What if the future of knowledge creation lies not in isolated expertise, but in the collective intelligence that emerges when artists, scientists, and communities play together?

In an era of both planetary crisis and unprecedented technological affordances, Systems At Play demonstrates that our most complex challenges might require fundamentally new ways of thinking together—ways that dissolve the artificial boundaries between disciplines, between theory and practice, between research and transformation.

Systems At Play was first tested during the CLEA International Artscience Symposium: A Self-Organising Symposium On Self-Organisation (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, February 2023). Here, self-organisation was not only studied but enacted: instead of a fixed programme, participants co-generated lectures, performances, and workshops through real-time interaction. This performative structure transformed the symposium into a complex adaptive system, where feedback, improvisation, and emergence were not side-effects but the method itself. Play functioned as a rigorous epistemic tool — a way to make complexity tangible, to test hypotheses collectively, and to generate knowledge beyond disciplinary boundaries and hierarchies.
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In 2024 the methodology was expanded through Systems at Play In The Noosphere, organised with a.pass and funded by the Human Energy Project. The event revisited the concept of the noosphere — the sphere of human thought as a planetary force — by asking how imagination and collective intelligence might act as renewable energies for ecological and social transformation. Rather than simply studying collective intelligence, participants played together to become a living model of the Noosphere itself.
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In 2025 these trajectories converged in the launch of Systems At Play: Imaginary Institute. Neither fixed institution nor purely conceptual framework, the Institute exists at the threshold between what is and what could be—a free-thinking laboratory where artists, scientists, philosophers and other creatives gather to collectively imagine new protocols for collaboration and collective intelligence. It replaces the logic of productivity with the logic of play, cultivating a space where "stupid ideas" and wrong turns are welcomed as essential pathways to breakthrough thinking. Through seasonal gatherings, the Institute nurtures imagination as a shared commons for manifesting urgent new ideas and bridging the imaginary with the real.
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Evolutionary Context

We're witnessing the emergence of a new kind of organism—one that thinks with multiple brains, learns through play, and evolves through creative collaboration. Emerging alongside initiatives from institutions like the Center Leo Apostel, the Human Energy Project's work on collective intelligence and the Third Story of the Universe, the Santa Fe Institute, the Institute for Advanced Studies (UvA), indigenous knowledge revival, and the growing recognition of distributed cognition in everything from swarm robotics to regenerative agriculture, Systems At Play represents a crucial bridge between cutting-edge science and ancient wisdom about collaborative sense-making.

These gatherings represent phase transitions in how knowledge emerges—the crystallization of new forms of collective intelligence that metabolize complexity into wisdom, composting disciplinary boundaries into fertile ground for emergence.

Living Outcomes

These gatherings have generated not only new research directions and artistic works, but lasting collaborations and what participants describe as fundamentally altered ways of seeing and playing in the world. The approach is simultaneously rigorous and playful, sophisticated and accessible—requiring no special expertise beyond curiosity and willingness to think together in new ways.

Together, Systems At Play, the Noosphere event, and the Imaginary Institute articulate a methodology where play and systems thinking combine to foster new forms of collaboration, creativity, and collective foresight. The methodology is designed to scale—from intimate laboratories to global networks. Whether you're a student questioning the boundaries of your field, an artist exploring new forms of collaboration, a scientist seeking more embodied research methods, or a policy maker looking to support genuinely transformative work, Systems At Play offers both proven frameworks and endless possibilities for innovation.