Enacting Collective Intelligence

E hara taku toa, I te toa takitahi – ngari he toa taku tini

My strength is not from myself alone, but from the strength of the group



Pierre Levy’s notion of collective intelligence provides not only an alternative model for thinking about the world, but an alternative model for thinking itself; a model that is increasingly apparent in the contemporary world, particularly in the densely interconnected, layered and cross-pollinating networks of the internet. The SCANZ theme of Interconnections and attendant topics that we have been invited to explore can be approached from this paradigm of collective intelligence, and the collaborative cyberformance platform UpStage provides the perfect hybrid medium within which to situate this ontologically multifluous discourse.

This performative presentation will be an enactment of collective intelligence: remote intelligences at geographically dispersed locations will expound on the ideas postulated within the SCANZ themes, generating a dynamic ideography which the on-site presenter will deliver in real time to the symposium audience. The complex hybrid methodology of the remote intelligences will simultaneously construct and deconstruct itself, generating a vibrant, even ticklish, indeterminate exploration of the interwoven hypotheses and resulting in perhaps surprising synchronicities and juxtapositions – as well as illuminated banalities and flashes of incomprehensibility. This apparent chaos will be underpinned with hybrid integrated indigenous knowledge systems and beliefs, in an (arguably vain) attempt to embody, or even anthropomorphise, a vision of truly synthesised, if preposterous, collective intelligence. All will unfold upon, within and beyond the hypersurfaces of the UpStage platform, the presenter’s present body and the remote intelligences’ projected absent presences.

The contributing intelligences will tap the deep pool of global intelligence, including Levy, Agnihotri-Clark, Bagnall, Ballard, Barba, Barthes, Barbrook, Bataille, Baudrillard, Bebo, Beehre, Bell, Benjamin, Bennett, Binney, Birringer, Bishop, Blau, Body, Bourriaud, Bradley, Braidotti, Brennan, Broadhurst, Brown, Bruns, Bryce, Bugden, Burroughs, Burk, Butler, Butler, Butt, Cage, Cunningham, Czegledy, Englebart, Facebook, Fuks, Giannachi, Gibson, Google, James, Jamieson, Mauss, McAvoy, McCaw, McCahon, McIntyre, McKenzie, McLuhan, Monteith, MySpace, Peric, Plant, Robertson, Smith, Untitled, Whyte, and many others. Concocted by a gaggle of idiosyncratic post-structural theory sluts, and in the spirit of Einstein’s notion of loose opportunism, the potential exists for both supporting and contradictory concepts to culminate in an exhilarating collision.

Helen Varley Jamieson has been diagnosed as a congenital post-structuralist cyborg (non-ticklish). Rarely operating solo, she has a penchant for coercing innocent intelligences into ambitious disruptive schemes involving thick plots, imaginary friends and uncertain outcomes. She describes her modus operandi as collective collaboration, with interconnection being a key personal trope.

www.upstage.org.nz, www.creative-catalyst.com

Keywords: Collective intelligence, cyberformance, hypersurface, presence, absence, remote collaboration