Themes on and about the complex mesh of relations between biospheres, climatic science, environmental politics, globalization, culture and art form the point of departure for mindthestorm.org’s continuously accumulating archive of image and textual documentation.
Processuality constitutes the focal point of mindthestorm.org. The archive is neither hierarchically structured, nor does it follow a defined order. The structure emerges through the quality of the contributions, their continuity, their quantity and tagging; the information structure which undergoes permanent renewal is represented by swarms.
Users of mindthestorm.org store the images and textual documents relating to their research or their actions in a common databank. The data are tagged when entered and subsequently set in relation to one another editorially and by the participants themselves. A tool is thus produced, which automatically and by way of the text proposes relations to other, already existing documents. These proposals can then either be confirmed or rejected. Swarms are visualized by this mesh of relations, which persistently form themselves anew with each subsequent entry. At this level, participants may interactively position the documents within the swarms, whereby the representation signifies a communication of all entries. Ultimately, what emerges from this is the possibility to record and represent both the subjective explanatory space of each respective participant as well as to assess the latter’s entry in its connection to other such entries, such that multiple swarm images may then be generated. Each of these representations stands in a relation of reciprocal influence, and leads to an unguided, dynamic revaluation of the swarms. This revaluation, though editorially accompanied by selected partners, is not directly influenced. The descriptions accompanying these are located on a separate level as a complement to the above-described representation of the swarm intelligence.
In this sense, mindthestorm.org is a collaborative, multi-user social network – as far as possible, an open platform. The immanent obstacles of Internet as a medium such as spam inhibit the possibility of the real-time visualization of the processes in the archive and hence make an editorial intermediate step necessary. The use of the platform however is designed as a simply as possible so as to guarantee the continual expansion of the content by third parties.
The objective of Mindthestorm ?would be to generate by means of audio-visual media that which apparently cannot be mediated – the shift from nature to climate – into a kind of web-archipelago, populated by swarms that converge in a biosphere. This would run counter to the way the current planetary crisis of global warming elicits a variety of responses ranging from the exercise of societal self-delusion, declarations of the commitment to sustainability, to total indifference – to a playing field for curators as a fashionable arena for topical shows, to denial, disconnection, precipitation of the sense of the present and to a dis-envisaging of the future. We cannot but function within complex systems such as nature, within whose limits and laws we interact and in whose nomos we immanently and manifestly move: together with its perceived ‘recorded’ transformations, mindthestorm interdigitates itself by means of swarms with that other, elementary natural science poised as it is in a ‘Copernican leap’ through experimental physics and mathematical universal formulas, anomy of predictions and controls out of non-manifest structures that characterize the climatic turn.
Our experience shows that these systems are intrinsically irregular, are exposed to the unforeseen and that which cannot be assessed. Not only are they subject to irregularity, but they actively create it in their search for certainty and in their need to control. Uncertainty is the constituent data of living systems.
Mindthestorm, a new creative reflexity ?(meta-observation) aims to integrate the arts, sciences, politics, and feelings and to reach a higher level of evolution. This leads to an augmented reality, a new world appearance delivered over / under – determined masses of membrane worlds, in copies of a divided cosmos or stray quests for meaning in a world of enhanced attentiveness, but also to an acknowledgement of the recognizable and the unrecognizable. Jumping out of the climate boomerang trespassing biological borders / frames, as also referred to by Peter Weibel in the postscript to Boris Groys’ book, Die Kunst des Denkens [The Art of Thought], we read: ‘Society suppresses not only unacceptable desires, but also unacceptable information. There is knowledge in our society that suppresses itself. Appearing in the guise of art, this socially unconscious, this suppressed knowledge can again return to consciousness and to reality.’ – In particular, this socially unconscious, this suppressed knowledge can return to consciousness and reality in a web-archipelago.
Mindthestorm opens up ?what has until now remained concealed from view, the significance of which is not occupation, but an enhanced perception of significant phenomena in an entangled biosphere. It does this by way of the formation of swarms composed of a vast and, we hope, soon unlimited and self-organized collection of pictures, data, sound, etc., whereby each squib gushes over in a relation of reciprocity: a collection of nested shells of biosphere matter. Perhaps, it was this that impressed itself on Jeremy Rifkin, and that presented him with the idea of mindthestorm when dancing on the floor of a Roman Hotel located close to Via Veneto: the sense of freedom, of swarming. When mindthestorm jumps out of the World Wide Web it would seem as if this collective intelligence could be more empathic than he ever imagined in his book ‘Empathy’: he wrote “a new way of jamming in the Third Millennium”.
Perhaps, we could re-enact in our minds the experience of the past, able we are as “weumans” to experience ourselves as a species. Yet climate turn poses for us a question of a human collectivity pointing to a figure of the universal that escapes our capacity to experience the world.
Mindthestorm removes the separation ?posed by those rights that have been in existence since the Enlightenment to celebrate our freedom without any awareness of the geological agency human beings were gaining, and ushered in this new geological time-interval called the anthropocene. The frame of reference is the discussion in the context of public conferences about the meaning of the swarms between natural scientists, environmental activists, peace movements, as well as ‘observers’ in the broadest sense of the term, and territorial entities such as the Council of Europe, the European Parliament, the ZKM, the PIK, Universitá la Sapienza, AVAAZ, 350.org, AdK Berlin. We would like to invite all of these organizations to interact with us in a call for interdisciplinary discussions: deep records and deep histories of human beings open to new experiences – to fight back for the future.
Much like the swarm itself, the user of the platform can himself become an actor by indexing the ‘squibs’ with the alternating ‘keywords’ as derived from the discussions, creating and generating swarms in ascending complexity and, we hope, enhanced consciousness.
