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The Library's Other Intelligences, organized by the MOBIUS Fellowship Program of the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York in collaboration with the Helsinki Public Library, is on display at the Central Library Oodi through March 10, 2019.

MOBIUS fellows Jussi Parikka (University of Southampton, Winchester School of Art, UK) and Shannon Mattern (The New School, US) have commissioned Finnish artists Samir Bhowmik, Tuomas A. Laitinen, and Jenna Sutela to create works that examine the new intelligences represented in our evolving knowledge institutions. These artworks reveal the alien logics of neural nets, give voice to machinic and speculative languages, and make visible the material infrastructures that allow intelligence to circulate. The exhibition’s featured artists are known for work that engages with AI, biological intelligence, digital culture, and the infrastructures of modern societies.

Tuomas A. Laitinen has composed a performative installation and a sound piece, Swarm Chorus, with generative tools that are interpreting the construction of medieval musical canons. He experiments with the form of the canon, a kind of an algorithm that allows us to generate complex polyphony from seemingly simple collections of organised sound. Here, the canon form can be seen as a morphing and churning organism, a layered progression without a definitive beginning or end. The work as a whole is likened to an ecosystem of circulating substances, with its words, inspired by ecological science fiction, functioning as fictional recipe poems describing and decoding an alchemistic combination of matter and meaning.  In Swarm Chorus, one can find ancient epistemic modalities layered with the notion of extended embodied mind as a conductor for accumulated knowledge. In the library space, this information is translated into sound. These aural events are channeled in the location with the aid of singers and a sound installation for ultrasonic speaker, as an attempt to gently tend to and activate the space. Aside from the performance, a speculative score for the composition is displayed in the form of an installation consisting of a video—partly generated by an AI—and a series of hand-printed scrolls.

Visitors to the library will be invited to engage with the works – and with the new building – by attending live performances, embarking on expeditions, and reimagining how we will read, listen, and learn in a new techno-cultural future.

MOBIUS Fellowship Program, organized by the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York and the Finnish Institute in London, brings together curators and other visual arts professionals on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. International work periods and thematic collaborations form the core of the program.

Read more:

The Finnish Cultural Institute in new York: http://fciny.org/projects/the-librarys-other-intelligences

MOBIUS Fellowship Program: https://m0bius.net/

Helsinki Metropolitan Area Libraries: http://www.helmet.fi/en-US/Libraries_and_services/Library_Oodi/Whats_going_on/The_librarys_other_intelligencies(174099)