The Chimerical Intelligence Lab (CI-Lab) is a platform for distributed thinking. The Lab aims at conducting non-linear thought experiments that manifests itself in overlapping study, research and working groups. Acknowledging the entanglement of all layers of reality, it is necessary to rearibute agency to the symbols and artefacts involved in every thinking process.

The CI-Lab produces graphic essays and cinematic lectures, but its main ambition is to challenge the very people who engage in it. It is through the participants that we hope to poke the existing intellectual order, ecosystem of thoughts, knowledge architecture that defines the imaginaries of this fundamentally ecological universe.

Position

Addressing issues at planetary scale is as much a necessity than a danger. While macroeconomics operate by homogenising value on Earth, macropolitics hopes to put in conversation the diversity of situated voices.

The question is: do we have the tools to reconcile the local and the global, the embodied and the abstracted, the subjective and the objective?

Every representation of reality is flattening its infinity of dimensions in a single layer. Since the present exists in correlation with the past and future, all conscious selves and nonconscious beings alike shall be understood as spread in time, and hence, in space.

If we acknowledge that knowledge making always function by reduction, trying to bypass this violent act leaves us with the possibility of overlapping different perspectives, over and over again.

Approach

In the CI-Lab, we experiment with the various layers of reality that we choose to collapse onto a sheet of paper. We operate by exploding the objects of study and decompose them into the assemblage of force fields from which they originate.

This practice opens up other logics of emergence. Mapping out the non-linear genealogies draws constellations of things that decentralises the human. Anthropocentrism is a useful and ethical paradigm as long as it is flexible enough to conduct Copernican turns at will.

We proceed by shifting the gravity center of our compositions and observing the rearrangements happening in coherence with these moves. The passage of one focal point to another applies one cosmological order onto an apparently unrelated subject.

This approach reveals not only new schemes of causality but logics of coexistence – which implies the possibility to recompose systems of ethics, politics and spiritualities.

Method

The CI-Lab is a nomadic space that manifests itself in diverse instances that function as intertwined working groups and study groups. We use visual, physical, aesthetic practices to mediate and canalise discussion that occur in separate domains, but also to catalyse these thoughts. The artistic DNA of the CI-Lab contributes to render visible, gives texture, sculpt and materialise alternative concepts. This is a laboratory to synthesise alternative objects of knowledge – which typically refuse academic disciplines’ enclosure.

In the manner of exquisite corpses, we superpose and assemble symbols that are produced in distinct registers. The resulting chimeras agglomerate fragments of reality scattered through parallel worlds. They work as starting points for pluralistic discourses, each including a different configuration of subjectivities.

In practical terms, we harvest archival images, contemporary visual documentation, created artworks, scientific illustrations, technical diagrams and personal sketches to make gigantic collages. We then put these tentacular figure in conversation with a spectrum of philosophical, theoretical, historical and journalistic texts. The capillarity of the collage leads to diverse intellectual branching.