Dates: 24 & 25 January, 14 & 15 February, 21 & 22 March, 25 & 26 April, 16 & 17 May, 20 & 21 June, 2025
Open Call
We don’t know what the Imaginary Institute is, or what will happen. Because the Imaginary Institute doesn’t exist. Currently, it’s a rumour.
The Imaginary Institute does not exist. And yet, it does. Like imagination itself, it resides at the transition between what doesn’t exist yet and what does.
The Imaginary Institute is a meeting place, a free-thinking laboratory, where artists, scientists, philosophers, and all curious humans (and non-humans) can share in a play of ideas, unconstrained by any single discipline or worldview.
The Imaginary Institute is devoted to intradisciplinary, intrasubjective, collective imagination. It’s an utterly serious, utterly playful attempt to support the conditions for the manifestation of urgent new ideas, beyond individuals and beyond disciplines.
The Imaginary Institute is imagined into existence anew by its co-imaginers. Members and guests are invited to collectively envision its practices and protocols, then enact them together. It is a space formed by the imagination, for the imagination.
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 by well-trodden paths, so we are happier to risk a ‘wrong turn’ than stay safely 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 the 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.
The homology between emergent complexity and play are key in shaping the protocols of the Imaginary Institute. Theatre, fiction, embodiment, play and whimsy offer dynamic and intuitive methods of doing, making, and being together. Complexity science provides tools to deepen reflection on these processes, creating fertile ground for reimagining how we think and act, and inviting new, relational ways of perceiving and understanding, where collective imagination becomes greater than the sum of its parts.
Example protocols for the Imaginary Institute might include: play, games, structures to foster novel forms of interdisciplinary collaboration, collective intelligence, collective minds with non-human entities, collective dreaming, algorithmic theatre, roleplay, speculative fiction, hyperstition, seminars, debates.
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.
How it works
The Imaginary Institute is initiated by Orion Maxted, Damien Rudd and Loretta Mesiti of Systems At Play at 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 all, (or most) of the series of symposia. 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.
Dates
Friday 24 & Saturday 25 January, 2025
Friday 14 & Saturday 15 February, 2025
Friday 21 & Saturday 22 March, 2025
Friday 25 & Saturday 26 April, 2025
Friday 16 & Saturday 17 May, 2025
Friday 20 & Saturday 21 June, 2025
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, as well as, to help finance the endless supply of tea and sandwiches necessary for such an endeavour. The fee, like all aspects of the Imaginary Institute, is open to revision by its participants.
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. Some knowledge of systems thinking concepts (e.g. cybernetics, self-organisation, 4E cognition, complexity science, emergence, actor-network theory) is recommended but not essential. Play and emergent complexity are proposed as our shared language.
Contact
orion.maxted@vub.be
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