The Council: Artificial Intelligence, Decentralization, and the Post-Digital Thinker
The artwork explores Dirty New Media Art approaches and the non-neutrality of technological systems.
Frederik De Wilde’s The Council reimagines Rodin’s iconic Thinker for the 21st century, interrogating the nature of thought in an era defined by artificial intelligence, centralized infrastructures, and algorithmic governance. Presented at Hyperpavilion during the 57th Venice Biennale (2017), the work extends beyond traditional sculptural form, transforming contemplation into a networked, distributed process. In contrast to Rodin’s solitary figure lost in introspection, The Council fragments cognition across 38 interconnected screens, each powered by Raspberry Pi devices running a custom mesh network. The result is a decentralized, non-hierarchical intelligence—an artwork that both embodies and critiques the ways contemporary thought is shaped by digital infrastructures.
“What is The Thinker thinking NOW? How would a 21st Century Thinker look, feel and think like?”
At its core, The Council examines the tension between decentralization and the increasing consolidation of power within digital architectures. While blockchain and peer-to-peer technologies promise distributed autonomy, the reality of artificial intelligence remains deeply entangled with centralized infrastructures—server farms, cloud computing networks, and algorithmic systems controlled by a handful of tech corporations. De Wilde exposes this paradox through sound and image: Amazon server room field recordings reverberate throughout the installation, evoking the vast, unseen landscapes of data storage that sustain the so-called immaterial world. Meanwhile, pixel-sorting algorithms deconstruct and glitch digital images in real time, revealing the fragility of visual representation and the ease with which digital realities can be manipulated.
This destabilization of form and meaning resonates with the legacy of colonialism. Just as imperial powers imposed centralized control over territories, resources, and bodies, contemporary algorithmic governance exerts similar forms of control—mapping, sorting, and predicting human behavior through data extraction. Post-colonial critiques of technological systems reveal how AI perpetuates these asymmetries, embedding biases within datasets and reinforcing structures of surveillance capitalism. De Wilde’s The Council gestures toward a decolonial alternative: by distributing intelligence across a mesh network rather than a single computational authority, the work resists the logic of centralization, proposing a model of cognition that is non-linear, fragmented, and open-ended.
From a decolonial perspective, The Council asks us to reconsider who—or what—has the capacity to think in a hyperconnected age. If Rodin’s Thinker embodied the ideals of rational humanism, De Wilde’s reconfiguration disrupts this legacy, inviting spectators to engage with a form of cognition that is post-human, non-hierarchical, and deeply enmeshed within technological systems. The work functions as both a meditation and a warning: it foregrounds the ways in which thought itself is increasingly shaped by opaque digital infrastructures, while simultaneously proposing alternative models for decentralized, collective intelligence. In doing so, The Council reframes contemplation not as an isolated act, but as a dynamic, networked process that implicates both human and non-human agents in the shaping of the digital present.
Commissioned for the 57th Venice Biennale 2017. HyperPavilion is a large-scale contemporary art exhibition situated on the northern side of the Arsenale of Venice in three historic warehouses, adding up to 3000m2. Produced by Korean based company Fabulous Inc and curated by Philippe Riss-Schmidt. Hyperpavilion (may 13 – October 30 Arsenale Nord Venice)
https://myartguides.com/exhibitions/venice/hyperpavilion/
Pictures © Jiho Park; ©Studio_De Wilde
