthetic expression and democracy.

Publications

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Other Academic Output

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