Prototipoak 2018: …Eta egiten ditugun gauzak / ...Y las cosas que hacemos

Prototipoak 2018 was the second edition of a developmental contemporary art biennial produced by Bilbao’s mayor cultural centre Azkuna Zentroa. Brookes was commissioned to co-curate this second edition for the programme, in partnership with his long-term artistic collaborator Rosa Casado. This curatorial appointment acknowledged Brookes and Casado’s long-standing contributions and achievements within the fields of located and interventional public art. The resulting international programme was supported by €200,000 of public funding from the city of Bilbao, and brought together renowned artist and collectives from Europe, North Africa, North America and Australia – to realise a series of located and participatory projects within the city, culminating in a major new exhibition for the centre’s 1000m² gallery space entitled '…And the things we do'.

This curated exhibition brought together a collective of new and specifically expanded and developed artificial intelligence (AI) and social-robotics based artworks, a number of which were created in collaboration with leading AI and robotics engineers, within a purpose built and reconfigured gallery environment also designed by Brookes. This exhibition experience proposed an innovative evolving and performative ecology of interactive artworks – developing across its four-month duration, through the accumulating activities and presence of the individual works, their navigations of the gallery space and each other, and their resulting interactions with the visiting public. The exhibition achieved record attendance figures for the venue, attracting over 18,000 visitors, averaging 200 visitors per day over its four month run.

Research questions include:
In what ways might expertise developed within the fields of context-specific and interventional live art inform approaches to gallery curation?
How might a contemporary art exhibition become actively performative, and how might the consequences and traces of that performativity be developed over time?
In what ways might the behavioural qualities of select AI and social-robotics based artworks be brought together to construct and cohabit such an evolving gallery environment?
In what ways might the evolving behaviours and environment of such a performative exhibition open considerations of wider social ecologies and the performance of social space?