With the last notes of the last piece of our project, the 67th Warsaw Autumn comes to its close. In the last several years, another day has been added to the festival as the Little Warsaw Autumn lasts longer than its “grownup” counterpart. The piece that ends the space®opera project’s (and the whole festival’s) final concert programme is Przemysław Pacek’s miniature Yes or No – Infinitely. Indeed, yes or no, we infinitely go on asking. Is it possible for art and music, particularly that living, contemporary one, created “here and now,” to be present in the world of Polish children and teenagers? In Polish schools? Can children’s creativity, ideas and inspirations influence modern art to a greater extent? Can this process become more conscious and premeditated? Is there a chance for mutual understanding and cooperation between music composers on the one hand, teachers and children on the other, united by joint creative projects that exert a special impact on young people’s development? Our answer is: yes, infinitely. There is space for experimentation, project work and joint enterprises at school, as the Scandinavian example can amply prove. And how about art? There should also be room for children’s agency and influence in art, if they are to grow up to become conscious recipients and creators of art in the future. Directly after the final space®opera concert, we invite you to a brief debate on this subject. Teachers, the composers of the miniatures, and the curatorial team will talk about their experience of collaboration on the project. 

The space®opera project has one more co-author that has not been mentioned so far: AI, which has been a component of the several months’ long collective working process. AI did not replace humans, but it has supported them and highlighted certain aspects of successful collaboration. Space®opera has proved to be a laboratory of collaboration on many levels and in many different spaces. 

Approximately 250 people have taken part in this process: children and teenagers, artists-composers, teachers, educators, IT experts, and event organisers. All of them are the co-authors of this musical “walk” through the city and have contributed to the contents of the app, which will remain functional after the festival as well. By involving all of them in the process, we have been able to observe how simultaneous collaboration of so many age groups, persons and professions, all of which contribute their talents, competences, knowledge, experience, even intuitions to the project, builds a kind of AI in the manner of the (still recently fashionable) “augmented” rather than “artificial” reality – and how our individual intelligences become augmented by the addition of that human AI just as the artificial AI is triggered and augmented by the actions of living human minds. 

All this forms a kind of “cluster” of talents and intelligence that could be called CI, or Collective Intelligence. The concept of collective IQ is applied to situations where a group of persons work on a consensus, and their joint ability to find a solution is better than the best individual solution offered by any of the group members. Introduced in the 1980s, the notion of CI concerns activities that involve a high degree of cooperation between participants and refers to the “added value” of such projects. 

What, if any, is the added value of space®opera? Come to the final concert to hear for yourselves or take a musical walk following the route of Warsaw’s monuments and sculptures. Or, best of all, listen to the individual works created as part of the space®opera project and look out for children’s special energy that the miniature composers have frequently invoked in their comments. 

Anna Kierkosz