Image by Sune Skote, Fornvårdar, 1950
I want to share our latest project, Babel Between Us. We got funding to invite 18 writers to write under pseudonyms in a forum for 6 months. If you or anyone you know might like to join, we’d be delighted to see your applications. We will also be using ethnography and artistic applications of collective intelligence methods in the project to explore how collective fiction can be co-written in a very open way.
I’m also sharing it here though to showcase a neat little trick. We built the application form to the project to create a new account for the applicant on our Discourse, and then send parts of the responses to a new topic posted under that new account. We do this to onboard all applicants to the forum so that if they get selected they already have an account, and even if they don’t, we can still keep in touch later.
This is based on this form that @gdpelican build for Edgeryders, although this version is modified in many ways, both in terms of design and to also both send to and retrieve from Airtable.
If you’re interested, this is the project:
We are looking for eighteen people to join Babel Between Us, a large scale online co-created writing process. The project utilizes digital ethnography to explore a range of questions:
- What happens when a group of people from different backgrounds and interests meet anonymously through a fiction they create together?
- What worlds manifest on the borders between their ideas, and what stories appear among them?
- Can ethnography be used as a tool to mediate and enhance this kind of creative collaboration?
- What is the language for communicating the thinking of a collective intelligence?
The project will take multiple forms; the co-created digital text itself, a cartographic visualization of the fictional universe and its conceptual world, as well as a research paper.
We aim to compose as diverse a team as possible. As a guideline we are looking for people with a strong interest in collaboration, who are comfortable with expressing their ideas through writing, who have an interesting creative output, who are comfortable with the “yes, and” principle and, most importantly, people who love experiments. Writers, poets, playwrights, actors, artists, philosophers, journalists, LARPers, etc. You do not need to be a published author to apply, we accept all applications.
Selected applicants are expected to produce roughly 2000 words per week during each iteration. There are three iterations, each six weeks long with a month break after each one. In total the project will last for up to 6 months. The work is paid and each writer receives a flat project fee.
If this sounds like you, please apply before the deadline, January 20th.
Babel Between Us is a project by a rag-tag team of artists, Edgeryders, Blivande and funded by Kulturbryggan.