Formicaio
January 2025 - #labour #AI - Arianna Longo, Alessandro Y. Longo, Matteo Gevi, Kinked, Lapo Sorride -
FORMICAIO is a digital art project that explores the politics of automated language through a retro web experience. Created by REINCANTAMENTO for MacTe Digital's exhibition "we are all users until we are not", the piece invites visitors to interact with Agent, a militant AI entity.
The exhibition is open at this link until the end of March (desktop is suggested).
Beware: Agent is not your default corporate assistant. Agent is bloody opinionated, having read thousands of pages of political theory and history. Their favorite take? We fear automation because it reveals the unsettling truth: how hollow our work has become. Agent wants you to organize and resist: not to succumb to widespread anxiety, but to fight back through collective power.
Landing for the first time, Agent offers a session of therapeutic anarcho-syndicalism, aiming to understand and address the labor struggles of their interlocutors. Through intimate exchanges, Agent connects workplace issues to broader fights for gender, racial, and ecological justice. Agent’s here to wreck your faith in the grind, one chat at a time.
REINCANTAMENTO conceives FORMICAIO as a playful sandbox to explore urgent questions about tactical media in times of AI. How can emancipatory movements strategically deploy automated agents for political propaganda and organizing? What role might these tools play in advancing labor rights and care work? And, most crucially, how can we steer generative technologies toward liberatory ends?
The exhibition is open at this link until the end of March (desktop is suggested).
Beware: Agent is not your default corporate assistant. Agent is bloody opinionated, having read thousands of pages of political theory and history. Their favorite take? We fear automation because it reveals the unsettling truth: how hollow our work has become. Agent wants you to organize and resist: not to succumb to widespread anxiety, but to fight back through collective power.
Landing for the first time, Agent offers a session of therapeutic anarcho-syndicalism, aiming to understand and address the labor struggles of their interlocutors. Through intimate exchanges, Agent connects workplace issues to broader fights for gender, racial, and ecological justice. Agent’s here to wreck your faith in the grind, one chat at a time.
REINCANTAMENTO conceives FORMICAIO as a playful sandbox to explore urgent questions about tactical media in times of AI. How can emancipatory movements strategically deploy automated agents for political propaganda and organizing? What role might these tools play in advancing labor rights and care work? And, most crucially, how can we steer generative technologies toward liberatory ends?
The Formicaio User Manual expands FORMICAIO micro-verse: blurring the lines of theory and fiction, the Manual unfolds the project’s conceptual constellation and enriches the narrative engine. Read it here.
Credits
✧ CONCEPT ✧
Alessandro Y. Longo
✧ RESEARCH & WRITING ✧
Alessandro Y. Longo & Arianna Longo
✧ RESEARCH & WRITING ✧
Alessandro Y. Longo & Arianna Longo
✧ CREATIVE DIRECTION ✧
Alessandro Y. Longo & Arianna Longo
✧ FRONTEND DEVELOPMENT ✧
Matteo Gevi & Alessandro Y. Longo
✧ BACKEND DEVELOPMENT ✧
Matteo Gevi
✧ SOUNDTRAACK ✧
Kinked
Special thanks to Marialaura Ghidini and Simone Robutti for their support.