January to June, 2025
Open Call
CLEA ArtScience and Systems at Play propose an Imaginary Institute - a free-thinking laboratory dedicated to emergent complexity, collective imagination, play, collaboration, and developing collective intelligence protocols for manifesting new ideas...
We don’t know what the Imaginary Institute is - or what will, could, or should, happen within it - because the Imaginary Institute doesn’t exist. Currently, it’s a rumour. Like imagination itself, it lives at the threshold between what is and what could be.
The Imaginary Institute is imagined into existence anew each time by its co-imaginers. What will happen depends on you. Members and guests are invited to collectively envision its protocols, practices, and methods of collective intelligence and collaboration, and then enact them together. It is a space formed by imagination, for imagination.
As such, The Imaginary Institute is a free-thinking laboratory—a meeting place for artists, scientists, philosophers, and other creatives—human and non-human alike— It fosters intradisciplinary exploration, collective imagination, play, and collaboration.
At its heart, the Imaginary Institute is an utterly serious, utterly playful, attempt to support the conditions for the manifestation of urgent new ideas, to envision beyond the present and bring forth what does not yet exist.
The Imaginary Institute invites unconventional imagination, shifting focus from binary, right-or-wrong frameworks of “what is” to exploring the affordances of “what else could be?”. Rationality is essential, but it only addresses what is already known. New ideas cannot be discovered via well-trodden paths, so we imagine a place where one is ‘safe’ to risk a stupid idea, a ‘wrong turn’, rather than stay on familiar ground. By bringing rationality into dynamic relation with intuition, play, curiosity, beauty, and imagination (art, theatre, fiction), the Imaginary Institute may cultivate an open-ended, collective ‘high-temperature’ search through the space of possibility — a playground for intellectual and artistic risk, where unexpected combinations of ideas can emerge. We believe that investing in a shared commons of the imaginary, free from conventional academic pressures, is vital.
The Imaginary Institute replaces the logic of productivity with the logic of play, and the drive to win with the desire to keep the play going, together, for everyone’s sake. Acknowledging that play’s seemingly inessential qualities are, in fact, essential, the Imaginary Institute is a serious, yet delightfully absurd, attempt to cultivate a free-thinking space for new ideas to emerge. The Imaginary Institute reinvigorates the fallow ground of our collective imagination. It’s a place where time can be spent listening, understanding, cultivating, and tending to, a complex system of relationships and ideas, nurturing a web of connections, thereby creating fertile common ground in which new ideas can emerge.
The Imaginary Institute is self-organising and open-ended. Surfing on the dynamics of a complex adaptive network of imaginations, shaped by the frictions and synergies between diverse forms of knowledge and creativity, different differences that make a difference. It emerges through the interactions and collaborations between participants, adapting to their needs, curiosities, and unique practices.
In shaping the protocols for the Imaginary Institute, we welcome a broad diversity of inspirations. Of particular interest to us are the intersections between imagination and play; play and systems thinking; play and theatre; creativity and collective intelligence; mythology and the void; evolution and computation; AI and Promethean fire; science and fiction; imagination and ritual; theatre and storytelling; collective minds and non-human entities; games and novel interdisciplinary collaboration; play and education; algorithmic theatre and roleplay; speculative fiction and hyperstition; and collective dreaming, seminars, and debates, ecology and relational thinking; activism and imagining alternative futures.
The Imaginary Institute is not anti-real. Like imagination, it is co-extensive with the real. It invites us to hold our normative world lightly, to explore new connections and chance encounters, and to question fixed patterns. It recognises the necessity of a space for playing with reality together, to propel the real in new directions. While focused initially on cultivating protocols for collective imagination, the Imaginary Institute also affords these formulations the possibility to take shape as tangible collaborative projects in art, science, technology, and beyond, bridging the imaginary and the real. While exploring how our collective imagination can be most effectively applied, envisioning, perhaps, future institutions of the collective imaginary. Afterall, all institutions were, at one time, imaginary.
The Imaginary Institute can be seen as a collaborative artwork, a shared research object, where form follows function in the spirit of institution-as-social-sculpture, durational participatory performance, and artscience.
Why "Imaginary"?
Imaginary (adjective): Yet to exist. Made up.
Imagine (verb): To envision beyond the present and bring forth what has yet to exist.
Imagination (noun): The playful capacity to explore possibilities beyond immediate reality, generating new ideas, worlds, and ways of being.
The Imaginary (noun):the social imaginary is the playful, creative, collective dimension of our social world, through which we collaborativly imagine and create ways of living together.
Dates
#1: 14 & 15 February, 2025
#2: 21 & 22 March, 2025
#3: 25 & 26 April, 2025
#4: 16 & 17 May, 2025
#5: 20 & 21 June, 2025
How does it work?
The Imaginary Institute is proposed by theatre director Orion Maxted, dramaturg Loretta Mesiti, ecology-artist Damien Rudd, and Professor Francis Heylighen, who are members of Systems At Play and the ArtScience department of the Center Leo Apostel, Vrije Universiteit Brussel.
We are also collaborating with partner organisations who will co-host the Imaginary Institute. If you’d like to host a session of the Imaginary Institute at your institution, please get in touch.
From January to July 2025, we will run a pilot series of monthly 2-day symposia to collectively imagine the Imaginary Institute together. This series will all take place in Brussels. There is currently no online option, although we are open to exploring this idea.
In order to go deeper into the process of imagining the institute together, and honouring the resulting collaborations, we are especially happy to hear from collaborators who would like to attend multiple symposia in the series. We will also retain some spaces for guests to visit as well.
For the first symposium, imaginary protocols will be proposed by members of Center Leo Apostel. Moving forward, we’ll develop a shared system so that future symposia are shaped by proposals for protocols for collective imagination by members and guests of the Imaginary Institute.
Members of Systems At Play at the CLEA ArtScience department will continue to take care of (curate) the Imaginary Institute as much, or as little, as is required, in relation to the process of self-organisation.
Cost
There is a small registration fee for each symposium. This fee does not imply that the Imaginary Institute exists already, nor that the Imaginary Institute is a paid service. Rather the Imaginary Institute is a collective process, and the small fee is simply to ensure that people who reserve a place do indeed attend.
Membership
The symposia are open to Imaginary members and guests. Spaces will be limited and prioritised for members. To apply for Imaginary membership, please fill out this application form.
Who is it For?
The Imaginary Institute is primarily intended for artists, scientists, philosophers, architects, designers, and anyone whose work involves bringing new ideas, ways of thinking, and co-inhabiting into the world.
Prerequisites
A willingness to play, collaborate, and temporarily suspend familiar expectations.
Play together with emergent complexity are proposed as a shared language of art and science.
Some knowledge of scientific concepts (e.g. cybernetics, self-organisation, 4E cognition, complexity science, emergence, actor-network theory) may be helpful but not essential.
Contact
orion.maxted@vub.be
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