QK

Concept

The ancient Athenian kleroterion was a stone slab with slots and tubes used to randomly select citizens for jury duty and public office. It served as a form of democracy by lottery rather than election, with the assumption being that random selection from the eligible population was more democratic than letting people campaign for power.

QK takes the kleroterion as a starting point and asks what happens when the selection mechanism itself becomes the site of collective decision-making. Instead of voting on outcomes, participants adjust a single parameter: the entropy governing the piece’s behavior. The value runs from 0 to 1. At low entropy, the LED grid displays ordered wave patterns that are synchronized, predictable, fully legible. At high entropy, the system enters states of contradiction where LEDs flicker between incompatible colors and entangled cells behave as inverses of each other.

Participants access a mobile interface, choose where they want the entropy set, and submit. The system takes a running average across all inputs throughout the course of the exhibition. No single person controls the outcome. The collective lands somewhere on the spectrum between order and chaos, and the piece responds accordingly.

The question underneath is whether democratic participation in algorithmic systems means deliberating specific decisions or configuring the parameters that generate those decisions. Most algorithms that govern daily life, from recommendation engines and credit scores to predictive policing, are shaped by parameters that users never see, let alone adjust. QK makes one such parameter visible and hands it to the crowd, where what they do with it accumulates over time.

QK Web Application 1/2

QK Web Application 2/2

References

1. Hansen, Mogens Herman. 1999. The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes. University of Oklahoma Press.
2. Arrow, Kenneth J. 1950. “A Difficulty in the Concept of Social Welfare.” Journal of Political Economy 58, no. 4.