[-empyre-] Creativity as a social ontology

[helen varley jamieson]

hi everyone,
thank you simon & renate for the invitation to be part of this 
discussion, & thanks eugenio for starting things off : )

speaking as a live performance/theatre artist, i'm also of the opinion 
that creativity doesn't happen in isolation or on our own; we are always 
building on what has gone before. in this sense, creativity can be 
understood as interaction & conversation, or even a translation 
(interpretation) ... my work is pretty much always dialogic, it is a 
creative exchange between performer(s) & audience in a shared moment 
(whether we are physically or virtually present, the time is shared).

to begin to respond to simon's questions, in particular "Does the 
internet facilitate the creation of communities where new modalities of 
creativity, authorship and exchange emerge?", i'll give as an example 
one of the projects that i've been involved with since 2003: the online 
cyberformance platform UpStage (http://www.upstage.org.nz/). the project 
began with the practical needs/desires of four artists, & over the years 
a thriving community has evolved around it. there are about 50 artists 
currently working with UpStage to create performances for the annual 
festival (& there might well be others using UpStage who i don't know 
about), around 300 on the mailing list, & it's used in educational 
situations from primary school through to universities. there is a small 
ongoing developer community as well.

one aspect of the UpStage community that particularly delights me is the 
emergence of cross-collaboration between the artists; four of the 19 
performances selected for this year's festival involve collaborations 
between artists who have met through UpStage (& mostly have not met in 
the flesh). this is similar to my experience with Avatar Body Collision 
- we came together through online networks & still have not all met, 8 
years & 10 performances later. this kind of remote collaboration is not 
so unusual today, but what's different with UpStage is the wider context 
- the ongoing interaction is not only between collaborating artists but 
also between artists, developers & audience - there is the sense that we 
are all cross-pollinating at several levels of creation - the 
performances, the software, & the community. each of these three things 
is being created by, & contributing to the creation of, the other two in 
a very organic (ontological?) way.

to pick up on eugenio's reference to trust - trust is central/essential 
both to communities and to theatre/performance. establishing trust is 
something that proximal (i.e. not online) theatre ensembles usually do 
at the start of a project if the members don't already know each other - 
playing games to build familiarity & a sense of connection between the 
individuals (i.e., community). any sort of live performance requires 
trust between the players - from trusting that your co-actor will 
remember their lines, to the confidence that your trapeze partner will 
catch you & not let you fall to the ground. online, trust takes on a new 
signficance. working remotely with people you've never met & know little 
about can require a risky leap of trust, but one that has to be taken. 
we also have to place enormous trust in technologies, at the same time 
as knowing that the internet is an unstable environment ...

hmm; i'm not quite sure how to tie that all back into the original 
questions, but i'll send this now anyway as i've just been handed 5 
bamboo stakes which are desperately needed by some rampant tomato plants 
on the balcony ...

h : )

On 5/07/10 12:30 AM, Eugenio Tisselli wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> First, let me thank Simon and Renate for inviting me, I'm very excited to be part of this month's discussion at empyre.
>
> Please allow me to be straightforward: lately I have grown quite wary of the idea of creativity itself. If I look at it in its traditional sense, as the act of producing something from out of nothing, I find that there is too much theological "background noise" in it. My suspicion surrounding creativity stronlgy developed after reading George Steiner's book "Grammars of creation" (2001), which starts out in an amazing way by saying that "we have no more beginnings left". Throughout the book, Steiner argues that our western vision of the act of creation is deeply rooted in religion; in the idea of the Platonic demiurge, who fashions the material world out of chaos. Seen from a contemporary perspective, this original idea seems almost unsustainable. At some point, Steiner proposes that instead of considering our acts as being creative, we should see them as being inventive, suggesting that we actually make new things only by assembling and manipulating
>   their constituent elements, which already existed before. Of course, Steiner was not the first one to question the idea of the artist as a creator: we only need to turn towards the well-known "objet trouvé". So, the artist as inventor may cause the solitary artist that Simon mentions in his introduction to crumble under his/her own weight, for an artist is never solitary even if working in isolation. The artefacts produced will necessarily be polyphonic, and will contain the echo of those who came before and provided the raw materials, however hidden they may be: the multiple beats within the singular.
>
> Nevertheless, I am willing to accept a contemporary idea of creativity that is detached from its Greek-Latin roots, and which necessarily implies the interweaving of collective threads in innovative ways. I would like to address one of Simon's questions, "How might we understand creativity as interaction, as sets of discursive relations?", by refering to Bruno Latour's book, "Reassembling the social". In his book, Latour points out that we should not view "the social" as a given entity which exists per se, but rather as something that is continuously re-created (or re-invented) through the multiple interactions of its actors. I largely agree with this vision, but I find that this continuous re-making of the social is not necessarily a creative act. Everywhere we may find groups of people immersed in an array of constant interrelations, from which all sorts of destructive actions can emerge. I believe that creativity emerges from individuals and their
>   social relations (physical or virtual) only when the interaction among them is focused constructively, and is based on the idea of a common good, mutual trust and shared engagement. Emergent communities whose relations are mediated by digital networks may find their creative potential increased quantitatively, in terms of number of individuals, and qualitatively because of their diversity, but I think that building and maintaining trust and engagement within them becomes particularly important, as these networks tend to promote rather detached/ephemeral ("just a click away") modes of interrelation.
>
> Just a few general thoughts to start off...
>
> Looking forward to hearing from you!
>
> Eugenio.
>
>
>
> Eugenio Tisselli Vélez
> cubo23 at yahoo.com
> http://www.motorhueso.net
>
>    

-- 
____________________________________________________________

helen varley jamieson: creative catalyst
helen at creative-catalyst.com
http://www.creative-catalyst.com
http://www.avatarbodycollision.org
http://www.upstage.org.nz
____________________________________________________________