On Becoming Imaginary, For Real

Overview

This workshop explores how an emergent collective imaginary—rooted in playfulness, wonder, and shared joy—can arise through our co-constituency with the world. It examines how this delicate sense of play can persist in the face of real-life challenges. While often dismissed as frivolous, play provides the necessary detachment from rigid problem-solving, cultivating space for creativity. To solve problems, we must first release them, not by seeking clear answers, but by softening our focus, questioning assumptions, and tuning into the background conditions where new possibilities emerge. Paradoxically, true systems-at-work are achieved in unity with systems-at-play—moving beyond fixed meanings into the fluid realm of affordances.

Free play eventually morphs into games as it meets the symbolic need for structure, serving as a form of preparation for the real world. By re-engaging the imaginary through play, we can soften the rigid structures of life, allowing the rules that govern us to become more fluid. In doing so, life itself can transform back into a game, leading us towards a state of playfulness and creative spirit.

This event will be hosted in two separate sessions, November 28th and November 29th, by the Imaginary Institute — Orion Maxted, Damien Rudd — and co-facilitated by Joris de Kelver, Cadell Last at the Multiversity.

About the Event

Introduction to the Imaginary

Artist Orion Maxted, and researcher Damien Rudd will be leading creative sessions and exercises that invite us to re-engage the imaginary in an open-mode of being. These sessions and exercises will require you to explore and investigate the nature of collective intelligence as well as the phenomenon of emergence internal to our own intersubjective systemic processes. Throughout the day creative sessions and exercises will attempt to help us connect with a child-like wonder via the senses and our relations, where we can see how rules emerge, how play has its own unique intelligence, and how an attitude of playfulness deeply relies on our feelings, as well as our embodied connection to others.

Connecting the Symbolic, Facing the Real

Orion Maxted, Damien Rudd, Cadell Last will also be facilitating workshops and discussions around our results from the Imaginary sessions. These workshops and discussions will help us think about how play relates to both the Symbolic and the Real. While play is imaginative, engaging our senses and opening us to new modes of being, the Symbolic condenses rules and grammars that we use to communicate and hold order over time, and the Real constantly reminds us of what is not working, what needs to be rethought in the confrontation with our limitations.