Hivemind is a knowledge game for artists to navigate the inner workings of their practice – follow along as we journey through the labyrinth!
Hivemind is part of the Serpentine R&D Platform’s continued effort to reimagine how artists and institutions can bring audiences into the research phases of their work. What began as R&D Labyrinths in 2021, has become an interactive, customisable knowledge game. Created by Trust members Calum Bowden, Will Freudenheim and Joanna Pope, the game allows for narrativised walkthroughs by artists of their back-end working environments. The artists approached the creation of Hivemind with this question in mind: how can you build a game that allows artists to archive and share, not only a finished artwork, but the tools, data and experiments they’ve built to bring their work into existence?
Taking a design-led approach beginning with research into game logic, Hivemind’s development included a series of design sprints that have allowed collaborators to map the needs of the artist-players, turn limitations into guidelines and obstacles into opportunities, and engage in critical thinking around the playful potentiality of archives for artists and creative technologists.
“Anybody who’s created something could play Hivemind and unpack it to reveal and make visible parts of the backend of their production process.” – Trust, 2022, Spike Magazine
Episode 1: Trust Plays Hivemind
In this episode, Trust introduces Hivemind with a playthrough of the game, reflecting on their research and development process along the way. We watch as the artists inhabit the game as The Librarian character, exploring the Labyrinth and the various hives that make up the Hivemind world. Each hive prompts the player to show different materials they have brought and place them within the hive, and in doing so, answer a question about their artistic process.
Episode 2: Libby Heaney Plays Hivemind (16 August live on @SerpentineUK Twitch)
Follow artist and quantum physicist Libby Heaney as she explores the new logic systems made available to us through quantum mechanics in Hivemind. Heaney has modified the game environment, transforming it into a ‘quantum Hivemind’ that she describes as a “non-linear labyrinth that weaves together multiplicities, entanglements and collapses to let us peer into the futures of quantum computing through art.”
Episode 3: Fannie Sosa plays Hivemind (part of Octobre Numerique Faire Monde 2022)
In this episode artist Fannie Sosa plays a live demo of Hivemind alongside artists Navild Acosta and Calum Bowden who is accompanied by Tamar Clark-Brown (Arts Technologies Commissions Curator). This presentation was part of the 2022 Octobre Numerique Faire Monde with Fabbula as its Artistic Director in Arles.
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About
- Trust
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Trust is a network of utopian conspirators, a sandbox for creative, technical, and critical projects, and a site of experimentation for new ways of learning together. Trust exists as a hybrid online (Discord server) and physical space (Berlin) for inquiry into emerging social and political phenomena through the lenses of aesthetic, narrative, game, technical, climate and design research. Since 2018, they have developed a public programme that includes lectures, installations, residency programmes, reading groups, working groups, live-streamed participatory events, and online resources. Trust incubates open-source projects that build a creative culture of the commons, including Moving Castles, Millieu, and Black Swan’s Cygnet.
Calum Bowden collaborates on stories, worlds and platforms that reconnect the cultural with the technological, economic, and political. He co-founded Trust, as well as Black Swan: a collective pursuing horizontal and decentralised approaches to art-making.
Will Freudenheim is a game designer and researcher. His work focuses on using real-time 3D engines for virtual production and live performance, and creating play-based systems for collective knowledge construction.
Joanna Pope is a researcher, writer, and composer. Her areas of interest include degrowth, knowledge games, aesthetics, and virtual belonging. As a maintainer of Trust, Joanna facilitates voice and chat-based formats for the online community.
- Libby Heaney
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Libby Heaney is a British artist and lecturer who holds a PhD in Quantum Information Science from the University of Leeds and an MA in Art and Science from Central Saint Martins in London. In her post-disciplinary practice, Heaney combines quantum computing and art as topics and tools to create intuitive, visual experiences that help us understand the world of quantum mechanics, as well as quantum computing’s radical potential and pitfalls. Heaney is currently exhibiting The Evolution of Ent-: QX at arebyte Gallery in London until 20 August. Ent- is a commission by LAS (Light Art Space) and was first shown at the Schering Stiftung in Berlin in early 2022.
