PSEUDO X NCM present Stigmergy, an exhibition that seeds a new network built on artist protocols.

We perceive, decide and act through networked technologies that most of us did not design and cannot fully see.

These networks structure the environments that we inhabit, govern the platforms that we use and mediate so much of our contemporary life — all through an immeasurable web of inaccessible infrastructure. Frictionless design and daily use make these systems invisible. We scroll, tap, swipe and share as if these gestures are second nature and not learnt.

Stigmergy exposes the topology of its structure. An antidote to the slop shock, rage bait and doom scroll flattening of everything we see online. It’s a network designed to be visible. Treating infrastructure as an artistic medium, its structure is as visible as the work it carries.

This exhibition builds an alternative framework, handmade and unscalable, focused on artists, their connections and the imagined possibilities of infrastructural independence.

Throughout a two-month intervention, local and international curatorial nodes feed into a custom architecture that seeds artworks, media and ideas that accumulate and mutate. The network transforms these contributions, absorbing the works offered by the community and reinterpreting them in the gallery.

Stigmergy asks what it means to encode our own values into these dominant systems and asks what circulates when we do? This experiment suggests that artistic work, made through networked technologies, lives not just in the residues of media within a system, but in the intimacies of those who sustain it.

An infrastructure designed for relation, not extraction.

Stigmergy is presented with RISING and opens with an after dark event on Thursday 4 June.

Not joining us for opening night? Stigmergy is included with museum entry and open from 5 June–9 August.