Interdependency

interdependent floating network was ~ Saturday 14 Nov 2020.

In this aquatic socio-technical thought space and submerged digital date Loren Britton, Gabrielė Gervickaitė, Hang Linton, Laura Lulika and Sylvia Sadzinski talked about their practices: Artistic, Curatorial, Activist, Social, Interdependent, Disabled, Trans and Queer.

Interdependent Zooids (what can and cannot be known) Length, 19:58.

Interdependency consists of a group of colorful window paintings that engage the threshold of the gallery space, visible both inside and outside of si:said gallery in Klaipėda, Lithuania, and a video work that engages boundaries of (non)humans, accessible here. In this exhibition Britton studies zooids as a figuration to address questions of self-determination, self-organization and collective interdependencies. Zooids are both a bio luminescent underwater organism as well as a type of table-top swarm robot. Zooids as robots and animals share the similarity of consisting of many small individuals that collectively organize for the survival of the whole. As animals, zooids, live deep underwater, can withstand extreme conditions, and are composed of multiple individuals that collectively organize within one skin. As robots, zooids, are miniature robots that are programmed to collectively complete tasks that require a group to complete their goal. Britton engages zooids as a figuration in their animal and robotic manifestations to propose that mutual dependence, of relying on and of caring for is our common condition. We are all dependent on each other and connected in our existence, feeling out ways of communication, possibilities for life and contingent survival.

In their playful and poetic explorations of zooids and engaging with the Black Feminist Poethics[1] of Claudia Rankine, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs Britton works with zooids as a figuration and asks “who are ‘we’?” Interdependency entails the mutual constitution of one thing by another and how all things come into being in a system of dependence on others. Interdependency is a question of living together and inhabiting contradiction. Interdependency allows difference to sit side by side while engaging the terrible difficulties and hopeful possibilities of acknowledging that ‘we’ share one skin.

The exhibition exists in a series of phrases. The first phrase of zooid window paintings will be visible at [si:said] gallery in Klaipėda, Lithuania between 10 October 2020 — 30 October 2020 and documented also online; the second in digital space accessible online at: www.lorenbritton.com; the exhibition will be continued with a third phrase in the form of an online symposium on 14 November, from 2–4 pm CET and the fourth phrase at TIER — The Institute of Endotic Research in Berlin, Germany in spring 2021.

The project is supported by Lithuanian Council for Culture and Klaipeda municipality.

[1] Poethics as defined by Denise Ferreira da Silva as a non-linear speculative praxis of not reducing anything to the object, the other or the commodity. History and memory are not reductive, they are actively shaping our past, present and future.