A Crowded Apocalypse \ IOCOSE (2011)

In the Atlantean period there were many energies being used and information and knowledge being used which were, for particular reasons of safety, withdrawn, shall we say, to prevent complete catastrophe, to prevent total destruction of your planet.

– David Icke, conspiracy theorist

Conspiracy theories are, by their definition, neither ultimately refutable or acceptable. In order to hold true, they rely on the acceptance that the full evidence is not reachable. They are based on a shared belief: the idea that each one of us is an unaware piece in a mysterious master plan.

Crowdsourcing, instead, makes this more transparent. Each user contributes to the creation of something which is bigger than the sum of each singular production. The final plan remains unknown, but it is actively produced by a large crowd.

Drawing on crowdsourcing and ‘cloudsourcing’ techniques to hijack the collective imagination, A Crowded Apocalypse called on the people of Liverpool and of Abandon Normal Devices’, asking the “crowd” to assemble its own conspiracies and to protest against their protagonists and effects. The results of the process are documented on acrowdedapocalypse.com, a new website which launched on 22 June 2012.

IOCOSE are a collective of four artists: Matteo Cremonesi (Brescia, IT), Filippo Cuttica (London, UK), Davide Prati (Berlin, DE) and Paolo Ruffino (London, UK). They have been working as a group since 2006 through a variety of media, such as websites, videos, social networks, portraits, sunflower seeds and dogs.

IOCOSE’s art investigates the after-failure moment of the teleological narratives of technological and cultural development, in regards to both their enthusiastic and pessimistic visions. IOCOSE believe that, in the long run, both utopian and dystopian narratives will disappoint, and much more mundane and varied realities will remain. IOCOSE’s focus is on the present moment in which the future is narrated, and on the ways in which these narratives are always already failing.

A Crowded Apocalypse was commissioned by AND Festival and Furtherfield.