Collective Intelligence, Collective Agency brings together artistic and scientific approaches to collective intelligence, cognition, and agency across species and systems.

Convened with and featuring artist Agnieszka Kurant in conversation with neuroscientist and AI researcher Ida Momennejad, this seminar extends the question of intelligence beyond the individual to the central concern of Kurant’s work: collective intelligence.

Observed in termite and bacterial colonies, social movements, cities, the internet, large language models, the stock market, and within our brains, collective intelligence describes how novel forms emerge from complex systems in nonlinear and unpredictable ways. Drawing on living systems, the evolution of culture and technology, artificial life, simulated societies, and AI agent swarms, the seminar also explores the processes of networked value creation in the digital economy and the global extraction of labor of the multitude underlying artificial intelligence. Considering intelligence as an emergent property of entire ecosystems, the speakers ask what new forms of agency collective intelligence makes possible, and what its political implications are. Introduced and moderated by Eriola Pira, Curator and Programs Director.