Gen Alpha ’Pataphysics is a film documenting a think tank style workshop with children born after 2010, centred on the theme of money. Developed in collaboration with art educator Studio Dicky, the workshop invited participants to collectively imagine and govern a fictional city, determining how resources should be allocated and which values might underpin economic life.

The film combines scripted text, open discussion and a collaborative role playing game. Ideas surface through logical fallacies, non sequiturs and cognitive leaps, as participants test the coherence of an invented system in real time. What begins as a structured moral and civic debate gradually becomes unstable: as fake currency, theft and improvised rules are introduced, the system is enacted to the point of breakdown. 

The film forms part of the broader Gen Alpha ’Pataphysics project: a series of workshops using drawing, writing, acting and speculative design to examine how children understand and reimagine the systems that organise their lives. Alongside the workshop on money, participants also developed the Union of Supernatural Conservation, an imagined organisation advocating for the rights and housing of supernatural beings such as fairies and elves, which is planned to be legally established in Amsterdam concurrent with the film’s screening. While not the focus of the work on show, this parallel strand clarifies the project’s wider methodology: treating children’s speculative reasoning not as metaphor but as a workable model for thinking through governance, care and collective responsibility.

Rather than positioning children as future citizens in preparation, Gen Alpha ’Pataphysics treats them as contributors to the present; the film maintains space for uncertainty, contradiction and novelty, allowing ideas to unfold without resolution or didactic framing. In doing so, it offers a view of economic imagination shaped by lived experience, intuition and play, exposing both the fragility and the productive limits of the systems we continue to inherit and reproduce.