[-empyre-] Creativity as a social ontology

[helen varley jamieson]

this looks like a great project, eugenio. it brings to mind a smaller, & 
not networked, but similar project led by a friend of mine a few years 
ago in backa palanka, a small town on the border of serbia & croatia. 
people in this town who had formerly worked, lived, & played together on 
either side of the river were divided by the war & literally had not 
crossed the bridge since then. the project brought them together to 
paint flags for peace, culminating with a march across the bridge (altho 
one or two of the participants were still too afraid to cross).

i'd agree that in both cases, the creative/artistic project is a pretext 
for community (re)building - unexpected for megafone but intentional in 
the case of backa palanka; & perhaps a necessary pretext in both cases. 
definitely "creativity as an activity of exchange that enables (creates) 
people & communities", as simon proposed in his introduction.

getting back to the networked context, what this adds is the ability to 
initiate such projects where circumstances make it difficult or 
impossible to bring people physically together.

h : )

On 7/07/10 11:01 AM, Eugenio Tisselli wrote:
> Hi Helen,
>
> I fully agree with you that commonality is a necessary condition for the emergence of a community... which, in turn, will constantly transform the very nature of that commonality through interaction between its members. I also believe that commonality can be subtle, or even contradictory: a community may form even emerge out of people holding antagonistic positions. Let me illustrate:
>
> Last year, megafone.net was invited to do a project in Manizales, Colombia, involving two groups: displaced people (people who had to abandon their home towns because of violence) and de-mobilized people (ex-guerrilleros). Obvously, these two groups are in extreme positions, which can be understood as the opposite ends of the Colombian conflict. However, they were all willing to work on the project. Antoni Abad, the head of megafone.net, went there and started the project by working separately with both groups. Each group would share a common mobile phone, from which the participants could send tagged images and audio clips to a web page. The goal for each group was to create and share a "community memory", in which they would reflect their daily life. Each week, the phone would change hands and would be passed on to another participant.
>
> Surprisingly, after a few days of activity, the participants themselves asked Antoni if he could arrange a meeting of both groups. And then it happened: displaced and demobilized people were shaking hands and even hugging each other after realizing that they had so many things in common. According to our Colombian hosts, something like this had never happened before.
>
> The web-based community memory they created together is available at megafone.net:
> http://www.megafone.net/TEMPORAL
>
> If I have to see this project in retrospective, I must say that the web page both groups created using mobile phones unexpectedly worked as a pretext for their face-to-face meeting. I also have to say that this community's creative production of itself is reflected in the folksonomy which emerged from their participation in the project, which can be viewed here:
> http://www.megafone.net/TEMPORAL/tags.php
>
> The most relevant tags speak for themselves.
>
> Finally, I must admit that my intention to start from a taxonomy of networks was maybe a little too far-fetched. I agree that networks are a good example of a fluid space, which can hardly be made to fit into a set of fixed categories. But I just wanted to try and see if we could characterize and find different types of networks, and see if we could identify which of their traits favor (or inhibit) collective creativity.
>
>
>
> Eugenio Tisselli Vélez
> cubo23 at yahoo.com
> http://www.motorhueso.net
>
>

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