The Wonder Machine
2020 - Onwards
The Wonder Machine is a performance and conversation system that generates wonderment.
00:04:48 conversation with Dr. Brain Castelliani
00:35:45 Wonder Machine
00:56:48 Conversation with Dr. Brain Castelliani and Interactions Group
01:11:15 Conversation with Esmee Geerken, Dr. Brain Castelliani and Orion Maxted on collective inteligence.
00:35:45 Wonder Machine
00:56:48 Conversation with Dr. Brain Castelliani and Interactions Group
01:11:15 Conversation with Esmee Geerken, Dr. Brain Castelliani and Orion Maxted on collective inteligence.
Wonderment is a key overlapping mechanism between art and science and changes in our understanding of the world.
In this compacted, systematised, form of conversation, each agent speaks in turn, beginning with the phrase ‘I wonder…’ expressing their current state of curiosity.
The complexity of the collective emergence that arises, makes the simplicity of the underlying rule-set all the more fascinating.
Like a swarm or flock or set of neurons - the agents must simultaneously propose relationships and ideas - in the form of wondering - and receive i.e. listen to the relationships and ideas proposed by the other agents. You hear and participate in decentralisation, emergence, and self-organisation as it is happening in real-time as ideas take the group in directions that no one individual can predict or control.
All each participant has to do is say something they wonder about - i.e. are curious about, thinking about, or in a state of awe (wonderment) about. As in conversation, there is turn-taking, but the turn-taking is more strict, like a game.
One of the interesting features that inevitably emerges, is how the agents’ wonderings often merge and co-produce the wonderings of the other agents, even though there is no explicit rule to do so. I suppose it's because each wonder which is expressed triggers patterns of activation in each of the other participants. This increases the activation level of each pattern and its ‘weight’ in the brain of each participant. As more and more wonders are spoken, each one activating patterns, each incrementally adding weightings within the neural networks. These patterns start to propagate further and eventually interact with each other, forming new patterns and new intuitions, which are then intuitively expressed by one of the participants, thus further adding to the weighting in the other participants. For a while, a dominant topic of wondering will emerge, a temporary goal state, which will lead to other wonderings, until the current collective goal state is perturbed by a new pattern. This is operating at the level of the whole system of participants, with ideas forming on a pre-symbolic and collective level, leading to the creation of new ideas. We can chart the rise and fall of ideas in the collective brain through time.
And so what we find very interesting here, is that through the interactions and feedback loops of primings and wonders, a simple yet surprising form of collective thinking arises - a collective mind. Over a period of time following this system together we arrive at very surprising intuitions and ideas that seemingly nobody thought of. It seems to me that art and intuition are in the end always a matter of creating space for feedback loops to form and develop. The Wonder Machine is a type of collective computation - which we might also call, collective intuition - i.e. a form of collective (largely) pre-symbolic computation.
The Wonder Machine is different from ‘ordinary’ conversation because the cue/assignment/task to wonder relieves the participants from trying to be correct and from trying to form a complete thought. I always say it's better to leave a thought unfinished, this invites someone else in the group to continue and develop the thought. I see this as a key in collective thinking and collective computation. Just as musicians improvise and interweave precisely by listening and proposing together, we do that with transdisciplinary ideas. That’s why we call The Interactions Group a ‘thought band’. In both art and science, it is very important that we disrupt the standard modes and trajectories of thinking.
In this compacted, systematised, form of conversation, each agent speaks in turn, beginning with the phrase ‘I wonder…’ expressing their current state of curiosity.
The complexity of the collective emergence that arises, makes the simplicity of the underlying rule-set all the more fascinating.
Like a swarm or flock or set of neurons - the agents must simultaneously propose relationships and ideas - in the form of wondering - and receive i.e. listen to the relationships and ideas proposed by the other agents. You hear and participate in decentralisation, emergence, and self-organisation as it is happening in real-time as ideas take the group in directions that no one individual can predict or control.
All each participant has to do is say something they wonder about - i.e. are curious about, thinking about, or in a state of awe (wonderment) about. As in conversation, there is turn-taking, but the turn-taking is more strict, like a game.
One of the interesting features that inevitably emerges, is how the agents’ wonderings often merge and co-produce the wonderings of the other agents, even though there is no explicit rule to do so. I suppose it's because each wonder which is expressed triggers patterns of activation in each of the other participants. This increases the activation level of each pattern and its ‘weight’ in the brain of each participant. As more and more wonders are spoken, each one activating patterns, each incrementally adding weightings within the neural networks. These patterns start to propagate further and eventually interact with each other, forming new patterns and new intuitions, which are then intuitively expressed by one of the participants, thus further adding to the weighting in the other participants. For a while, a dominant topic of wondering will emerge, a temporary goal state, which will lead to other wonderings, until the current collective goal state is perturbed by a new pattern. This is operating at the level of the whole system of participants, with ideas forming on a pre-symbolic and collective level, leading to the creation of new ideas. We can chart the rise and fall of ideas in the collective brain through time.
And so what we find very interesting here, is that through the interactions and feedback loops of primings and wonders, a simple yet surprising form of collective thinking arises - a collective mind. Over a period of time following this system together we arrive at very surprising intuitions and ideas that seemingly nobody thought of. It seems to me that art and intuition are in the end always a matter of creating space for feedback loops to form and develop. The Wonder Machine is a type of collective computation - which we might also call, collective intuition - i.e. a form of collective (largely) pre-symbolic computation.
The Wonder Machine is different from ‘ordinary’ conversation because the cue/assignment/task to wonder relieves the participants from trying to be correct and from trying to form a complete thought. I always say it's better to leave a thought unfinished, this invites someone else in the group to continue and develop the thought. I see this as a key in collective thinking and collective computation. Just as musicians improvise and interweave precisely by listening and proposing together, we do that with transdisciplinary ideas. That’s why we call The Interactions Group a ‘thought band’. In both art and science, it is very important that we disrupt the standard modes and trajectories of thinking.
Landscapes of collective thought. The figure shows how words come up and disappear again in an iteration of The Wonder Machine. We cut the transcript of the performance into 5 minute segments, and then picked the three most frequently used words in each segment to plot over the course of the performance.
The Wonder Machine is of course produces a very different output each time it is performed.
Credits