Self Portrait: Arnolfini

The project will launch on Friday 18th February 2011 and over the course of 2011, which is the Arnolfini's 50th anniversary year I will be working to develop a series of self-portraits of the institution using information from their archive.

Presented throughout the building, these data portraits will trace their histories, and speculate on possible futures.

In the first of these self portraits we are looking back from their centenary in 2061.

Recalled from composite memory, data-sprites dart, spurt and flow through the public spaces of the building.

Three relational threads are intertwined;

1. social and financial organisation

2. technological innovation

3. art and its institutions

From the Bristol Riots of 1831, the sprites trace loops of financial market expansion and collapse, the struggle for real-time direct democracy, Transaction tax implementation, rights for Organic Synthetic assemblies, corporate museum expansion and implosion, the evolution of the Arnolfini, the foundation of the multitude social enterprise coalition, the growth of the iCommons, and much else besides.

You can read about the futures workshop, see some data maps or images of the installation and development.

The was developed with designer Stephen Coates, archivist Julian Warren and curated by Nav Haq

 Related projects include Museum Futures, Industrialtownfuturism and V&A Bicentenary