https://theinteractions.cargo.site interactionsgroup Tue, 08 Jun 2021 20:57:01 +0000 https://theinteractions.cargo.site en https://theinteractions.cargo.site/TITLE Tue, 08 Jun 2021 20:05:17 +0000 interactionsgroup https://theinteractions.cargo.site/TITLE IMAGINARY INSTITUTE / INTERACTIONS GROUP / THOUGHT BAND / FOR COLLECTIVE HUMAN COMPUTATION    https://theinteractions.cargo.site/Welcome-Intro Mon, 07 Jun 2021 11:22:31 +0000 interactionsgroup https://theinteractions.cargo.site/Welcome-Intro The Interactions group is an experimental theatre, art and science collective. A transdisciplinary thought band composed of artists, scientists and philosophers who together explore the weird and wonderful folds in the dimensions of all possible collective human computation. More about the interactions group >>> https://theinteractions.cargo.site/News-header Mon, 07 Jun 2021 14:55:14 +0000 interactionsgroup https://theinteractions.cargo.site/News-header Interactions News & Agenda  https://theinteractions.cargo.site/NEWS-Building-as-Being-15-4-20 Mon, 07 Jun 2021 14:22:48 +0000 interactionsgroup https://theinteractions.cargo.site/NEWS-Building-as-Being-15-4-20 15 April, 2021 Online Performance & conversations Wonder Machine Online Performance at Building is Being symposium, curated by Esmee Geerken and Waag Society, Amsterdam. Building as Being moves away from a human-centred worldview to a holistic view of shaping our environment in accordance with non-human entities. In Part 2. The Mind we ask how self-organization shapes the individual and collective human mind? How can we allow entropy and emergence in our collective thinking and what would this mean for our building strategies and how we enact with our ecosystem? With Prof. Dr. Brian Castellani, Orion Maxted and The Interactions Group who will perform a short demonstration of the Wonder Machine. 00:04:48 conversation with Dr. Brain Castelliani00:35:45 Wonder Machine00:56:48 Conversation with Dr. Brain Castelliani and Interactions Group01:11:15 Conversation with Esmee Geerken, Dr. Brain Castelliani and Orion Maxted on collective inteligence. Waag Society, Amsterdam https://waag.org/en/event/building-being-symposium-part-2-mind https://theinteractions.cargo.site/NEWS-Blend-Bleed-3-4-20 Mon, 07 Jun 2021 14:12:07 +0000 interactionsgroup https://theinteractions.cargo.site/NEWS-Blend-Bleed-3-4-20 3 April, 2021Online Performance & Workshop Wonder Machine At Blend & Bleed symposium - curated by Carina Erdmann.The blending of realities, worlds and disciplines will be the focus of the online Symposium ‘BLEND & BLEED’, wich conjures synergies between the fields of performance, larp, game design and media theory.The interactions gave a short performance and led a workshop in the Wonder Machine - An exercise in collective and continuous inquiry. Expect no concrete statement or predictions. In this collective mind one question will echo as a multitude of new ones. And in this rhythmic expression of wonder and doubt, a web of connected intuitions emerges.  Together with Guided Apophenia: Make your own conspiracy workshop by Reed Berkowic.  Luca School of Arts, Belguim (Online) https://0ct0p0s.net/Day-3https://www.luca-arts.be/en/blend-bleed https://theinteractions.cargo.site/NEWS-Negative-Poetry Mon, 07 Jun 2021 14:33:44 +0000 interactionsgroup https://theinteractions.cargo.site/NEWS-Negative-Poetry 20 December, 2020Online Performance Negative Poetry Online and at Museum of Science and Technology, Belgrade Negative Poetry Human Algorithm is an online performance bridging collective thinking, theatre and complexity science. A computer made of people tackles the complex task of transforming a poem into its opposite, thereby generating a potentially infinite combinatorial polyphony of possibilities.Negative Poetry Human Algorithm is a collaboration between Orion Maxted, Katarina Petrović and The Interactions group.Supported by Museum of Science and Technology, Belgrade, Ilija & Mangelos foundation; the Institute for Advanced Study (University of Amsterdam) and Center Leo Apostel (Vrije Universiteit in Brussels), Ministry of Culture of Serbia. Belgrade (Online) https://www.negativepoetry.com/human-algorithm.html https://theinteractions.cargo.site/NEWS-Interactions-Summer-School Mon, 07 Jun 2021 15:00:58 +0000 interactionsgroup https://theinteractions.cargo.site/NEWS-Interactions-Summer-School 15-20 August, 2020Workshop / Summer School Interactions Summer School Collective Intuition All thinking, including intuition, takes place in networks. Any network with sufficient connectivity, feedback and self-correction will produce a kind of thinking. The kinds of thinking that can take place is affected by the composition of the network - which can be an individual, or a group of people engaged in reciprocal collective activity. During the Summer School we shall be attempting to let go of rendering finished ideas at the level of individual intelligence, and embrace individual un-finishedness in order to distribute thinking across many people and cultivate emergence at the level of the collective mind, to experience hybrid new forms of thought. Institute for Advanced Studies / Frascati, Amsterdam https://theinteractions.cargo.site/NEWS-Social-Distance-Swarming Mon, 07 Jun 2021 14:58:22 +0000 interactionsgroup https://theinteractions.cargo.site/NEWS-Social-Distance-Swarming 1 June, 2020Collective Interactive Performance  Social Distance SwarmScore for WonderingTogether & Alone  Live interactive performance -With Orion Maxted, Katarina Petrovic, Prof. Francis Heyligen, Renske Vroomans, Enrico Sandro Colizz, Izabelė Jonušaitė, June Yu, Berthe Spoelstr, Augusto Corrieri Central Stration and NDSM Werf, Amsterdam Facebook event link https://theinteractions.cargo.site/About Tue, 08 Jun 2021 20:57:01 +0000 interactionsgroup https://theinteractions.cargo.site/About About(Draft) The Interactions Group is an experimental collective, ‘thought band’ and artscience group that explores the interconnections of art, theatre, poetry and complexity sciences through the lens of algorithmic theatre and collective human computation. The Interactions Group hold weekly online meetings, as well as offline workshops and performances, bringing together a diverse range of artists, philosophers and scientists, who together explore the weird and wonderful folds in the dimensions of all possible collective human computation. Our inspirations include algorithmic theatre, collective intelligence, poetry, and complex adaptive systems sciences with the goal of developing conversations about what art and science can be, and how to relate performance to complexity science. Our approach to this topic is to work closely together on the very question of collective thinking. Moreover, the Interactions project is the formulation of the group itself. Thinking about the group as a complex self-organising system, how can we better understand the ingenuity of complex adaptive systems through this living model of collective thought? Conversely, can we borrow ideas from complexity in order to organize a group that organizes itself - whilst simultaneously proposing practical new forms of collective thought, collective feeling, and collective being? For obvious reasons, much of our work in the past eighteen months has taken place through Zoom and other online platforms. Taking advantage of the limitations of a digital platform has highlighted the importance of conversation structures. Imagining conversation as a complex adaptive phenomenon with emerging properties hinging upon the interactions of the groups’ agents. How do collective thinking and discussion usually take place?  How might we reprogram conversation by changing its rules and constraints. It’s an open-ended approach to conversation as an algorithmic composition, which has real implications for how we think together, especially in a transdisciplinary context like IAS”.  The group’s weekly collaborative experiments have led to public performance, including Negative Poetry, a collaboration with Interactions member Katarina Petrovic; The Wonder Machine, and Wandering Together and Alone - a piece about swarming and social distancing. How can a conversation become a performance? Traditionally, a theatre performance is thought of as a ‘fixed’ script, of words and direction which is rehearsed and repeated over and over in the same sequence. Our approach is to think about performance as a model of a complex adaptive system, or, to put it another way, as collective thinking. Instead of a fixed script, we give the agents rules and/or constraints, which govern how they interact, listen and intra-act. The performance emerges through this process, and just as with conversation, we don’t try to control every aspect, but rather, set up a system and follow the dynamics of the system. For most of the researchers involved this was the first time they had interacted in such a way. A lot of the work we do is about building a shared vocabulary between artists and scientists. The fundamental difficulty in artscience is that the ideas you are able to cocreate are limited by the degree to which you are able to cultivate a shared language around a shared set of practices. In addition, a major part of The Interactions Group is devising systems and playing games that generate collective thinking. One of the performance systems we have devised is called The Wonder Machine; a game that generates wonderment - which we see as a key overlapping theme between art and science. 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. The Interactions Group foster transdisciplinary scientific and artistic practices drawing ideas from complex adaptive networks and non-traditional theatre making, and applying this hybrid knowledge to the practice of collective thinking itself. Our methodology for doing art, science, and artscience is not only theoretical or representational, but rather operates through the practical, by embodying systems and processes and proceeding from complex systems we collectively form. For me, that’s the essence of theatre and performance as well as science; finding ways to think and do things collectively. Allowing serious thought to reclaim its playful nature.The Interactions Group formed in the shadow of the Covid-19 pandemic, at the Institute for Advanced Studies, UvA, when scientists Renske Vroomans and Enrico Sandro Colizzi and architect Sharon Wohl met Orion Maxted during his Artscience Fellowship at IAS, an international meeting point for researchers in complexity sciences.  The interactions group has since grown and currently includes members from The Netherlands, Brussels, Germany and the UK. https://theinteractions.cargo.site/Orion-Maxted Mon, 07 Jun 2021 12:49:34 +0000 interactionsgroup https://theinteractions.cargo.site/Orion-Maxted Orion Maxted  Algorithmic Theatre MakerLorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Pellentesque non placerat arcu, vel sodales tortor. Pellentesque ut elit nisl. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Phasellus a nulla odio. Ut non nunc a ex pretium gravida. Proin convallis, diam quis feugiat tristique, tellus urna blandit mauris, vitae ultrices massa nulla vitae sapien. Vivamus suscipit vulputate leo volutpat vulputate. Suspendisse ac mi porttitor, maximus odio a, aliquam libero. Vivamus quis euismod ipsum. Phasellus tempor lacinia ex, ut venenatis mauris porttitor ac. Nam volutpat libero sem, eget posuere mauris molestie maximus. Aenean quis nulla eget nulla hendrerit lacinia vitae non ex. Ut mollis vitae quam ut auctor. Sed varius sit amet urna non tempor. Sed blandit lacus ac enim pretium, id ullamcorper ante tincidunt. Pellentesque a augue sed nunc commodo efficitur. Nulla ipsum leo, ultrices vel risus sed, vehicula luctus erat. Maecenas eleifend, orci ut iaculis maximus, nisi nisl sollicitudin dui, et pretium velit orci ut lorem. Fusce faucibus tortor sit amet eros vulputate convallis. In et sem a dolor molestie mollis.