Tuesday, 19 March 2013

Myths, Morphs and Memes at Brighton Science Festival!


 
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! 


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? 
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.





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