Vehicles for the Mind

The project Vehicles for the Mind, developed during their stay at Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen, explores how information patterns spread and the conditions that contribute to our globally-shared inner world. Memetics, the theoretical and empirical science that studies the replication, spread and evolution of “memes” (cultural information units), served as a point of departure. Vehicles for the Mind was constituted as a database of textual and visual entities (e.g. well-known expressions and flags) that enable inter-subjective communication; together they form an ambiguous system that balances between individual selfishness and collective responsibility.

Vehicles for the Mind was started in 2004 as an internet-based artwork. Originally conceived as a re-search project on the dissemination of cultural information, the project later developed into a complex, multi-cultural, interdisciplinary work. Social Engine, as it is called, documents and generates cultural pluralism through active artistic creation and dialogue. Social Engine was published in a total of five different versions and eventually merged with the HoopUp Collaborative Platform (hoopup.net).

Social Engine was extensively discussed and documented in Social Engine—The Hybrid Source Book, the first publication in the Büchs’n’Books—Art and Knowledge Production in Context series.