The Parrot

“I’m always basing my new thoughts on conversations I’ve had, people I’ve met, situations I’ve been in, so I can’t be an artist. I never think anything completely new! I’m not a lone genius I’m like a parrot just adding on my own sounds to something I thought I saw, something I thought could come, something that wasn’t but I could make it be”
-Member of Index Teen Advisory Board

The Parrot is a learning program that recognizes art as something messy, glitchy, always entangled and dependent on collective sharing.
As a way to reflect on both the potentials and dangers of repetition as a way of learning, The Parrot is a playfull format that repeat in order to defeat.

Taking on multiple formats, The Parrot evolves in tandem with Index Learning Program as it tries on forms of playing with group rhythms, copymachines, words and online cycles in workshops, festivals, and alternative documentation.

Recognizing knowledge as something we build together, The Parrot stand on the shoulders of Pirates, and continues to work with questions of free information and peer-to-peer learning.

As our knowledges stand on the shoulder of Giants, in popular culture you normally find The Parrot on the shoulder of the Pirate. As a character that is long troubled with human cultural signification, The Parrot is often given the role of the joker. A repetitive character that gives to hilarious misunderstandings, birds in the city mimicking alarms, reciting profanities in viral clips. What if we see this space of human constructed glitch as a place to actively misunderstand, decide to repeat in our own way? Acting like we continue the tradition, but being aware of the glitchy potential the role allows for. Letting the human believe we confirm their knowledges by repeating them, but actually, bringing it forward