Merging Minds, Fusion Arts & Wellcome Centre for Ethics & Humanities, Oxford, UK, 2023
11 - 21 MAY 2023
Merging Minds is a live multiplayer art installation, that has been co-created as a result of a collaboration between artist/creative technologist duo Yambe Tam & Albert Barbu and the ‘Rethinking Collective Minds’ research strand, part of the Welcome Centre of Ethics and Humanities (WEH) at the University of Oxford.
The work explores the philosophical questions of how we think and act as collectives; a phenomenon made increasingly more sophisticated through technological advances, brain-computer interfaces and digital social networks. As artists in residence, Yambe Tam & Albert Barbu have developed a bespoke multiplayer art video game and accompanying sculptural artworks, which are inspired by this line of research at the WEH.
This free public exhibition explores the human role in these digital realms, and poses questions such as: Who am I? Where do I end and you begin? What are my responsibilities and rights in a connected and collective space?
The game was remotely playable via Twitch during opening hours.
Commissioned by the Wellcome Centre for Ethics & Humanities, University of Oxford, supported by the Wellcome Trust.
Merging Minds, 2023, installation view with research paper “Merging Minds: The Conceptual and Ethical Impacts of Emerging Technologies for Collective Minds”, eds. Lyreskog, David M., Hazem Zohny, Julian Savulescu, and Ilina Singh.
