[-empyre-] Creativity as a social ontology

[Johannes Birringer]

hi all


it was mentioned that the hacklabs or grassroots or alternative organizations /
spaces you described this week might be like


 >a disorientating space that combined
> apparently ad-hoc activity, gatherings, open resources and anarchic
> imagination to provide inspiration and great compost for a whole load of
> people to come together and then go and find out what they could do to
> hack around given structures. 

spaces or temporary zones, in other words, where things might happen or do happen and then 
the energies disperse or people move on, dissociate,  or sustainability (of anything really) becomes an issue or is actually
rarely achievable, and yet the "social" or "organizational" creativity is claimed.  Why is that?

>There is a often a flourishing of
>identity and shared purpose that comes out of such conditions...the
>phrase 'network ecologies' has become commonly used, right?


I am not sure whether i would trust the common usage, and if I could remember it more precisely, I would recount you the
harsh critiques i read the other day (in the german press)  about Green Peace and its fumbling social networking in the face
of the catastrophic oil spill from the BP offshore drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico.  

I think Ruth was somewhat trying to address the illusions harbored by "network ecologies:" and hactivism, when she wrote

>>We all know now that the high levels of connectivity promoted by
networked thinking and action have the potential to be exceedingly
generative; releasing energy and ideas by allowing us to connect across
distances and differences. Obviously these networked environments have
appeared to offer boundless possibilities, freedoms and new orders of
productivity. This is what lies behind the reification of digital
creativity by politicians and economists...Ironically many arts
organisations survive on the surplus dreams of this promise of a new
route to unlimited economic growth.>>

yes, and wasn't there a "blueprint" launched  for the UK's creative industries this week?  

what i am trying to get at are the terms and underlying hopes that were articulated
last week about activism, grass roots,  or this exceedingly generative creativity mentioned above, the
shared passions, the "community," the collaborations. and so on.  but we can't say for sure what impact
social networks have. can we?  and what kind of  impact?   impact now is also a government
assessment term, and rings hollow as it will be used ideologically and with economic repercussions. 

what i gathered from the posts was a generally shared claim that people involved, intermittently,
with these spaces you described explored and "learnt a lot about different ways of organizing." 
 

Magnus did address this briefly:

>>Yes, this was sometimes controversial at The Chateau: whether we were
a community at all or just "...different folk sharing different spaces
at different times, for example" ;)>>


I think the posts raised so many - perhaps not easily answerable - questions that almost none were asked this week.


regards
Johannes Birringer
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