The Art of Instituting

Image: Jana Winderen, Jana Winderen (2014). Krísuvik, Iceland.
Photo by Finnbogi Pétursson.

IXDM’s Jamie Allen and Bernhard Garnicnig of the research project Institutions as a Way of Life contributed a chapter to Digital Dynamics in Nordic Contemporary Art. The book recasts the Nordic art context in an expanding digital condition and reveals horizontal ways to write its histories.

In their text, Jamie Allen and Bernhard Garnicnig examine a digital dynamic within a networked sense of collectivity, and how this has influenced and enabled institutional experimental sites of thinking and production. They locate a tendency to organize oneself in collective groups as particularly evident in the Nordic context, reflecting a cultural history of ‘instituting’ (i.e. the formation of associations and unions) and today forming sites of hacker spaces, DIY technology groups, and artist-run project studios that hover between science, art and technology. These sites are necessary, the authors argue, as institutional forms to diversify responsibility across collectives, while simultaneously helping to equalize agencies, energies and temporal resilience, and exert post-capitalist influence.