Ambient Information Systems (AIS) came into being as an intermedia hub and website, www.ambientTV.NET, in 1999, emerging out of founding artist-activist Manu Luksch’s interest in extending the medium of film using the Internet. Under her co-directorship with Mukul Patel, it has since developed into a crucible for wider critical, interdisciplinary practice that takes numerous forms – the devising of tools, the creation of frameworks, the instigation of processes.

Interrogating the socio-and eco-political transformations of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, this practice bridges art and activism, and recalls aspects of the 1910s-20s avant-garde and 1960s-70s conceptual and systems art. Several works take as medium and object, regimens and technologies of data accumulation and manipulation, including the disciplining 
of data by the mycelial security industry.

Although these projects grow on an electronic substrate, the concern with regulation extends beyond the digital domain to, for example, the legal status of the image and the language of instruction. Mirroring its objects, AIS persists as a distributed network while also maintaining a node, ambient.space, as
studio, workshop, event space, and artist residency in East London.

Location