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The Prix Ars Electronica Archive is a collection enabling search and viewing of all the submissions since 1987. The award-winning projects are documented with catalogue texts and audio-visual media. All other submissions can be searched by title/artist and displayed with year, category in list form. Please cite the credits (artwork name, artist and photographer) and only use the materials if your article is related to Ars Electronica.
Ghana ThinkTank is Developing the First World
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Ghana ThinkTank is an international collective that develops the "first world" by flipping traditional power dynamics, asking the "third world" to intervene in the lives of the people living in the so-called "developed" world.
We collect problems from communities in the USA and Europe, and send them to think tanks we created in "developing" communities. The think tanks--which include a group of bike mechanics in Ghana, a rural radio station in El Salvador, Sudanese refugees seeking asylum in Israel, an artist collective in Iran, and a group of incarcerated girls in the US penal system, among others-- propose solutions, which are then implemented in the "first world."
Ghana ThinkTank's innovative approach to public art reveals blind spots between otherwise disconnected cultures, challenges assumptions about who is "needy," and turns the idea of expertise on its head by asking people in the "third world" to solve problems of people in the "first world." This process helps people overcome their own stereotypes while being exposed to the stereotypes that other cultures have about them.
We accomplish this through unexpected applications of technology and social engineering. In rural Morocco, we converted a donkey-cart into a solar-powered media center and tea house, which travelled from village to village collecting African solutions to US problems. In Israel, we integrated a touch-screen running Ghana ThinkTank software into an interactive sculpture/bicycle, which we used to connect Sudanese and Eritrean refugees seeking asylum in Israel with South Tel Aviv residents who wanted the African refugees removed. At the US/Mexico border at Tijuana, we built a hand-cranked "border cart" that provided mobile seats for self-identified "immigrants" and "Americans" to face each other while using custom software to exchange problems/solutions around immigration, and connected recently deported immigrants with groups of US-based border vigilante/ "patriot" groups.
Links: www.ghanathinktank.org
We collect problems from communities in the USA and Europe, and send them to think tanks we created in "developing" communities. The think tanks--which include a group of bike mechanics in Ghana, a rural radio station in El Salvador, Sudanese refugees seeking asylum in Israel, an artist collective in Iran, and a group of incarcerated girls in the US penal system, among others-- propose solutions, which are then implemented in the "first world."
Ghana ThinkTank's innovative approach to public art reveals blind spots between otherwise disconnected cultures, challenges assumptions about who is "needy," and turns the idea of expertise on its head by asking people in the "third world" to solve problems of people in the "first world." This process helps people overcome their own stereotypes while being exposed to the stereotypes that other cultures have about them.
We accomplish this through unexpected applications of technology and social engineering. In rural Morocco, we converted a donkey-cart into a solar-powered media center and tea house, which travelled from village to village collecting African solutions to US problems. In Israel, we integrated a touch-screen running Ghana ThinkTank software into an interactive sculpture/bicycle, which we used to connect Sudanese and Eritrean refugees seeking asylum in Israel with South Tel Aviv residents who wanted the African refugees removed. At the US/Mexico border at Tijuana, we built a hand-cranked "border cart" that provided mobile seats for self-identified "immigrants" and "Americans" to face each other while using custom software to exchange problems/solutions around immigration, and connected recently deported immigrants with groups of US-based border vigilante/ "patriot" groups.
Links: www.ghanathinktank.org
With support from: Creative Capital, Creative Time, Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, CEC ArtsLink, Queens Museum of Art, Detroit Justice Center, Puffin Foundation, Black Rock Arts Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, SUNY Research Foundation Network of Excellence in Arts and the Humanities, SUNY Purchase College, Kindle Project, DTE Foundation, Michigan Economic Development Corporation, and Sigrid Rausing Trust.
Ghana ThinkTank was founded in 2006. Their recent work has been featured in major international exhibitions such as the Venice Biennial of Architecture, the National Museum of Wales, Hong Kong/Shenzhen Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism, and the Global Contemporary at ZKM in Germany, among many others. They spoke at the Creative Time Summit in Stockholm, received a Creative Capital Grant in Emerging Fields, and are currently focusing on The American Riad, a project that uses art, architecture, and open-source law to promote housing justice in the historically Black neighborhood of Detroit's North End.