GENERATIVE COLLABORATIVE PRACTICE
CASE STUDY: INFINITE MONKEYS
Infinite Monkeys is a multidisciplinary art collective formed in 2019 in response to the Serpentine's Augmented Architecture open call.The collective began as a conversation between Vytautas Niedvaras, a creative technologist and multimedia artist (BSc Creative Computing, Goldsmiths; now CTO of UCL MAL), and Robert Berenguer, an architect, about the place of sound in architectural practice: ideas are developed and communicated through visual material such as sketches, notes, renders, and acoustic treatment is applied only after the form is set. Antoni Gaudí's tornavoz, a sounding board designed to project the voice, was cited in the conversation as a counter-example.
To answer the open call, the two formed a team with Dimitris Kyriakoudis (BSc Computing, Goldsmiths) and Edmund Oetgen (BSc Music Computing, Goldsmiths). The four set out to build an augmented-reality piece in which virtual structures appear and disappear in the camera's view, while live audio from the device's microphone is modulated to simulate how each structure would alter the acoustics of the surrounding space. The work required audio synthesis and digital signal processing, computer vision, and real-time graphics. A prototype was developed over several months of weekly sessions, which the group called workshops. As of August 2026, the collective has built a substantial backlog of performances and shows, with 64 contributors having taken part, converging around principles of facilitation, equality and a horizontal approach to practice. It is a format closer to a happening, referred to simply as the workshop.
«The workshop was never simply a jam. It was the whole cycle of listening and reconsideration, more about creating a framework within which things could happen. Listening to one another's material opened conversations and made surprise structurally important. We gathered, tried things again and gradually developed our own way of working. The Infinite Monkeys grew out of that process.» [1]
The collective's recurring questions concern the sonic and communal architecture of environments: how does a space dictate the direction of a happening, and how does alternation of personnel and method contribute to a practice?
The space sets the terms. "There's something in the constraints of the space itself, that dictates how people navigate their presence and absence in the event." [2] Each environment distributes attention and licence differently, and the ambition in every one of them is to convert expectation into participation.
In an environment shielded from expectation, the contributors are compelled to fill the emerging empty space: ‘If you're a balloon in a room and you suck all the air out of the room, the balloon explodes. Because there's no outside pressure, there's nothing to answer — so it expands to fill the available negative space’. [2]
For a workshop, you need a question and some guiding principles. Then you have the makings of a collaborative exercise, [3] preparation gives way to staying present and reading the environment [8]. You can ready your tools, not the encounter; what carries you is skill and relationships [3]. Rehearsal is replaced by a small shared frame: a topic or theme or question and an environment to host it, a few guiding principles, and the will to let go once they are set [3]. as the collective grows, such frames take over the coordination that familiarity once did [6].
Rotation keeps roles fluid: a fixed group tends to crystallise, change circulates leadership, constantly shifting the spotlight towards different agents [6]. This asks for restraint: acting where something is missing, and holding back otherwise [7]. Each newcomer offers a change of method, recalibrating everyone around them [3][6]; facilitation therefore works on the environment, not the people, making the gaps perceptible first, trusting those present to fill it [2].
The workshop is both immersive and participatory: those present cooperate on the making of sound and are consolidated by it, with aim to trust the confidence of those watching to become involved [3]. What accumulates is an assemblage of moments, and a shared attention aiming at wordless understanding [5] [7]. The open question is whether the results of said practice can be harnessed beyond the real-time, for pulling together gaps present at a given moment [2]. There is playfulness and intent to the process, answering questions within the guidelines of a given setting, a balancing act between the sublime and the ridiculous. [3]
As contributed by members of the collective:
[1] Robert Berenguer, Robert Berenguer, sound artist, DJ and architect, founder of the Infinite Monkeys collective and label head at POSITIVLAND.
[2] Dimitris Kiriyakoudis
[3] Edward Griffiths
[4] Vytautas Niedvaras
[5] Kristina May, producer and DJ based in London
[6] Edmund Oetgen, creative technologist and musician working with creation of emergent systems based in London
[7] Maxim Shatalin, a curator and DJ based in London
[8] Tal Hendrickse, mixing, mastering and software engineer based in New York
Written by Yewen Jin