Šaloun – The Studio of the Visiting Artist, is hosted by the Academy of Fine Arts, Prague, and based in the former studio of the Czech sculptor Ladislav Šaloun. Led each semester by a different international artist, in Spring 2017 John Hill worked with Tomáš Džadon and students from AVU, UMPRUM and UJEP, as well as Erasmus and International exchange students from China, Australia and the UK.
Starting with the title How to build a platform the group worked with an adapted, and adapting, version of cybernetician Stafford Beer’s Team Syntegrity. Beer’s Syntegration organises a group of people into smaller subgroups. With each participant a member of two groups work and ideas are spread evenly across the members. With no centralised point of decision-making, there is no position of leadership available. Instead the structure or shape of the group allows for what Beer termed Syntegrity, where co-operative ‘compression’ and critical ‘tensile’ forces balance each other and allow ‘reverberation’ of ideas that give the group a coherence and identity without the need for an external positions from which the process can be guided. The group is self directing.
Generating and selecting six broad themes, members of Platform Šaloun then arranged themselves into a double-pyramid octahedron, assigning themselves groups to create a balanced structure. These groups were the platforms upon which participants could generate individual and collective works over the 16-week programme.
