Phantom Capital, Hybrid Authorship, and Collective Intelligence*

Abstract

Good morning. Thank you Jane for this introduction. Thank you very much for inviting me to be a part of this Symposium. I won’t have much time to talk about my work, but I will try to say a couple words about several projects. Let me start by explaining the main focus of my practice, which relates in particular to this conference. I have to say that the questions of copyright and authorship and hybrid value of objects, among them artworks, are actually at the core of my artistic practice. I am also very interested in the question of labor, especially in how labor became immaterial since the beginning of cognitive capitalism or late-capitalism. I’m interested in the questions of immaterial and invisible labor as well as hidden exploitation of social energies. I am going to start with this piece entitled A.A.I., which stands for Artificial Artificial Intelligence. It’s a series of works that I outsourced to another species— to the colonies of living termites. I realized that termites are among very few species in nature that, just like humans, in the process of evolution formed very complex worker societies with a very clear division of labor into classes or castes. They form classes of soldiers, farmers, nurses, foragers, and so on. What is even more interesting to me, they produce these monumentally looking forms—the termite mounds. These forms are created as a result of an emergent process, which means that there is no master plan. The structure is emerging through millions of micro-contributions by these insects. Each single termite carries a couple of grains of sand or mud, and it doesn’t know what it’s building. So there is no way of telling in advance what the final shape will be. Emergent processes are impossible to predict or plan. In particular, this is interesting to me because these products of the work of termites resemble cathedrals, or pyramids, or some kind of other human monuments that in this case are built by entire societies of termites. I decided to use this labor force that is completely unaware, because termites are almost blind. I decided to outsource my creative work to this another species in a similar manner as factories nowadays very often outsource the labor to countries where the workforce is cheaper like China or Bangladesh or Africa. In a way I was pushing