Social Engine — The Hybrid Source Book

Urtica Art and Media Research Group (Eduard Balaz / Violeta Vojvodic)

Appeared in the series Büchs’n’Books - Art and Knowledge Production in Context
Volume 1
With texts by Zoran Erić, Igor Balaž, Bill Seaman, Staniša Dautović, Andrei Siclodi and Violeta Vojvodić (Urtica)

Edited by Andrei Siclodi
1st edition 2008
English language, 128 pages
EUR 15,00

ISBN: 978-3-9502583-0-1

The Social Engine is an artistic research project in progress authored by Urtica – art and media research group which explores how socio-cultural patterns spread and in what ways they shape the society we live in. Begun in 2004 as an Internet based artwork, over time the Social Engine grew into a resourceful, cross-cultural transproduct (art, education, science), which documents and generates cultural pluralism through active artistic creation and dialogue.
Urtica

Social Engine — The Hybrid Source Book gives an introduction to the project and a vivid documentation of the fields of activity in which the Social Engine appears: the online database, workshops, and site-specific artistic interventions. Additionally, the book collects related texts contributed by authors from various areas of expertise (art theory, microbiology, information theory, mathematics), who situate the project within a broader artistic-scientific context. The book initiates a hybrid discourse on art and knowledge production today, in relation to the concepts and topics of art and communication, identity, emergence, hybrid invention and machines in art.