The Hexagonal Hive and a Mouse in a Maze

What if every thought was a movement, and every movement a thought? What is intelligence and when is it artificial? Can robots dance? Can they help our children learn how to be? How are we learning, and do we ever stop? What are the values and skills that we pass on as societies through games, crafts, stories and cinema?

The Hexagonal Hive and a Mouse in a Maze is the result of a seven-year process of collaboration and questioning, made under the banner of the Derek Jarman Lab. Swinton and Dziadosz were curious about the ways in which play and social interactions impacted on learning. The first question was ‘what is a school for?’ The scope broadened into a meditation on what it is to learn.

They left the British Isles to find scenarios of work, games and knowledge transfer elsewhere: Bangladesh, West Africa, the eastern seaboard of the USA. They looked to cinema and to AI, to literature and to science, to servers and to simulators. Educators, historians, physicists and neuroscientists spoke and they listened. Their children had things to say too. They searched in the cabinets of a supercomputer, in the curve of a chalked letter, in the weaving of a basket.