Fortunecat Productions

In May this year we will be creating The Consciousness Engine, for the HOUSE festival in Brighton.

The Consciousness Engine by Sam Hewitt and Shardcore is a series of visual and digital art installations distributed throughout the hidden spaces of The Old Market in Hove. It is a three dimensional map of an emergent consciousness making discoveries about its own nature, not as a child learning for the first time, but as an adult looking beyond assumptions of what is possible. At the core lies a constantly evolving computer generated mind.

The audience can explore this piece on their own terms and there are several opportunities to interact with and, for a time, become part of the exploration that the Engine is making into the nature of consciousness.

The Consciousness Engine will be the fifth collaborative project between the artists Shardcore and Sam Hewitt, all of which have explored the search for truth: spiritual, scientific, collective and individual.

We will be using this blog as a notepad and aide memoir for the development process.

Much of the work of Dh Drab and Shardcore is an argument, not about the existence of God, but about how the possibilities of human consciousness can be discussed in art.

They have made three installations in two different churches using paintings of the human form.  These showed that the conceptual fragility of religion and the obsolescence of painting, in combination, could produce powerful comments about the relationship of an individual to a society.

Last year they placed two giant Fortune Cats in Jubilee Square, gave them the role of gods and created a fanatical cult of robed worshippers.  The public then asked the Cats questions and received The Answers.

The Enlightenment Machine at the Latest is the prototype for a series of installations that reflect some of our modern, uncategorised uses for the God experience.