During the summer of 2020 we witnessed our operating systems fail. Systemic inequality has been exacerbated at both local and planetary scales by the current pandemic intensifying the demand for systemic justice. Yet we now exist in an unstable condition of flux—highly volatile, as well as extraordinarily generative—and we are all accountable for and subject to the future that emerges from these shifting conditions. A future built through this flux demands new territories and creates nodes from which to act.

Meeting the multiplicity of health crises, missing social safety nets, climate change, AI, automation, and risk analyses require scalable coherent narratives that must emanate from within small clusters yet also engage the overall assemblage of larger systems. Strategic alliances will define new terms of engagement between systems and societies, and these alliances are and will be the protagonists as well as the spaces through which they navigate. What is needed now is, in general, an ability to maintain cohesion while navigating noise. Protocols are needed to develop conviction and confidence in our expansive capacities and responsibilities as a species, while maintaining the humility and understanding of our species’ limitations as sapient matter immersed in a multitude of systems whose command is beyond our capacities.

A.S.T. developed a set of protocols for the construction of twenty-first century alliances traversing borders, nation states, and species. We looked to the typology of the murmuration as a model for new operating systems and protocols that adapt as they move: through their murmurations, starlings have the “remarkable ability to maintain cohesion as a group in highly uncertain environments and with limited, noisy information.” We likewise need cohering protocols to make the conceptual and organizing tools to build strategic alliances defining new terms of engagement between systems and societies; tools to repair and remake our cities and communities in the face of ghastly historic failures. And, like murmurations, these protocols must be adaptable and revisable.

This project began as a proposition on Strelka Mag as part of their issue The Revenge of The Real which launched this summer 2020. The work is a combination of text and commissioned video works, that has unfolded throughout the course of eight weeks, with each week presenting a new video work featuring one of the protocols. It was then adapted to be a part of the group exhibition, To Dream Effectively at Focal Point Gallery, Southend, London, in September 2020. Our aim is to continue to research, expand, and adapt the protocols to reflect the plurality of demands and solutions required to address issues such as climate change, AI, automation, and risk. Then edited to be published.

This project currently incorporates a short text (including a brief explanation of content, context and intent, available on the next page), 8 ‘protocols’ and a short video corresponding to each. The protocol titles are as follows:

001_adaptation
002_territory
003_navigation
004_scale
005_time
006_risk
007_translation
008_alliances

Project History

• Strelka Magazine

  The Revenge of The Real

  Strelka Institute, Moscow, RU, (videos and text)

  Website

• Focal Point Gallery and Big Screen

  Group exhibition To Dream Effectively

  Southend, UK, (videos and text)

• Flow Chart Foundation

  Incident Report

  Hudson, NY, scrolling LED display (text only)

• Adaptation
• Alliances
• Navigation
• Risk
• Scale
• Territory
• Text
• Time
• Translation
• Video