2022 | Workshop and Talk
The Panoptic Garden at The Uzbekistan National Pavillion | Venice Biennale
The Panoptic Garden, organized by Sara Raza, NYU ITP, and Andris Brinkmanis, NABA, Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti was a one-week intensive public program (July 5-9, 2022) that focused on transcultural themes relating to the garden as a discursive space through the lens of utopia, heterotopia, and dystopia. Designed in response to the 59th Venice Biennale “Dixit Algorizmi—The Garden of Knowledge” the intensive poetically addressed algorithmic thinking and bias from a human-centric and non Euro-American centric perspective. Through the metaphor of “world-building” the program questioned colonial historical narratives, assumptions, and optics.
In concert with artists, local hosts, facilitators, artists, architects, scientists, sociologists, writers, and musicians, the one-week intensive culminated in live and virtual programming, along with a digital archive and publication. I presented a talk, Worldbuilding Through Art, and participated in a lively panel discussion with NABA students, moderated by Sara Raza and Andris Brinkmanis.
Employing both on and offline components it offered both a site-specific and site-responsive program of land cultivation/gardening, workshops, talks, radio program, walking tours, and supper club. The program explored the theme of surveillance and the role of algorithms in control over global citizens, via the implementation of AI and the emergence and rapid development of quantum computing, and investigated its links to Western ideology and history.
