Organismo 2027 – Art in Applied Critical Ecologies

As heat continues to build unceasingly, so too do the many notions of heat accumulate in our collective consciousness. Beyond a sense of thermal variance are shared meanings, representations, symbols, and values that underpin these ever-expanding imaginaries of heat. Imaginaries that shape the political, social, cultural, and historical dimensions that constitute the software to the hardware problem that is our climate crisis. Thermoculture, thermopower, thermopolitics, and other fields of thermal studies have emerged amidst the increasing need to reorder our lives and effect policies that mitigate warming global temperatures. These sudden urgencies mask over the fact that much of culture, economics, and politics were themselves shaped by heat. As new thermal policies and lexicon are introduced into our lives, the climate crisis, in turn, presents us with opportunities to comprehend the crisis beyond its crystallization into a single word—carbon.

This case study looks to explore the many imaginaries of heat and their many possibilities. In fully grasping heat’s complexities, may we then manifest new forms of thermo-dynamics in the forms of thermo-intimacies, thermo-solidarities, thermo-communities, and perhaps thermo-revolutions.

There is extensive evidence determining that health is deeply shaped by the environments we inhabit. Yet health care has tended to be understood as the treatment of disease and confined to healthcare settings. Beyond clinically recognized diseases, aspects of our societies may become subject to pathologization and could be addressed through other forms of civic life. Certain experiences linked to ways of living together and to social structures, such as unwanted loneliness or how people perceive their own social usefulness, can contribute to less healthy societies. Other factors, however, such as sound or the possibilities for movement within a space, can have a positive influence on our relationships with others and, in turn, on community health.

In line with the recent agreement between Spain’s Ministries of Health and Culture proposing the incorporation of the arts into public health policies, Radical Soundness, bringing together in its title the meanings of soundness, as a state of good health or solidity, and sound itself, explores the potential of artistic experience to foster healthier lives. The extension project of the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza will serve as a field of experimentation from which to explore, poetically and politically, a future museum that integrates mental, cognitive, and physical health as a structural criterion for the design of its programs and spaces.

Soon, the world's eight billion people may be joined by hundreds of billions of human-level AI agents, forming a "para-society of trillions" in which many of the most consequential exchanges will occur not only between people but between agents and composite arrangements blurring the outlines of both. In such a world, agency lies less within the figure of the “individual” than in the “relay” linking such combined networks towards the execution of shared intended outcomes. 

Framed as Universal Basic Agency, this case study explores a series of guiding threads. What are the relays that we have and the relays that we need to address our most pressing challenges? Could organizational charts become living diagrams that stage, direct and choreograph alternative workflows? And as AI races ahead while society adapts slowly, can new institutions emerge and close this "alignment gap"? Through diagrams, simulations, and experimental human-AI workflows, the case study will prototype new typologies of agentic expression and test the outlines of a renewed social contract.