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Division of Acclimatization
The Department of Planetary Futures
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The Division of Acclimatization was a socially engaged working office within the Department of Planetary Futures. It featured a multimedia installation that invited visitors to collaboratively edit the works of Shakespeare into new poems.
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Shakespeare works including The Winter’s Tale, Pericles, Cymbeline, The Tempest, Hamlet, Henry IV Part I, A Mid Summer’s Night Dream, and Measure for Measure, were cut into thousands of thin strips that visitors could pull from a hanging birdcage. After choosing their lines, they worked to collectively build poems on the gallery walls which were covered in sheets of newsprint. Visitors could create their own poem or add to one that others assembled. For the exhibition’s duration after the reception, the resulting office remained on view as an installation.
Framed poems created with the same selection of strips spanned one gallery wall. The space was divided by a newsprint scrim that donned a projection of Murmuration, a short film that recontextualized archival materials from the Folger Institute Shakespeare Library, and Brickman’s time there as an Artist Research Fellow, by weaving them with artificial intelligence to create a predictive reality aimed at generating dialogue about the collective social and environmental experience of the now and beyond.
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The DoA considers the way literature has profoundly affected how individuals interact with their surroundings and influences: through social, historical, literary, and artificially intelligent avenues to build a shared vision for acclimatizing to what the future holds.
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COOP Gallery, Nashville, TN
2024
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Supported by Folger Shakespeare Library, Folger Institute Artist Research Fellowship, Washington, DC