ECOS ‘Ecosystemic Storytelling’ is a narrative system for emergent worlds developed by Juan Diaz Bohorquez since 2004, as a ritualistic, collaborative, counter-narrative practice and new volumetric creation language to augment imagination.
During the past 20 years Juan has focused in structuring and shaping the conceptual tools, protocols and dynamics of ‘ECOS’ to develop a fluid system and a philosophy of imagination that is constantly nurtured by a reflection of perception, cognitive process, spatial construction of reality, linguistics and biological ecosystemic processes. ECOS redefines imagination as a journey through layers, scales and rhythms, instead of a controlled intellectual exercise. ECOS seeds and nurtures the emergence of complex morphing worlds with multiple layers of reality.
Diaz Bohorquez has passionately worked to develop these tools to augment imagination, believing that In these times of uncertainty and crisis, we need new tools to augment imagination that challenge and disrupt the linear hegemonic paradigms, to transition into ecosystemic and generative systems. The ‘Ecosystemic Storytelling’ system serves as a common language for truly interdisciplinary collaboration, putting at the center our natural comprehension of stories as a way of making sense of the world and our reality.
Traditional methods for collaborating are a problem when bridging knowledge from different disciplines. Our world emerges from the tools that we have to think, imagine and create. We have augmented our capacity to build, from the hammer to 3d printing buildings, to generate energy and produce food, yet, despite our technical capacities, our collaborative processes and the way we approach narrative is still linear, textual, and hierarchic. Through this disruptive method, a new era of collaborative work and a combination of knowledge from the most diverse fields can be realized, which allows completely new narratives to emerge.
OUR WORLDS EMERGE
FROM THEIR LIMITATIONS,
OUR REALITY EMERGES FROM STORIES.
WORLD BUILDING
In 2007, Diaz Bohorquez started a continuous collaboration with renown designer Alex McDowell after they recognized their methods and research were complementary. Alex McDowell had at that time recoined the term world-building to designate a holistic approach to post-cinematic storytelling, but was their 16 years collaboration and the combination of their methods that has re-defined World building as the disruptive art-science practice and method well known today.
While they keep evolving their own variants of the processes, these have evolved in parallel as a powerful narrative design system often understood under the umbrella of world-building, that has been applied to develop and produce film and media projects, social impact and science-art projects. The methods have been put continuously to the test targeting real phenomena from very different social, geographical and cultural contexts, as migration, microbiological research, regional development and post war areas.
Diaz Bohorquez and McDowell head the World Building Institute in Los Angeles and Berlin under the principle that interdisciplinary collaboration is an essential part of transforming the way we work and especially how new ideas emerge. Their dialogue and research evolves continuously, matures, adapts as an organic system through the continuous collaboration with the broad World Building Institute network of illustrious collaborators from diverse fields: film, art, theater, architecture, anthropology, science, governance, among others.
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