Transmissions from Within the Ludic Mind -Otto-Wagner PSK Kassenhalle/ AIL. An exhibition by the PSYCHOLUDIC / ROBOPSY researchgroup.

07.05- 28.06.2025

Monkeys, Machines, and Multiperspectivities is a call to embrace the transformative power of play. As visitors move through this experimental landscape, they will encounter new perspectives, rethink their roles in the world, and explore how small shifts in perspective can unlock vast potential for creative and collective action. Through this dynamic intersection of art, science, and play, the project offers a vision of a future defined by empathy, interconnectedness, and the endless possibilities of the ludic mind.

Presented through the lens of the Psycho-Ludic Approach (with methods by artistic research, experimental psychology and neuroscience), this exhibition challenges conventional ideas of agency, perspective, and societal structures and explore alternative motivations for play. The current global crises show that humanity’s exploitation-based strategies have come to an end: conquering new worlds, accumulating possessions and winning. These strategies, which are now failing, are reflected in games and their mechanisms.

Situated within the physical manifestation of a game engine—a world-machine-conglomerate—this exhibition environment becomes a space where the playful mind engages with pressing universal issues, exploring them through experimental games. Multiperspectivity is the key concept driving this exhibition. It emerges as the first result of the experimental game series: a revolutionary game mechanic that enables rapid, unpredictable shifts in perspective. What happens when we change the lens through which we view the world? How can shifting our perspective alter the way we relate to our surroundings and to each other? Rather than seeking radical, sweeping change through traditional “revolutionary” means, we propose that change can occur situationally and continuously—by adjusting the way we see and understand things. This mechanism, applied here in a series of playful experiments, serves as both an artistic practice and a social principle. In our increasingly fragmented world, it offers a powerful tool for rethinking everything from democratic processes to environmental consciousness.

Through a self-reflexive exhibition game, the project offers an opportunity to actively participate in the unfolding experiments. Here, individuals are not passive observers but dynamic players within a fluid system of roles: whether as “involuntary” players, NPCs (non-playing characters), agents, researchers, or as curious lovers of ludic art. The exhibition blurs the lines between audience and performer, inviting participants to step into multiple roles, shifting from one perspective to another as they engage with the work. The exhibition also introduces non-human players into the role-play, expanding the concept of agency and offering a more inclusive view of interaction. These alternative modes of play, underpinned by computational neuroscience devices and techniques, transform scientific tools into artistic expressions focusing on empathy, creativity, and participation—can become vehicles for addressing ecological and social challenges.

For the critical analysis of LLMs in cooperation with the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence a Citizen Science artwork ROBOPSY LLLM SWITCHER GAME is launched (tnX here to Fabian Navarro and the group)— to  learn how OUR collective memory is affected by the use of the Large Language Models. 

We critically address the often unwilling consent to surveillance and data harvesting in games: YOUR emotional face/ thought expressions will be the willingly given source to of constantly newly generated games, with new emerging game mechanics by LUDIC PSY AI game engine, developed under the lead of b in the PLRG artists. Parallel YOU, the player generate a physical RPG Role Playing board during the show. (YOU WILL FIND THE RESULTS of the daily game activity printed in 3D as a hexagonal Board game piece. YOUR daily art piece will be exhibited in a physical floating bounding box!

In a hybrid ludic assemblage, corresponding to avatars of OUR smoking players’ heads, represented in a TRIADE EEG head installation by Thomas Wagensommerer and Louise Linsenbolz, based on simultaneous brain scan data, you will find heads by sculptor Talos Kedl in symbiosis with electroencephalogram electrodes, that awake in the opening performance to life, as well as a activist NEST by the role-playing game enfleshing/bleeding Hollow group around

Xenobio activist Támas Pall, who critically investigated and researched lithium mining and its politically and ecologically devastating consequences.For You, the player, we now open our experimental game cultures  lab: In this

artpiece/ show research processes and experiments are part of a playable environment. It builds on a conversation under a cherry blossom tree — with the research question: what is it like to play a tree?The concept video for Tree-game and a Tree voodoo performance by Margarete Jahrmann and Stefan Glasauer, as well as their concept Cre[AI]tor trained on artists’ drawings at the entrance gate – generate a NEW INDIVIDUAL CONCEPT of the Show for EACH PLAYER a.k.a. visitor!So it is as ambigous as play to tell You about what this show is.

When You enter this collective game art piece, You are welcomed, or my be physically lovingly caressed by a data ghost, made of delicate fabric, based on brain-scans of three exemplary players — because three players can already choose: to cooperate and to switch with whom they cooperate in each playround — that is a model for democracy – without hardened lines. And the TRANSMISSIONS from within the LUDIC MIND change….

TREE GAME, a game constantly redrawn by visitors, is at the center of the exhibition, created with the help of the boardgames specialist Thomas Brandstetter, flanked by the swarm game by Stefan Maier and the drone paintings by Max Moswitzer created in a collective drawing game with drones (students participated in the prototypes- tnX to our students in EGC), which reverse war technology just as those drones opening the exhibition wrap their propellers in delicate green brain data fabrics.

SPECIAL and HEARTFUL THANKS to 

Artists in alphabetical order: Thomas Brandstetter, Stefan Glasauer, Clara Hirschmanner, Margarete Jahrmann, Talos Kedl, Louise Linsenbolz, Georg Luif, Stefan Maier, Barbi Markovic, Max Moswitzer, Fabian Navarro, Thomas Wagensommerer.

The Psycholudic Approach. Exploring Play for a viable Future, Austrian Science Fund FWF/Program zur Entwicklung und Erschließung der Künste.

Project Lead: Margarete Jahrmann, Experimental Game Cultures, University of Applied Arts Vienna. 

Partners:  

Brigitte Felderer, Social Design, University of Applied Arts Vienna, 

Matthew Pelowski, Department of Cognition, Emotion, and Methods in Psychology, University of Vienna,

ROBOPSY. An Artistic Exploration of Collective Memory through Role-Playing with AI Language Models, WWTF Vienna Science and Technology Fund 

Project lead: Margarete Jahrmann with Barbi Markovic and Thomas Brandstetter, Experimental Game Cultures, University of Applied Arts Vienna. 

Partners: 

Stefan Glasauer, Computational Neuroscience, Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg, Germany, 

Mark Coeckelbergh, Chair Philosophy of Media and Technology, University of Vienna

Robert Trappl, OFAI Vienna. Austrian Research Institute Artificial Intelligence

INTRA research project NEST, by Támas Páll together with Margarete Jahrmann and Thomas Wagensommerer, Experimental Game Cultures.