Everything Happens So Much

Everything Happens So Much (2018) was an exhibition created for London Design Festival 2018, to launch SSS and showcase our work. The exhibition was shaped by Donella H. Meadow’s observation that ‘Systems happen all at once’, and the title was taken from a Horse e-Books tweet. Horse e-Books was a Twitter spam account that spat out fragments of modified text. Supposedly created as an automated bot to promote electronic books, the account was later revealed to be human-run, uncovering the human intent behind an unruly system.

Everything Happens So Much included work which explicitly interrogated contemporary scientific and technological systems; and sculptural and graphic approaches which explored how form, materiality, and presence are made present in complex systems.

The exhibition design was influenced by the standardised symbols and colour schemes of the International Civil Aviation Authority. No matter which airport you go to in the world, the colour markings and symbols on the runways will be identical.

Of Machines Learning to See Lemon, by Alistair McClymont and John Fass, which materialises how machine learning algorithms categorise and assign value to training data.

Faces of Senegal, is a portrait series evolving from conversations between Joel Karamath and his subjects about image selection and decision making processes.

Thinking in public/action, together, is a sculpture from Paul Bailey

Augery, by Tobias Revell and Wesley Goatley, draws predictions of the future from a neural network trained on airplane positions and tweets.

Michael Sedbon created Ctrl, in which 10 slime molds compete in John Conway’s Game of Life

Demons Inc., from Marion Lagedamont, uses corporate aesthetics in its service to sell souls

Alistair McClymont showed What If We Could Look At The Sun With X-Ray Vision, a collaborative artwork created with scientists at the Central Laser Facility in Oxfordshire, England.

David Benque presented almanac.computer, an almanac publication which unpacks the cosmic imagery around data and algorithms.

A Stick To Ward Off The Inevitable by Ben Branagan, navigates the friction between construction and collapse.

Eleni Xynogala showed Symbiosis, a performance-installation exploring the disparity of perception within the virtual and the real.

Inorganisms, from Luisa Charles, explores notions of objected oriented ontology through a series of interactive kinetic sculptures.

Architectures of Choice. Vol.1 YouTube by David Benque, a series of experiments in mapping recommendations.

Participants: Paul Bailey, David Benque, Ben Branagan, BBC R&D, Demystification Committee, Luisa Charles, John Fass, Gareth Foote, Wesley Goatley, Marion Lagedamont, Alistair McClymont, Michael Sedbon, Eva Verhoeven, Georgina Voss, and Ewa Winiarczyk.