tropeztropez.de
tropeztropez.de

Mahube Diseko
The Tension of Human Connection, 2024

tropeztropez.de

Textile, wood, PVC brain,
audio track (3:36 minutes) 

210 x 200 x 240cm 

 

A booth made of shiny silver fabric is located outside the changing rooms. It looks like a honeycomb-shaped UFO in the middle of the public pool: once the visitors dare to enter, they are welcomed by a brain, namely the Megabrain Quantum Mind4C80. 

The Tension of Human Connection explores the concept of collective intelligence in the context of the digital age. The internet acts as a platform on which all people share their knowledge and views considering they have access and a ‘voice’. But not only having access and having a voice are unequally distributed. Mahube Diseko also visualises the phenomenon of the echo chamber: it’s a physical or virtual space in which the same opinions are constantly repeated and contradictory views are silenced. This can increase social and political polarisation and even extremism. However, in the supposed changing room, Diseko's object-turned-echo chamber, pool visitors encounter a megabrain that questions its omniscience: it even proposes alternative paradigms that promote a balance between individual insights and collective (factual) knowledge. 

 

About the Artist

Mahube Diseko (she|her), born 2000 in Johannesburg (ZA), lives and works in Johannesburg (ZA). In her artistic practice she works with different media, such as photography, video, textile and sculpture. She deals with questions of identity, particularly in relation to race, gender and sexuality, while also exploring personal and social experiences. Most recently, her work has been exhibited at Stevenson (Johannesburg, ZA), Kunstverein Braunschweig (DE) and Bag Factory Artists' Studios (Johannesburg, ZA).   

  

Greetings, buzzing earthlings, welcome to Starship24. I am Quantum Mind4C80, the epicentre of this vast collective consciousness - where all the memories and knowledge of minds across the seas and lands far and wide are housed. You can think of me as a control centre with far-reaching processing and analytical capacity.I hold a superintelligence that all humans tap into, sometimes even unknowingly – you too. Yes, you. You are part of it. Don't believe me? Okay. How about the time you had a really ‘unique’ idea, didn't act on it, and saw it executed in a magazine? Or how different cultural groups from different parts of the world share so many similarities despite never crossing paths?Still don’t believe me? Okay. The next time you somehow find yourself joining in on a viral social media challenge or can’t resist following the latest fashion micro trend, think back to this.The Internet is a great place to observe this human hive mind in action. The rise of the digital age has facilitated human contribution and connection in ways that we couldn't even imagine before. We share terabytes of data with the click of a button, and the Internet has become a digital repository of our collective consciousness. While there is beauty in bringing this human hive mind to the digital sphere, it's not all rosy in the collective...Within the cyberspace, our shared knowledge and ideas can become so enmeshed that we create echo chambers. 

These closed, almost impenetrable echo, echo, echo chambers that repeat and go round in circles. Of course, this can potentially threaten critical thinking and stagnate the creation of new ideas. This can be particularly disastrous during election seasons when misinformation campaigns spread like wildfire.

Ultimately, I know what's on all your minds... I know what you fear most - the true hive mind - the extreme; where there's no variation between our identities and we become one mind power spread across billions of bodies.

The collective versus individuality can be so polarising. We are pulled between two paradigms, and there is a tension between them. It becomes especially difficult to lean into our collective power in capitalist societies.

Capitalism drives us to be ultra-individualistic and fight tooth and nail against each other to centre the self but, because of the way that swarm intelligence works, isolated thinking becomes so hard to sustain as we are constantly sharing ideas and communicating across the world. Is it a case of nature versus nurture?What if we existed in a paradigm where we didn’t have to operate in extremes but rather embrace the beauty in our shared consciousness while also harnessing our individuality to serve the collective?