CLEA PLAYEEEEERS is a series of play sessions,taking place at CLEA from December 2022 until February 2023,coordinated by theatre maker and CLEA researcher Orion Maxted.
Keywords
Play & Embodied
Enactive
Embedded
Extended
Emergent
Research Systems
More info
In the sessions, embodied, intersubjective play and playing, i.e. collectively playing, inventing and evolving, games, systems and ‘models’, informed by children’s games, cybernetics, and immersive post-dramatic theatre/performance, is explored as a novel transdisciplinary embodied collaborative approach to theatre, performance, science, and transdisciplinary research and systemic modelling.
We shall begin just by, quite literally, playing simple games, with few rules or conditions, and which do not involve much or any technology, nor even a playing board or cards. They are sometimes called ‘children’s playground games’ or ‘theatre games’, (since they are often used to train actors for the theatre). Perhaps the archetypal example would be ‘Tag’ or ‘It’, (which is at least 2300 years old), a very simple, yet perfect example of emergence and cybernetics in action. There are 100s of such games to get going, as well as storytelling games, such as, ‘One Word at a Time’ which cultivate other kinds of collective intelligence.
We shall simply start from these games, get into the feeling of them, and then, see what evolves, as the group begins to riff off the old games, recombine them and start generating new games, rules, constraints etc.
Soon we will be building our own games, systems, collective thinking exercises, etc, and discussing them. Over time it's hoped that the group will find its own rhythm and its own agency. Others will be encouraged to contribute starting games, human models, and systemic ideas, and artistic and scientific perspectives as we develop.
Whilst staying with the core aspect of playfulness, the sessions are therefore a genuinely radical form of transdisciplinary research, utilising play as a common ground, which allows us to explore such questions as:
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Collective play as an underexplored transdisciplinary space between art and science, and an approach to transdisciplinarity research and education.
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Collective play as embodied, enactive, extended, embedded cognition, a collective research medium, which is hands-on, and readily accessible.
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Collective play as a way of developing new transdisciplinary ideas.
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Theatre/performance = play = science, as a generative transdisciplinary metaphor connecting art and science as mutually beneficial technologies of perception.
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A practical space to combine and contrast knowledge, and generate deeper transdisciplinary discourse between art and science
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How through collective systems play, participants can become agents who are inside (constituent to) the system itself,
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Dissolving/straddling, the objective and subjective distinction.
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Collectively, generate, experience and reflect through a shared ‘inner experience of emergence’.
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Developing an intuitive understanding of how systems, emergence (et al) feel from the inside, e.g. what makes a system work.
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Creating simple ‘models’ but with human-level agents, who are able to reprogramme and iteratively develop the systems in which they are part.
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Collective systems play as distributed collective human computation and collective intelligence.
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Collective play is a high indicator of cultivating social bonds, friendship, health, and mutual understanding.
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Collective systems play as transcendence of the individual, and being part of ‘something bigger than oneself’, of Flow, and of collective purpose, and so constituent to a sense of meaning.
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Last but not least, play for its own sake.
Practical
Dates and times so far:
Friday 2 December, 6-8pm
Saturday 3 December, 1-6pm
Friday 13 January, 6pm-10pm
Saturday 14 January, 1-6pm
Friday 27 January, 6pm-8pm
Saturday 28 January, 1-6pm
Friday 9th February, 6pm-8pm
All sessions will take place at CLEA, Krijgskundestraat 33, 1160 Brussels, near the Etterbeek campus of the Vrije Universiteit, Brussels,
Please contact orionmaxted@gmail.com if you are interested to take part.