The TRAFFIC of Collective Intelligence during Manifesta 12
“Walking like a ghost in the Palermitan traffick, air currents from cars spin it around, pulling it between their doors, and under chassis’ and bonnets, and into compartments only to be let out through open windows and doors. The subjective chaos of personal choices made in quick succession and under pressure being the surface and interface on which it glides as if without will. Yet, it observes everything and thinks. Until the right friction presents itself and it grabs and is propelled at break-neck speed across the territory screaming without being heard.”
– Artist Timo Tuhkanen –
Conventions and norms are best expressed and embodied in traffic. There, in traffic, crowds become amplified sonically and in motion and weight streets form nodes, networks, and bottle- necks, that all flow at a breakneck speed. Particulars concerned with their own immediate surroundings, pulsating the city, but being in traffic is not merely a song of transportation. Mental states adjust to speed and the death defying order of cells that should not touch. Awareness awakens and driving often is a state in which self-reflection and auto-poesia emerge.
To meet this urban bloodstream, Collective Intelligence activity relies on temporary concepts of agency and its subversion. Over the course of their residence in Sicily started in 2017, the participants look at how a meshed ’space for emerging relationships’ acts as a location for ’knowledge creation’ rather than product development or production. (Ikijiro Nonaka and Noboru Konno, The Concept of ”Ba”: Building a Foundation for Knowledge Creation). This shared space is multi-sensorial, equally observing the activity of all the senses. Thus emergent knowledge arises from between the individuals and their fields of interest rather than from what the individual already knows.