User:Objettechnique/sandbox

HAAL.400
HAAL.400 is the name given to a artistic collaboration between H,A,A and L initiated during the fall of 2020. HAAL.400 is conceived of as a space for conversation (about anything) and experimentation primarily online, using video conferencing interfaces like Zoom (software) and shared presentation tools such as Power Point.

Historical Context
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic context and the necessity for distancing and staying home, HAAL.400 joined forces as a collective of emerging artists and students either graduating or nearing the end of their BFA, to develop creative strategies in order to sustain their practices and community. The video conference software that is Zoom was our sandbox for initiating this collaboration which isn't about collectively working on one single, well-defined project, but functions more as a space for conversation and inspiration from digression.

∞Growth of the Collective
What first started as a duo for writing a manifesto grew into a trio, and eventually a quartet; the four heads all in their allocated space within the zoom interface. As a duo, A and L had set themselves the task of creating a manifesto, a declaration of sorts on the mode of existence of artists in the context of confinement, of the kinds of challenges and opportunities that can arise from the situation — to which they had never experienced anything equivalent before. The idea of having a non-textual (non-transcript) form for the manifesto was proposed early on before the third and fourth links came along.

The collaboration space grew into one of conversation, mostly, as the other two members joined the team. Zoom studio time, as HAAL.400 calls it, kept an overall open structure to have as much wiggle room as possible while still having a few constraints, like weekly tasks, loose meeting schedules and deadlines too prevent the artists from wandering too much out of track in deep digression. And that's exactly what struck them as one of the core modalities of the collaboration: indulging in digression.

From that point, the team took off — still in a zoom meeting — to Google Drive; the extent of presentation tools like Google Docs and Google Slides as well as their collaborative editing possibilities were manifestly adequate for the HAAL.400 modus operandi and was it's next turf for exploration and digression. The four members opened a shared slides document and gave themselves the loose instruction — itself in the form of a question — to not delete anything? [sic.] They also chose to colour code their interventions as to be relatively certain of who wrote what.

The move to Wikipedia happened naturally, as L was and still is doing research on the online encyclopedia within a philo-technical and art-historical framework. The web-hosted platforms of collaborative knowledge-making, of collective user-editable learning, although antithetical to the HAAL.400 rationale of indulgent digression, provided an appropriate space to nest the collective's activity. Not without generating subject-object tension and challenging the aura of factual authority of these platforms, HAAL.400 chose these shared cyber spaces to broaden exterior access into its complex network of narrative threads all woven by the different voices which constitute it.

NAI | Non-Artificial Intelligence
HAAL.400, in its denomination, ressembles HAL 9000, the AI assistant from 2001: A Space Odyssey, yet the former is not a machine learning system capable of computing without human intervention beyond programming and engineering. With this major difference aside, HAAL.400 and HAL9000 do share the common function of aggregating knowledge into a central processing unit and both require computerized human intervention in this process. From this, HAAL.400 can also be understood as NAI, or Non-Artificial Intelligence. The term, not to be confused with Narrow AI, refers to this commonality with HAL9000, both in name and operation, and semantically suggests a specific philosophical dimension to the collaboration; Epistemology.