Chimerical Intelligence Lab @ ARTeCHÓ

On 12 June 2024 the Chimerical Intelligence Lab took part in the ARTeCHÓ Learning Experience at WIELS in Brussels, a day bringing together art, technology and philosophy to look behind crypto art, blockchain and NFTs. The event was organised by Startup Europe Regions Network (SERN) as part of ARTeCHÓ.

About ARTeCHÓ

ARTeCHÓ (Art, Economy & Technology) is a European initiative by five institutions: Startup Europe Regions Network (Belgium), Baltan Laboratories (Netherlands), FZC-Etopia Center for Art & Technology (Spain), Frankfurt School Blockchain Center (Germany) and MEET Digital Culture Center (Italy). It is co-funded by the European Union through the Creative Europe programme.

At its core was a seven-month fellowship for 15 artists and designers, combining online sessions, mentoring and residencies: a kick-off at MEET in Milan in May 2023 and a two-week residency at Etopia in Zaragoza in November 2023. The programme set out to build a peer-learning community around crypto art, blockchain and NFT marketplaces, exploring these decentralised technologies while staying critical of their economic and ecological implications.

Cnidarian Economics

The lab's connection to ARTeCHÓ runs through Cnidarian Economics, the project Ianis Dobrev developed as one of the 15 fellows, and one of the lab's ongoing topics. It asks how the intelligence of financial systems could be redesigned by looking at ecosystems rather than at the human brain: instead of an AI built on short-term, self-interested profit, a “chimera intelligence” that borrows from the many ways other species live and organise, individually, socially, as swarms and as colonies. Read more about the project in Baltan Laboratories' residency page.

The talk

The lab's contribution at WIELS was a talk that set out its position step by step:

• Artistic agency outside the arts. The lab looks for ways of working that take artistic practice into political spaces, and that use interdisciplinary approaches to turn complex connections, relations and networks into new iconographies, without putting humans or capital at the centre.
• New iconographies, ontological shifts. Confronted with a vastly different perspective, knowing is not the same as experiencing. The globe became a new icon and brought a shift towards globalism and environmentalism. The question is how to create images and imaginaries for what is now known but not experienced.
• Finance needs new imaginaries. To attune finance to the entangled complexities of the ecological crisis, the lab proposes to regard blockchain technology as a means to escape the universalisation of value into a single abstract metric.
• Beyond technocapitalist futures. Technology that emerges from capitalist systems is designed to create profit by subjecting users to consumption loops. The market creates imaginaries such as the "inevitability of AI", and generative systems imagine the future for us, so humans give away their agency over it. The lab argues for imaginaries that let humans and more-than-human relationships express their needs in a liveable vision of the future.
• Chimerical views. Chimerical means multilayered and intertwined: an artistic practice that does not recreate technocapitalist patterns, that sees the planet as a system of sympoietic interdependencies, and that maps and aestheticises what is there. The chimerical object moves from AI-augmented imaging towards technē-augmented imaging for postcapitalist futures.
• Blue Marble. As an example the talk asked how the Blue Marble image came about: technological and societal assemblages created it. This question is the starting point of the project Mapping Blue Marble.

Further reading

• ARTeCHÓ: Investigating Decentralized Action in Art, the programme's publication (Baltan Laboratories & ARTeCHÓ, 2025), including work by Ianis Dobrev
• artechoproject.eu, the ARTeCHÓ project website
• The original event listing on Eventbrite