Please join us for the book launch of Collective Intelligence, an innovative monograph that documents the last ten years of Polish-born conceptual artist Agnieszka Kurant's interdisciplinary practice. The book includes newly commissioned texts by renowned thinkers in science, philosophy, art, technology, anthropology, and economics. For the event, Kurant will be joined in conversation with SI director, Stefanie Hessler, scholar and researcher Kate Crawford, and curator Jenny Jaskey.
Kurant's experimental work investigates collective and nonhuman intelligences and their impact on transformations of the human, the future of labor and creativity, and the exploitations within digital capitalism. Questioning the ideology of individualism, Kurant proposes that we rethink human and more-than-human worlds from a perspective of plural subjectivity, and, through this fundamental shift in perspective, posits the possibility of alternative political imaginaries. Her work probes the replacement of individual authorship with collective intelligence—a phenomenon observed in slime molds, termite colonies, social movements, cities, the internet, and inside our brains.
Collective Intelligence
Edited by Stefanie Hessler, Jenny Jaskey, and Agnieszka Kurant
Contributions from Monika Bakke, Philip Ball, Shumon Basar, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Nicolas Bourriaud, Rosi Braidotti, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Kate Crawford, Diedrich Diederichsen, Graham Harman, Stefan Helmreich, Caroline A. Jones, Nora Khan, Esther Leslie, Jussi Parikka, Matteo Pasquinelli, Tobias Rees, Jessica Riskin, and Elvia Wilk
Published by Sternberg Press
Co-published with Berggruen Institute, Ed and Dillon Cohen, and the Blessing Way Foundation
Hardcover, 400 pp., 213 color illus., 225 b&w illus.
ISBN: 9781915609557
Please RSVP to rsvp@swissinstitute.net.
Agnieszka Kurant is a conceptual artist investigating collective and nonhuman intelligences, the future of labor and creativity, and the exploitations within digital capitalism. She is the recipient of the 2020 LACMA A+T Award and the 2019 Frontier Art Prize. Her solo exhibitions include Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (2025 and 2026), MUDAM, Luxembourg (2024); Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2021-23); Sculpture Center, New York (2013); and Kunstverein Hannover (2023). In 2015 she realized a commission for the façade of the Guggenheim Museum, and in 2022 a permanent commission for the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge. Her work was also exhibited at the Gwangju Biennale (2024), Sydney Biennial (2024); Istanbul Biennial (2019); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2021), Centre Pompidou (2024), Palais de Tokyo (2014), Jeu de Paume (2025), Pinault Collection – Bourse de Commerce, Paris (2024); MCA, Sydney (2025), Gropius Bau (2023); Louisiana Museum, Denmark (2023); SFMOMA (2020); Kunsthalle Wien (2020), Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2020), Witte de With, Rotterdam (2011), Moderna Museet (2014); the Kitchen (2016), Gamec, Bergamo (2023), ZKM Karlsruhe (2022), Guggenheim Bilbao (2017), Performa Biennial, New York (2009 and 2013), and Frieze Projects, London (2008).
Kate Crawford is a Research Professor at USC Annenberg, a Senior Principal Researcher at MSR-NYC, and an Honorary Professor at the University of Sydney. She is the inaugural Visiting Chair for AI and Justice at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where she co-leads the international working group on the Foundations of Machine Learning. In 2021, she received the Miegunyah Distinguished Visiting Fellowship at the University of Melbourne. She has co-founded multiple interdisciplinary research groups including FATE at MSR, AI Now Institute at NYU, and Knowing Machines at USC. Kate has advised policy makers in the United Nations, the Federal Trade Commission, the European Parliament, the Australian Human Rights Commission, and the White House. Her academic research has been published in journals such as Nature, New Media & Society, Science, Technology & Human Values and Information, Communication & Society. Beyond academic journals, Kate has also written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, Harper's Magazine, among others.
Jenny Jaskey is chief curator at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, where she established the institution’s first year-round contemporary art program in 2024. Prior to this, she was director and curator of the Artist’s Institute at Hunter College and a distinguished lecturer in its graduate art history program. Jaskey has curated exhibitions with artists including Sam Contis, Raven Chacon, Pierre Huyghe, Eric N. Mack, and Jessi Reaves. She has edited publications on the work of Pierre Huyghe and Carolee Schneemann and was co-editor of Realism Materialism Art (Sternberg Press, 2016).