Program Themes
Below are the program themes for 2025 – 2028
These three program themes, in combination with iiiʼs artistic focus, serve to communicate what iii stands for and what types of projects iii wishes to support. When selecting residency proposals we will be looking for projects that are within the artistic focus of iii and which address one of these three themes.
Co-inhabiting Complexity
iii offers an alternative to the virtual spaces and filter bubbles of mainstream online media, as well as the established presentation formats afforded by visual arts galleries and traditional stages. Many of the artists we work with create experiences requiring great care for the nuances and complexities of bringing people together under unique circumstances. They create live encounters where something unexpected can always happen and where the relationships between audience and artist are never so certain. Richness of observation, intertwining participation, and fragile vulnerability play a key role. These experiences get their complexity not only from the inner worlds of the artists who initiate them, but also the radically diverse inner worlds of the audiences who become part of them.
In this sense iii works with artists who create something like temporary moments of shared hallucination, echoing neuroscientist Anil Sethʼs claim that we are each “constantly hallucinating” and that “when our hallucinations agree, we call that reality”. Given that every human brain is so different, from sensations to stories, it seems a miracle that we are able to share any kind of reality at all. Yet our species has, and continues to, invent new ways to share ideas and sensations. We work with artists who cannot resist probing the existing limits of what can be communicated, knowing that these limits only require a unique subjective experience and a bit of craft to transcend. iii supports this process by offering a platform where established forms can be conveniently put aside, and where the incommensurable internal worlds of individuals may be brought together, shared and shaped in new and surprising ways.
Technologies of Future, Past and Present
iii thinks that ‘technology’ is not a concept that should be limited to digital or industrial inventions, but that technologies exist in many forms. Technologies are our stories and songs, our languages and governments, our art and music: all the many ways human beings encode beliefs, knowledge and desires into systems, objects and rituals. We regard technologies not only as inseparable from culture, but as carriers of culture, linking human thoughts and lives across generations.
Artists play a special role in this process of transmission and change, as excavators of technological pasts, lineages, traditions or heritages – as interpreters alive in the here and now – and as the seed layers of unimagined possible futures. They are the most adventurous archivists, with each new generation of artists interpreting and evaluating the tools of the past, meeting the concerns of the present. In contrast to modern and contemporary archives and heritage systems, artists create rituals and practices that must be experienced to be understood, or begin intentionally from cultural inventions that have been excluded, forgotten or misunderstood in the historic record. iii aims to support these artists, as they not only do the work of breathing new vitality into ideas of the past, but are also consciously part of a process of cultural rebirth that forks, twists and turns before circling back, eschewing simple linear ideas of progress that so commonly come to mind when we think of technology.
Webs of Intelligence
iii takes the intense public discourse on artificial intelligence (AI) as an opportunity to reconsider the concept of “intelligence” underlying these technologies. Intelligence in this case is often implicitly a synonym for being “human like”, echoing a bias that has been used for centuries in Western thought to separate and elevate the human species above a world to which we are utterly inseparable from. Therefore, as part of our response to the rapid growth of AI, iii works with artists who bring us into new relationships with intelligences of all kinds – be they electronic, biological or geological, collective or collaborative exploring non-human and imaginary forms of perception and life.
Historically the field of AI has grappled with some of these themes – as an experimental simulation space for understanding human and non-human intelligences, perception and even inventing artificial forms of life, yet AI’s current moment is dominated by a few large and powerful players who are working to build tools that simulate human-like perception, behaviors and creativity, oftentimes automating away activities that people take great joy in doing, or have built rich cultural communities around. While we accept change as a mover of culture, iii also strongly believes in the work that emerges when artists create unique relationships with their tools, rather than being replaced by them. We seek to support artists who are working at the meeting point between intelligences, helping us to make sense of these rapid technological changes and their cultural impacts, while also inspiring us with wonder and humility regarding our species, and the difficult-to-grasp intelligences with which we co-exist.
The previous program themes for 2021 – 2024 can be found HERE
