Social Engine

The Hybrid Source Book

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The Social Engine is an artistic research project in progress authored by Urtica – art and media research group (www.urtica.org) which explores how socio-cultural patterns spread and in what ways they shape the society we live in. Begun in 2004 as an Internet based artwork, over time the Social Engine grew into a resourceful, cross-cultural transproduct (art, education, science), which documents and generates cultural pluralism through active artistic creation and dialogue.

. Designed as an interactive online database, the Social Engine embodies the artistic model of a symbolical sphere of negotiation in which various “biased” entities interact, come together, form coalitions, grow distant, or even repulse each other. [.] The project combines knowledge contingents from the fields of art, design, and from information, evolution, and cognition theory to form a model of representation of reality whose potential for conflict goes well beyond the cultural sphere. Insights won through the process of artistic interdisciplinary research and knowledge processing here, almost inevitably, lead to the formulation of simulative models of action that, hardly surprisingly, turn out to be instructive indicators of an experience of reality.
(Andrei Siclodi)

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Social Engine—The Hybrid Source Book

Social Engine—The Hybrid Source Book gives an introduction to the project and a vivid documentation of the fields of activity in which the Social Engine appears: the online database, workshops, and site-specific artistic interventions. Additionally, the book collects related texts contributed by authors from various areas of expertise (art theory, microbiology, information theory, mathematics), who situate the project within a broader artistic-scientific context. The book initiates a hybrid discourse on art and knowledge production today, in relation to the concepts and topics of art and communication, identity, emergence, hybrid invention and machines in art.

büchs’n’books – Art and Knowledge Production in Context

Social Engine—The Hybrid Source Book marks the beginning of a new series of publications released by Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen. Büchs’n’books—Art and Knowledge Production in Context brings together publications by artists and theoreticians who conceive of their work as a specific contemporary production of knowledge, as well as anthologies that deal contextually with this complex field. The authors in this series are, for the most part, alumni of the fellowship program for visual art and theory at Büchsenhausen, a program for supporting artists and theorists active in this field.

The series of publications büchs’n’books – Art and Knowledge Production in Context is edited by Andrei Siclodi.