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The invisible hand Ii
Gonçalo S. F.
YEAR: 2020
Lisboa
A gesture is an action on existence.
It is intangible. It is every movement of all the individuals who construct law firms. Here, it is the camouflaged dynamo of all activity: the silent engine. This firm is born and grows from every gesture, from every individual, from every movement, repeated, each day, diligently. It is this sum of gestures that creates the visible results of labour. To this sum of intangibility, to this imperceptible movement, we called “The Invisible Hand”.
From the capture of all the mouse and trackpad movements of more than 400 lawyers and support staff who work at this firm around the world in real-time, an original software reads this information and transforms it into images, making the most invisible work and the abstract nature of the firm visible, between the individual creative explosion and the structuring ability over this energy, exploring the tangents between machine determinism and the random nature of human-created data.
A singular poem at the frontier between digital and human, chaos and order, beauty and labour, information and art. While the polymorphic capabilities of the medium used to present the piece helps give it an iconic plastic expression, it is its content – the dialectic between the reality of human action and the virtual nature of digital activity – that gives rise to a piece generated collaboratively by hundreds of computers and people that forms the real artistic object:
a representation of the invisible.
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Work commissioned by
MORAIS LEITÃO GALVÃO TELES,
SOARES DA SILVA & ASSOCIADOS
Collective of Two.
Gonçalo Santana Ferreira / Vasco Barbosa
In a time of neural networks and artificial intelligence, “The Invisible Hand” explores the beauty of the human network and presents the firm as a living organism that is ever-changing and always growing in a dynamic between people and structures, thus synthesising a dialectic of order and chance through a structured arrangement of bits and bytes and translating the intangibility of this combined effort into digital beauty.
This second visual iteration of Mão Invisível/Invisible Hand continues to be a reflection about the conceptual idea of work, of organization, and of the cooperative nature of the dynamics between the two. This algorithm is inspired by the nature of mycelial networks. These networks are the fruit of the symbiotic relationship between fungi and plants whose roots interconnect and allow individuals to communicate and cooperate in an ecosystem. This relationship turns a group of individual entities into a cooperative organism, a forest, a complex, a communicating and cooperative network of living beings, greater than the sum of the parts.
This is where a clear parallel can be drawn with the nature of a firm like Morais Leitão. Individual and simple gestures that give rise to a complex and dense network through the action of their interconnectivity. A reflection about what is individual and collective and on how their dynamics create an autonomous reality that feeds them by directionally, transforming them into something larger than themselves.
We have mathematically and conceptually explored this idea, in an approach to the computational beauty of nature, using the data captured by the software of Mão Invisível/Invisible Hand in real time to simulate the creation of a digital mycelial network that makes the individual and autonomous actions of every one at Morais Leitão communicate with one another, revealing such subtle connections between each and every gesture, tracing the intangible ballast of cooperation and work and the singular poetry of human interaction, making the invisible visible.
≥
THE INVISIBLE HAND II
YEAR: 2020
Lisboa
A gesture is an action on existence. It is intangible. It is every movement of all the individuals who construct law firms. Here, it is the camouflaged dynamo of all activity: the silent engine. This firm is born and grows from every gesture, from every individual, from every movement, repeated, each day, diligently. It is this sum of gestures that creates the visible results of labour. To this sum of intangibility, to this imperceptible movement, we called “The Invisible Hand”.
From the capture of all the mouse and trackpad movements of more than 400 lawyers and support staff who work at this firm around the world in real-time, an original software reads this information and transforms it into images, making the most invisible work and the abstract nature of the firm visible, between the individual creative explosion and the structuring ability over this energy, exploring the tangents between machine determinism and the random nature of human-created data. A singular poem at the frontier between digital and human, chaos and order, beauty and labour, information and art. While the polymorphic capabilities of the medium used to present the piece helps give it an iconic plastic expression, it is its content – the dialectic between the reality of human action and the virtual nature of digital activity – that gives rise to a piece generated collaboratively by hundreds of computers and people that forms the real artistic object: a representation of the invisible.
In a time of neural networks and artificial intelligence, “The Invisible Hand” explores the beauty of the human network and presents the firm as a living organism that is ever-changing and always growing in a dynamic between people and structures, thus synthesising a dialectic of order and chance through a structured arrangement of bits and bytes and translating the intangibility of this combined effort into digital beauty.
This second visual iteration of Mão Invisível/Invisible Hand continues to be a reflection about the conceptual idea of work, of organization, and of the cooperative nature of the dynamics between the two. This algorithm is inspired by the nature of mycelial networks. These networks are the fruit of the symbiotic relationship between fungi and plants whose roots interconnect and allow individuals to communicate and cooperate in an ecosystem. This relationship turns a group of individual entities into a cooperative organism, a forest, a complex, a communicating and cooperative network of living beings, greater than the sum of the parts.
This is where a clear parallel can be drawn with the nature of a firm like Morais Leitão. Individual and simple gestures that give rise to a complex and dense network through the action of their interconnectivity. A reflection about what is individual and collective and on how their dynamics create an autonomous reality that feeds them by directionally, transforming them into something larger than themselves.
We have mathematically and conceptually explored this idea, in an approach to the computational beauty of nature, using the data captured by the software of Mão Invisível/Invisible Hand in real time to simulate the creation of a digital mycelial network that makes the individual and autonomous actions of every one at Morais Leitão communicate with one another, revealing such subtle connections between each and every gesture, tracing the intangible ballast of cooperation and work and the singular poetry of human interaction, making the invisible visible.
</>
Work commissioned by
MORAIS LEITÃO GALVÃO TELES,
SOARES DA SILVA & ASSOCIADOS
Collective of Two.
Gonçalo Santana Ferreira / Vasco Barbosa
Gonçalo S. F.
≥
THE INVISIBLE HAND II
YEAR: 2020
Lisboa
A gesture is an action on existence. It is intangible. It is every movement of all the individuals who construct law firms. Here, it is the camouflaged dynamo of all activity: the silent engine. This firm is born and grows from every gesture, from every individual, from every movement, repeated, each day, diligently. It is this sum of gestures that creates the visible results of labour. To this sum of intangibility, to this imperceptible movement, we called “The Invisible Hand”.
From the capture of all the mouse and trackpad movements of more than 400 lawyers and support staff who work at this firm around the world in real-time, an original software reads this information and transforms it into images, making the most invisible work and the abstract nature of the firm visible, between the individual creative explosion and the structuring ability over this energy, exploring the tangents between machine determinism and the random nature of human-created data.
A singular poem at the frontier between digital and human, chaos and order, beauty and labour, information and art. While the polymorphic capabilities of the medium used to present the piece helps give it an iconic plastic expression, it is its content – the dialectic between the reality of human action and the virtual nature of digital activity – that gives rise to a piece generated collaboratively by hundreds of computers and people that forms the real artistic object: a representation of the invisible.
In a time of neural networks and artificial intelligence, “The Invisible Hand” explores the beauty of the human network and presents the firm as a living organism that is ever-changing and always growing in a dynamic between people and structures, thus synthesising a dialectic of order and chance through a structured arrangement of bits and bytes and translating the intangibility of this combined effort into digital beauty.
This second visual iteration of Mão Invisível/Invisible Hand continues to be a reflection about the conceptual idea of work, of organization, and of the cooperative nature of the dynamics between the two. This algorithm is inspired by the nature of mycelial networks. These networks are the fruit of the symbiotic relationship between fungi and plants whose roots interconnect and allow individuals to communicate and cooperate in an ecosystem. This relationship turns a group of individual entities into a cooperative organism, a forest, a complex, a communicating and cooperative network of living beings, greater than the sum of the parts.
This is where a clear parallel can be drawn with the nature of a firm like Morais Leitão. Individual and simple gestures that give rise to a complex and dense network through the action of their interconnectivity. A reflection about what is individual and collective and on how their dynamics create an autonomous reality that feeds them by directionally, transforming them into something larger than themselves.
We have mathematically and conceptually explored this idea, in an approach to the computational beauty of nature, using the data captured by the software of Mão Invisível/Invisible Hand in real time to simulate the creation of a digital mycelial network that makes the individual and autonomous actions of every one at Morais Leitão communicate with one another, revealing such subtle connections between each and every gesture, tracing the intangible ballast of cooperation and work and the singular poetry of human interaction, making the invisible visible.
</>
Work commissioned by
MORAIS LEITÃO GALVÃO TELES,
SOARES DA SILVA & ASSOCIADOS
Collective of Two.
Gonçalo Santana Ferreira / Vasco Barbosa
