[-empyre-] Participatory creativity as a prerequisite for community formation

[Simon Biggs]

First I apologise for not contributing to this discussion. I have been
travelling and busy since my return. Due to this I have not really been
following prior threads closely enough to respond in detail. It is easier
for me to start a new thread, accepting that in doing so, in ignorance of
other discussions, I risk redundancy.

I understand all art to be intrinsically participatory. That is why, since
the early 1980¹s, I have primarily made interactive artworks. My current
thinking on this is focused on two things. Firstly, expanded concepts of
agency (what or who can be an active participant?) and secondly, but
directly emerging from the first question, how creativity and knowledge
formation can be regarded as forms of social interaction rather than
outcomes of activities. I am not going to address the first question here in
any detail as it is not explicitly evoked in Empyre¹s current theme,
although I will suggest that Latour¹s concept of actor-network-theory can be
seen as a useful platform for understanding interactions between people and
things and how these interactions altogether might permit authorship and
creativity to emerge as sets of discursive relations rather than outcomes of
processes.

Here I will focus on creativity as a function of communities and something
that brings communities into existence.

Specific creative communities can be regarded as microcosms of larger
communities. Communities of artists, as with other communities, develop as
cultural paradigms crystallise or dissipate. This is a recursive and
iterative process involving complex social interactions. Particular creative
communities can act as a lens through which social change may be observed.
Many contemporary communities exist as both local and global phenomena, in
Ocreative cities¹ and Oglobal networks¹, and appear to draw value from this
conjunction of opposites. Many current examples from networked culture could
be cited here, from large scale communities of dispersed interests
(Facebook) to specialist communities with acutely honed interests (Empyre).
An insight here is that whilst creativity is often perceived as the product
of the individual artist, or creative ensemble, it can also be considered an
emergent phenomenon of communities, driving change and facilitating
individual or ensemble creativity. The key understanding here is that
creativity can be a performative activity (Latour¹s concept of
actor-network-theory is useful here) released when engaged through and by a
community.
 
In this context the model of the solitary artist, producing artefacts that
embody creativity, is contested as the ideal method to achieve creative
outcomes. Here creativity is proposed as an activity of exchange that
enables (creates) people and communities. Anthropologist James Leach, in his
book Creative Land (2003), observes and describes cultural practices where
the creation of new things and the ritualised forms of exchange enacted
around them function to both ³create² individuals and bind them to social
groups, thus ³creating² the community they inhabit. Leach¹s argument is an
interesting take on the concept of the gift-economy. Given this
understanding, it is possible to conceive of creativity as emergent from and
innate to the interactions of people. Such an understanding also combats an
instrumentalist view of creativity and novelty, where governments and
corporations demand of artists and researchers that their creations and
inventions have clear social (read ³economic²) value. In the argument
proposed here, creativity is not valued as arising from a perceived need, a
solution or product, nor from a supply-side ³blue skies² ideal, but as an
emergent property of communities.

Marika Luders (³Why and how online sociability became part and parcel of
teenage life², Blackwell Handbook of Internet Studies 2009) observes that
creativity Ois now commonly understood as part of what constitutes human
beings. Moreover, creativity is not necessarily (or even ever) an isolated
phenomenon¹. Rob Pope ( Creativity: Theory, History, Practice, Routledge
2005) states Obeing creative is, at least potentially, the natural and
normal state of anyone healthy in a sane and stimulating community S
realising that potential is as much a matter of collaboration and
Oco-creation¹ as of splendid or miserable isolation¹. Thus it can be argued
that all communities are potentially creative.
 
In this context we need to ask what ³creativity² is? We can seek to situate
it as an activity defined by and defining of communities, seeking to
transcend the debate on the instrumentality of creativity and knowledge,
situating innovation as an ontological factor in the formation of
communities. This approach allows the deconstruction of traditional
perceptions of creative activities and the development of a less reductive
understanding of creativity and its value. Doing this leads directly to
fundamental questions regarding the public value of creativity and the role
it plays in creating communities. I would propose the term ontopoeisis to
describe these processes.

This is the position I am currently trying to develop. I am not sure where
it will go at this stage. I am not even sure if my thinking here is
reflected in my own artistic practice. It might be, to some degree, in that
I involve audiences, spectators and often unwitting passers-by in the
generation of material that constitutes the actual artwork ­ and of course I
recognise the all-powerful character of the ³reader² who interprets a work
into existence. But this is not quite the same thing as what I am seeking to
describe above. As an artist who is very much a product of 20th century
individualism, acting upon things and acted upon, splendidly unitary in my
identity, it is a challenge to understand something as core to the sense of
self as creativity in a new way, fundamentally different to how familiar
models propose it.

As I argue that creativity is a process of becoming, so to is coming to
viscerally understand this.

Regards

Simon


Simon Biggs
Research Professor
edinburgh college of art
s.biggs at eca.ac.uk
www.eca.ac.uk
www.eca.ac.uk/circle/

simon at littlepig.org.uk
www.littlepig.org.uk
AIM/Skype: simonbiggsuk


Edinburgh College of Art (eca) is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC009201


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