Myths,
Morphs and Memes
presented ‘Groupmind’ where visitors to the Brighton Science Festival were invited to contribute to collaborative,
cumulative, cultural communication experiments.
We are interested in how ideas
and information, in the shape of stories, drawings, and constructions are
transmitted through minds across generations. We invited people to enter into a
communicative activity which had consequences – they may influence the behaviour
of others!
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| Natural selection of drawings |
Psychologist, Dr. Julie Coultas engaged people in the cultural transmission
of structures through building spaghetti towers! What information do we pass on? What
information gets forgotten? How does cumulative cultural evolution work?
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| Tower building at Jubilee Library |
Artist, Rachel Cohen used drawings to demonstrate mimetic evolution in
action. Is it possible to reproduce a drawing from instructions, like a recipe?
 |
| Collaborative iPad game of picture consequences |
Psychologists, Dr. Nicola Yuill and Stefan
Kreitmayer invited people to experiment
with ‘Live Sentences’ where people in different locations co-create sentences
live, and tweet them to Live Sentence. Will these co-productions oscillate and
reach some coherent sequence of sentences, or will it all be random?
Artists, Patricia Thornton and Angela
Rogers encouraged people to communicate by taking part in a collaborative
Drawing Dialogue game.
