Sune Skote, Fornvårdar, 1950
 

Update: Deadline extended to January 26th.

We are looking for eighteen people to join Babel Between Us, a large scale online experiment in collaborative writing and digital ethnography. The project will evolve on a daily basis through the interaction between the participants, exploring 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, through reflecting the process back to the participants?

  • What is the language for communicating the thinking of a collective intelligence? Is it based in text, or something different - more akin to a map/text hybrid? 

The project will be presented in multiple forms; the co-created text as a document in itself, a cartographic visualization of the fictional universe and its conceptual world - open to be explored online, as well as a research paper, delving into the details of this process. 

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 in English, 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.

The project is conducted in three iterations, each six weeks long with a month break after. Selected applicants are expected to produce roughly 2000 words per week during each iteration. In total the project will last for up to 6 months. The writing takes place on an online forum where each participant writes as they wish. The work is paid and each writer receives a flat project fee.

If this sounds like you, please apply below before the deadline, January 26th [new deadline].

If you have any questions contact us on our forum, at team [at] bbu.world, or on twitter

Image by Sune Skote, Fornvårdar, 1950