Wooloo

Formed by Sixten Kai Nielsen (b. 1978, Fredensborg, Denmark) and Martin Rosengaard (b. 1979, Helsingør, Denmark) in 2002. Live and work in Copenhagen

Human Hotel. Ten Years of Radical Human Matchmaking (2009–2019), 2019
Installation, dimensions variable
Courtesy of the artists

The Danish art collective Wooloo, which works with social sculpture, presents the decade-long history of the social project Human Hotel and offers a means of extending art beyond the temporal and spatial limitations of the exhibition. Attempting to contrast symbolic acts in the field of art with real-life practices, Wooloo collaborated with Garage Field Research to initiate a Human Hotel community in Moscow and develop a self-learning algorithm that will in future suggest to users ecologically responsible solutions and models of behavior.

Wooloo first became involved in the global environmental movement during the UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen (2009), where the group helped over 3,000 activists from across the globe to find accommodation outside of the overbooked hotels through an informal network of local hosts. This large-scale exercise in social cooperation radically transformed the collective’s practice and formed the basis for Human Hotel: a community which brings together like-minded hosts and travelers through communication and mutual support.

Shifting their artistic and organizational energy from traditional exhibition practices to working with the everyday and creating useful tools for the global community, Wooloo return to the world of art with a radical project. The self-learning algorithm developed by the group echoes Google’s alleged experimental project “The Selfish Ledger,” which leaked online, a program that would collect data to create encoded versions of users and potentially “improve” them by not only predicting their behavior but also directing it. In the coming world of pressing ecological problems such social engineering may indeed be necessary.