“World­mak­ing, Par­tic­i­pa­tion, and Learn­ing: Ex­per­i­ments in Col­lab­o­ra­tive Cre­ation” presented by de Campo

Symposium:


Session Title:
  • The Volatility and Stability of WorldMaking as Techné

Presentation Title:
  • World­mak­ing, Par­tic­i­pa­tion, and Learn­ing: Ex­per­i­ments in Col­lab­o­ra­tive Cre­ation

Presenter(s):


Venue(s):


Abstract:

  • Panel: The Volatility and Stability of WorldMaking as Techné

    This paper will dis­cuss a re­cent pro­ject re­alised with a mixed group of par­tic­i­pants, and its evolv­ing fol­lowup. Varia Zoosys­tem­at­ica Pro­fun­do­rum began as the idea of mod­el­ing (hy­po­thet­i­cal) com­mu­ni­ca­tion be­tween crea­tures to be in­vented. Apart from ac­quir­ing prac­tice in elec­tron­ics, pro­gram­ming, and me­chan­i­cal build­ing, the guid­ing prin­ci­ple was hav­ing the team de­velop much of the con­cept jointly. Thus, many as­pects of the pro­ject evolved from team dis­cus­sions in­clud­ing just-in-time cod­ing ex­per­i­ments oc­cur­ring across sev­eral in­ter­re­lated courses. Once the con­text (the Deep Sea) was de­cided on, the par­tic­i­pants began to in­vent a va­ri­ety of highly in­di­vid­ual crea­tures, which share com­mon brain func­tion­ing; com­mu­ni­ca­tion be­tween them is by telepa­thy, and ex­pressed by sound, light and move­ment. In essence, we loosely com­bined no­tions from works like Gor­don Pask’s Col­lo­quy of Mo­biles with a work­ing method­ol­ogy in­spired by David Tudor’s ap­proach in evolv­ing Rain­for­est. Given the pos­i­tive re­sponses from all par­tic­i­pants, the ap­proach is ex­tended fur­ther in a fol­lowup pro­ject: Here, we start by look­ing at his­toric in­stances of cy­ber­netic think­ing and fu­tur­ol­ogy, and will cre­ate a loose per­for­ma­tive con­text for in­di­vid­ual works in­volv­ing sys­tems such as playable chaotic syn­the­sis­ers for audio and vi­su­als – again, de­tails will emerge from the flow of the pro­ject, and group im­pro­vi­sa­tion (which we con­sider a cy­ber­netic ac­tiv­ity) will hap­pen at dif­fer­ent time scales, from plan­ning to build­ing to even­tual per­for­mances.

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