Hi there! Thank you for signing up to the Algae Newsletter, a 3-part series on creativity and technology. Following an incredible year at NEW INC, a museum-led incubator out of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, Algae finds itself floating back out into the open sea, searching for its place, story and offering to the world.

I [Srushti, also the founder] do not speak of Algae in third person for any facetious reasons but rather, to identify the development of this entity as collective, community-driven and deeply influenced by our shared knowledge — necessarily so. Non-negotiably so.

Here, now, today

Over the past year, Algae’s shaping has been largely influenced by the community of NEW INC, particularly artists, teams, filmmakers, engineers, designers and entrepreneurs who willingly shared their concerns, struggles and triumphs — attempting to answer my core questions — What does a future of technological mediation look like for human creativity, growth and artistic endeavour? Can we sustain, as stewards of the future, while sustaining the collective?

Most crucial of all — Can creative pursuits with technology elevate other touch-points of human progress? Food sovereignty, human rights, international cooperation on climate change etc. Or must we create to simply entertain, educate, memorialise and dare I say — distract?

XR [Extended Reality], Immersive Media, Art/Technology, AI [Artificial Intelligence] are largely umbrella terminologies used to describe this growing interdisciplinary space. They encompass a wide range of global socio-technical systems that are undergoing rapid change.

For today, let’s gather these terms under creative experiments with technology.

Why Algae?

For anyone who attended my DEMO talk¹   on June 4th, some of this organizational biomimicry may sound repetitive. But I chose the name Algae for a reason – one that continues to baffle, intrigue and expand my vision.

You see, corals and algae have a mutually beneficial relationship. Corals [animals] provide algae with protection. Algae [a group of photosynthetic organisms] living within the corals, use sunlight to make food, supply nutrients and therefore, sustain life.³  

When ocean temperatures rise, algae often leave the corals, leading to what we call coral bleaching or depleting coral.

Let’s use corals and algae as an analogy for art and technology.

Let’s say the artistic outcomes are the corals — Beautiful, engaging, widespread, colorful — They could be virtual reality films, augmented reality apps, installations made with generative artificial intelligence, wall projection art, films and video, product and object-oriented works etc.

Let’s then say the algae are the nutrients supplementing and sustaining these artworks — Un-aesthetic, boring, invisible — Institutional actors like museums, universities, governments — aided by grants, donations and angel funding. It could also be the interdisciplinary team working on the artworks, international trade agreements, intellectual property laws — paperwork and contracts holding up these institutions etc.

Using this comparative frame, I ask the artist — What is the algae fuelling your particular piece? Is it a VR headset? Is it the corporation owning the headset? Is it a commission? Is it the labor required to uphold hardware and the software tools? Is it a ticketing business model?

In rendering the invisible visible, we deepen our knowledge of shared processes and the processes behind the technologies we engage with.

The full picture should push us towards the most crucial question of all — Who benefits?

Why does it matter that we understand the invisible algae?

I fear that creative experiments with technology under the current technological and political landscape will function as feeders for militaristic aggression and violence if artists do not understand the implications of their work i.e. the economic, environmental and social toll of creative experimentation. One of the ways artists become actors of the state is when we remain clueless and uncritical about what is actually required to fuel work — a collective complicity — active, passive or a mix of both.

Once these invisible frameworks are identified, a conversation on building sustainable business practices with ethical collaborative and co-creative methods can truly begin.

But in order to get there, a sort of unhinged honesty about algae must be prioritized.

Can we start with intellectual property?

Intellectual Property [IP] is an exciting yet tricky realm. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,²  

“Intellectual property is generally characterized as non-physical property that is the product of original thought. Typically, rights do not surround the abstract non-physical entity; rather, intellectual property rights surround the control of physical manifestations or expressions of ideas.”

The umbrella of IP includes copyright, creative commons, licensing, patents, trade secrets, and the many justifications for what constitutes non-physical property and therefore, what governing bodies may enforce such legal rights.

What we understand as intellectual property determines much of who benefits from creative and artistic ideation, especially when it involves technological mediation.

But hold up.

Don’t @ me

I am not an IP lawyer, nor do I have training in the matter. Yet, in researching the algae framework, I found that the education, investigation and exploration of IP law was as crucial to our conversation about creative experiments with technology as any other.

Histories of IP law have extended to ancient Greece and before. And as is always the case, I am certain there are examples, case studies and alternative understandings of the concept that remain to be discovered. So what I hope to highlight is this — The contracts, agreements and governance structures we put into play today might be the very things we benefit from several years and even generations into the future.

But negotiations of abstract nature aren’t always pretty. They require highly specialized skill sets that draw upon a convoluted, inside-out process of creative examination.

In many ways, IP is the algae of creative experiments with technology. And IP at a collective scale, might just be the conversation we need. Mixed with global solidarity, audiences can then be positioned as communities, become a thriving social body that melts the boundaries between producer, consumer, audience, citizen and user.

Once melted, the end consumer-audience-producer-user-citizen person becomes their own economic agent, one with far more power than a few conglomerates or studios.

How might we move forward? An economics of solidarity?

According to the UN,

Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE) refers to forms of economic activities and relations that prioritize social and often environmental objectives over profit motives. It involves citizens acting collectively and in solidarity for democratization of economy and society, including producers, workers, and consumers. ⁴

SSE is not a new field. It has been studied by a growing number of scholars across the world, aided frequently by social movements that go unnoticed but make significant impact through the years.

And it is a lot simpler than we think.

Jessica Gordon Nembhard is the Professor of Community Justice and Social Economic Development in the Department of Africana Studies at John Jay CUNY and an internationally recognized political economist.

In an interview for the Institute of New Economic Thinking, she says the following —

“Economic democracy is all about voice, participation, decision-making and power-sharing, a concept we use to explain the goal of what economics should really accomplish…something that everybody should participate in, benefit from.”

She also adds,

“We need to understand that this liberation is not something new or alien to black folks or people of colour — it is something that human beings have engaged with through human history, as in, “I’ll take your kids to school and you might cook dinner for me or fix my fence.” We have to see it as something normal and regular because we are cooperating human beings.”

What Nembhard suggests in the interview is evident in much of the field — solidarity economics has been known to the human condition for centuries.

We simply need to find better ways to communicate it.

And so what?

Perhaps in a culture of distraction, creative experiments with technology can provide ways forward for self-reflexivity that examine our systems at hand, engage new audiences in distributed ways and create pathways for healthier social interaction.

But we can only get there by taking a long hard look at the invisible structures upholding the industry, name them and then reclaim the power to benefit a new economic order.

Phrased as a question — Can the intersection between collective intellectual property, global solidarity and emerging technology usher in a new era of creativity?

The answer may not be as straightforward.

But it could be revolutionary.

Stay tuned.

1  DEMO is a yearly festival showcasing New INC work of the prior year.

2  https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intellectual-property/

3  https://sos.noaa.gov/education/phenomenon-based-learning/coral-and-algae-its-complicated/

4  https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/social_and_solidarity_economy_29_march_2023.pdf