Collective Intelligence project is a series of deep dive sessions up to one month long; encounters where artists, thinkers and activists work on parallel and shared projects, influencing each other in a convivial frame.
Collective intelligence can be defined as shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration, joint effort, and competition of many individuals and appears in consensus decision making. How to trigger and to manage collective intelligence at its best is an experimental process itself.
In 2016, during our festival Interfaces for Empathy we have found several investigations providing evidence that collective intelligence is the most effective tool to work through tasks, to solve problems and to create interactive experiences. Several sessions, held during 2017-2023 in Gibellina, Palermo, Cervignano del Friuli, Helsinki, St. Laurent des Arbres, and in other localities, focus on governance seen as an inclusive process, use and misuse of digital tools favouring cooperation, social cohesion, and trans-species collaborations. The trans-disciplinary practice is based on the experience of the artists, in a context that is equally unknown to them. The facilitators of the project having familiarity with the context, generally help the participants to connect with the local resources during the sessions.
What do we seek? Unexpected assemblages, intuitive actions and heuristic knowledge.
Initiated by Egle Oddo, Collective Intelligence is a project developed by an informal workgroup. Supported by different founders depending on the context, the production team independently seeks the collaboration and patronage of local and international institutions to support the activity and the distribution of the results, always in dialogue with grass-root organisations and local institutions. In 2025 the group is formed by: Alan Bulfin, Antti Ahonen, Egle Oddo, Johanna Fredriksson, Marjatta Oja, Saša Nemec, Timo Tuhkanen, Suva, Veera Kusisto, Irina Mutt.
“Throughout history, collective intelligence has secured the survival of our species. The vital importance of collaboration is resonated in the numerous neural mechanisms we have that give rise to empathy, comprising of skills for understanding other people’s thoughts, feelings, and for acting altruistically. At the moment humankind is facing problems of tremendous urgency and scale. Simultaneously, we have been able to devise a fantastic tools that have made humans more connected than ever before. However, our digital tools for collaboration are still in their infancy. Ironically, they do not support many things that are highly important for functional human interaction such as feeling of shared context, physical touch, synchronisation and rich expression of emotionality. Very often, these shortcomings seem to inhibit the emergence of empathy in digital environments, and as a consequence, collective intelligence.” (Cognitive neuroscientist Katri Saarikivi, extract from the panel discussion)
Pixelache Festival 2016, video of the panel discussion about collective intelligence here.
The first public launching of Collective Intelligence was at Manifesta 12, in Palermo from June to November 2018, with the project IL TRAFFICO.
