One ball, one paddle, hundreds of players. What happens when an entire audience controls a game of the videogame classic Pong? Can they keep the ball in play as it moves faster and faster?
In 1991 computer animation pioneers Rachel and Loren Carpenter tried this social experiment for the first time at a conference in California. It showed how a crowd could make decisions and act in unison, without debate, like a murmuration of birds.
For cyberhippies and early internet entrepreneurs, it embodied a utopian ideal: individual freedom and collective action, unburdened by governments, with everyone connected through a single network.
Today, this dream has lost much of its utopian charm. But Carpenter’s Hivemind Pong Experiment still feels like magic. Could it also inspire us to imagine a different internet and society than the one we ended up with?
For DocLab’s twentieth edition we are bringing it back for a second time, re-imagined by Utrecht-based art collective Katpatat. Bring your phone, and join the game.
