A two-part artistic research residency responding to the postdoctoral research project of Dr Michel Rouleau-Dick, ‘Warped Mirrors: Statehood in Focus’, on the phenomena, possibilities and dangers of digital statehood. The postdoctoral project is between TAIGA/UmArts/Juridiska Institutionen/Architecture School.
The postdoctoral project seeks to question the two-pronged question of efficacy and ethics connected to the newly emerging phenomena ‘digital statehood’. The efficacy of which most recently attempted through the small island nation state Tuvalu in the process of digitising itself to remain a sovereign body (as such) once sea levels rise, to which it is so prone. This is alongside the ethical concern for what has been termed ‘The Network State’ giving cryptobros capability to create new forms of state sovereignty beyond the physical, breaking down the division between public and private. Dr Rouleau-Dick has been concerned with this fissure of the abstract from the physical – the landed form of sovereignty and citizenship and an abstracted form that can be manipulated beyond its material realms – for good, but also no doubt for bad.
Using LLMs to question, provoke and potentially create new forms of state sovereignty during the period of his post-doc, Dr Finchett-Maddock has been invited to collaborate and respond to his doctrinal legal research alongside the artistic research element of the post-doc, by spending time with Dr Rouleau-Dick to develop visual, sonic and conceptual responses to the project as part of the legal artistic research element.
Working with Rouleau-Dick, the residency will involve working with LLMs to collaborate on questions of sovereignty, property, materiality and abstraction, to understand the ‘edges of sovereignty’ through probing these warped mirrors that no longer reflect the physical reality of the landed nation state. And temper what we mean by sovereignty as a result.
The residency will culminate in a short exhibition later in the year alongside further publication and funding plans as a result of the time spent there.