Workers' Aquarium

I wrote this as an introduction to a booklet documenting a project I did as an artist in residence at Trust.support organized by Gamechanger.land

Fish have short memories, but according to recent studies, it seems that fish memory is longer than three seconds. From fish biologists in Canada, we learned that fish return to a location where they once found food for up to 12 days after. On New Year's Eve 2022, I wonder how many local Berlin fish had already forgotten about a recent disaster that wreaked havoc on the local tropical fish population there, 12 days earlier.

I began an art residency in early December 2022 at Trust. Days after I began to sit and look out of the big foggy windows of this co-working space built on a swamp, an unpredicted apocalypse took place in the fish community of Berlin. On December 17, the largest free-standing cylindrical aquarium in the world exploded, called AquaDom. 1500 rare fish died among shards of glass and hotel furniture, as they were shot through the glass by 250,000 gallons of highly pressurized salt water. The next day, rare fish from around the world lay all over the street. The day before the explosion, the conditions could have seemed perfectly normal. The hotel, which once hosted human guests from around the world, is still closed.

Do you think that, deep down, some fish wanted this explosion? These were ocean fish stuck in a small glass can relative to their home. Do you think they knew they were in captivity? Did they know they were working, that they were on display? Maybe they had adjusted so thoroughly to their working conditions that they didn't know that they could want anything more. Did they enjoy the destruction of the hotel? Could they have done anything different? Did they blame themselves?

Some experts propose that the explosion was caused when a crack in the glass formed due to a subtle shift in outside temperature. It is also possible that the hotel that housed the aquarium did not adjust the heat of the hotel to normal levels because of the rising cost of fuel, which affected the water pressure to rise and a crack to form. The infrastructure had been fairly well maintained, with work done as recently as 2020. The end of this little water world was a highly unlikely event.

The conditions are changing. 

Our conditions. The temperatures where we live, the ways we get energy, and how we feel about being alive in a world that is burning. In some places in the world, like in European cities that haven't been touched directly by climate catastrophe, maybe our daily lives haven't changed directly yet. We may still be drinking coffee, instagramming and making cute art. We must enjoy the moment and not think too much about the future, because it is too uncomfortable. Sometimes we also must forget the recent past so that we are able to continue to live and work and pay rent. The incentives and opportunities we receive ask us to keep living as if everything is ok, when we know that it is not, and maybe it hasn't been for a long time. We may know that we need to adapt to changing conditions, but we can't do that alone, or it won't matter. It is hard to know how to prepare for an emergency that may never come directly to you when you have been formed by a competitive and individualistic society. It is hard to know if this is the emergency.

Welcome to the Workers' Aquarium. 

In the Workers' Aquarium we recognize that as cultural workers we have no idea what to do in relation to multiple overlapping crises. No one does. In this way, we are all in the same water together trying to figure out how to breathe. I started this artist residency at Trust, organized by GameChanger, wanting to talk to people around the residency about something that feels unspeakable, but which is constantly on my mind: What is meaningful work in the apocalypse? 

At the beginning of what was meant to be a 2 month residency, I co-developed a new method with Jamie Woodcock that combines two radical question-asking practices for collaborative research and transformation: Workers’ Inquiry and The Hologram. Worker's Inquiry is an established Marxist method of mobilizing (factory) workers by asking them about the conditions at their workplace and at home. The Hologram is a relatively new, viral self-organized peer-to-peer protocol in which people support others' health over a long term by becoming each other's living medical records. 

Using this new, hybrid methodology, I facilitated five meetings of four people each in the winter of 2022/23 in Berlin, online. I invited anyone around the residency to participate in these sessions facilitated by me. This meant that I invited people from Trust, as well as the curators of GameChanger, and the people who I work with on The Hologram. These three groups of people who all feel like they are quite different types of fish got together in the Workers' Aquarium to talk about power and money, which we all struggle with in different ways.

The meetings that took place aimed to look at the collective experiences of power and money within the cultural field surrounding this project, as messy and relational as they are. I suspected that our struggle for individual financial survival may have been keeping us from feeling and responding to a world that is burning. I organized these discussions that would reveal our individual struggles and our big gaping questions. I hoped we might see patterns in our material lives. I was not naive enough to believe that people would organize around common needs that were revealed in a single meeting, but I did hope that it would become clear that our needs and struggles are common and can be organized around. If we had goals, wishes, or radical proposals for how to make our material lives more just, maybe we wouldn't be so worried about our identities or who we should try to be. I thought that maybe we might see that the real work ahead of us is to build conspiratorial networks of interdependence with the people who are right next to us. 

What would it take to feel connected

While hosting these meetings where cultural workers discussed their struggles, a devastating earthquake took place in Turkey and Northern Syria. This highly politicized, climate-crisis and economic disaster left a huge number of residents in Berlin in fear and grief for the loss of their loved ones and villages. At the time I am writing this, it is still an extreme emergency for people living in the earthquake affected areas and their families. In the Workers' Aquarium, not one person connected their struggle to this very real and immediate disaster. I wonder what it takes to see ourselves as connected to people who we don't know directly, as our lives are so entangled politically, microbally, and everywhere in between. 

This was one pattern among many. I think that the most important aspect of the Workers' Aquarium method is that 4 people at a time get to see what they have in common when they think about power and money in their lives. There are many commonalities that are obvious, including a general sense of precarity that is linked to anxiety. There are other patterns that included the fact that many of the participants experienced a sense of ambivalence or guilt for earning money in an unfair system. Most people experienced difficulty in speaking about money generally, or knowing how to use it well when there is so much need everywhere. There were common questions about agency, power and privilege, and if it means anything on a burning planet. 

It was interesting to be the only facilitator for all of these aquarium-shattering conversations. I felt that I had the best spot in the house as the only person who could see how much all participants had in common. Seeing these patterns felt like pure prophet. But at the same time, in order to keep confidentiality, I couldn't really talk to anyone about what I saw, even if it felt like it was changing my opinions and sense of self.

I agreed to collaborate with Trust on a project that sought to discern some of the patterns in these sessions using AI. While I hate AI and the corporations that are building it, I also feel helpless to stop it. I agreed to put all the transcripts from the meetings into an AI text generator so that it could puree the meeting transcripts and produce a new one. This new text was to be an artificial version of a Workers' Aquarium  session, but this one was attended by no one and everyone. It is a collective voice. Can AI detect and model patterns that we can't? What does it mean to train an AI to talk about our inability to face a multi-layered global crisis, when many would say that AI is a part of the corporate megastructure that is producing the end of life for so many and so much? What is made possible, and what is at risk in using AI to blur the personal and the collective voice, when we desperately need to learn how to live collectively? 

Why are we using the masters' tools? Is it because we feel that if we don't we could be left behind?