Dave Young - Workshop themes
Themes in workshop proposal
- Emergent social systems - particularly how individuals manage hierarchy within a group
- One simple way of implementing this in the workshop is to have fewer computers than participants. This will force a conflict, and will either render people as surplus, or they will have to work out a democratic method of dividing power/control amongst themselves.
- Simulacra/Simulations
- I'm curious what we can learn about our own society from its simulation. This will be part of the group discussion, and perhaps will also emerge during the playing of the game. How could the game be improved? Perhaps encourage the participants to suggest some more rules that could be added to the game in order to improve its level of 'realism'.
- Cold War ideologies embedded in contemporary culture
- What evidence of cybernetics can we find in the game that also bears relevance on reality? Can the participants see any examples of how cybernetics may have had an impact on the organisation of society?
- Game/Play
- Connecting the game to the history of Game Theory, and the Cold War simulations of cities in times of crisis. Does this connection change the context of the game? Does it make it more 'serious', and less about diversion/play?
Role of the Audience
Participants should be naive subjects. The workshop is an experiment in two ways: it challenges the participants to organise themselves as a group in order to complete a brief (build a city in Micropolis). It is important that the participants feel they can behave naturally and not be fully aware of the goals of the experiment. For those who are already aware of my research, it could stimulate self-awareness and affect their behaviour in the group.
Role of the Workshop
The workshop questions if our social interactions can be mediated by cybernetic theory with the aim of creating a more democratic group decision making process. Micropolis relates the experiment to the era when cybernetics/game theory were used to simulate human behaviour in times of crisis, or to calculate the projected demands upon the infrastructure of a city in the future. My main interest is to provoke a discussion about how cybernetic theory may have become embedded within our understanding of the world in these ways, without us being fully aware of or questioning its military ontology.