[-empyre-] Creativity as a social ontology

[davin heckman]

I have been scanning the emails the last couple weeks and am sorry I
haven't had time to jump in.  But I think this month's theme is
explored in an interesting way in the film, Inception (which is in
theaters, now).

Scott writes, "In general, I agree with the idea that creativity, or
creative practice, is the outcome of an agency that is located as much
in a community or an environment as much as it is in an individual.
The "genius", the solitary "author" is a thing of the past, which was
always already an economic construct used to assign rights more than
it was a description of creative practice. I believe both that
creativity is enabled by communities (among other ways, by recognizing
and validating  creative work as "real work") and is in most cases
actually the outcome of a collaborative process (books, for instance,
involve a designer, a typesetter, a bookbinder, an editor, a
distributor, and so on)."

I think Inception, when viewed in light of comments like these by
Scott (and others on the list, makes for an interesting experience.
The basic premise of the film is that creativity is expressed at a
deep level (a psychological one), but is drawn from social experience.
 Circulating around this, is a running discussion of how ideas can
have radical implications for being, for our notions of reality.
Purely individualistic "knowledge" is held up in ethical distinction
to collectively held "knowledge," but certainty is never a luxury for
viewers (or characters).  Similarly, there are practical limitations
to individual genius, not the least of which is the disruption to
creativity posed by certain knowledge....  the other is necessary in
this world that Nolan has created.  The film also touches on aspects
of play and virtual reality, although it roots these discussions in
human consciousness (rather than machine intelligence, as you get with
the Matrix and the typical scifi headtrip films).   In it, you'll see
shades of Nolan's earlier Memento, but as a whole, I think it is a
better film.

Peace!

Davin


On Mon, Jul 26, 2010 at 8:08 AM, Scott Rettberg <scott.rettberg at uib.no> wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> I have just spent some time reading through the stream of messages written over the course of this month regarding creativity as a social ontology in an attempt to begin to frame my thoughts around these questions and determine how I can most productively contribute to the discussion. I think I can contribute best via some discussion of the work I have done over the past decade with the Electronic Literature Organization (eliterature.org) and with the project "Developing a Network Based Creative Community: Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice" (elmcip.net), a Humanities in the European Research Area project which Simon and I are working on with other researchers at institutions in the UK, Norway, Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, and Slovenia. Largely due to Simon's thought and efforts, one of the central research questions of this project essentially connected to theme of this month's empire discussion, in that much of the research will b
>  e focused on how the conditions of social and technological networks can enable the formation of creative communities. In doing so, the project will both examine electronic literature and digital arts communities as case studies of creativity as a social ontology, and produce a number of outcomes that we hope will help to develop creative and research communities of e-lit within Europe.  These will include an ethnographic study of specific creative communities, a knowledge base with bibliographic(style) records and descriptions of individual works, artists and events related to electronic literature, an anthology of works of electronic literature including pedagogical materials which will be distributed on a free and open base, several seminars on specific aspects of electronic literature and its relationship to specific cultural contexts, such as performance and publishing, an international conference, and exhibition. A simple way to put it is that we will be engaged in a r
>  eflective research practice, doing work we help will advance and develop a field of creative and critical practice at the same time as we are examining structures and practices within that field in order to discern characteristics and patterns that are generalizable and useful to the formation and development of other fields of network-based creative practice.
>
> I hope that Simon will provide an explanation of how the overall frame of this project is in many ways a reaction to the idea that the phrase "Creativity and Innovation" has largely been co-opted as a term of corporate parlance.
>
> Like many other creative practitioners and humanities researchers, I am resistant to the idea that creativity or innovation could or should be framed in an instrumentalist way. That is to say that one way of thinking of creativity is that it is what happens in a "trendy" neighborhood of a city before the landlords are able to raise the rents, gentrify the neighborhood, and send the artists packing to the next marginal neighborhood. The value of creativity I'm most interested in is not that sort of economic measure, but instead its cultural value, which is not easily quantifiable: that is to say the capacity art has to make us better understand how humans operated in the past, what they are becoming in the present, and how they might operate in the future. It is also quite simply the value of play that makes human environments more livable. I operate on the assumption that the accountant who walks to work through a sculpture garden is more likely to have a better experience of
>  his day than the accountant who drives straight from the suburb to the office cubicle. You might argue that the "surplus value" of any given environment or system is the art produced within it. So  in a very general sense, I am interested in electronic literature and digital art forms as the reflective human reaction to the technologically mediated globalized communication environment, the play in the system, the use of tools developed for other purposes for the creation of contemporary cultural practices and artifacts.
>
> Let me offer a few thoughts and comments on a couple of the ideas that have come up during the discussion so far:
>
> Simon: "I am entertaining the idea that agency is of (or is) the relationships between things (whatever those things might be). In this respect I am proposing a folding of agency and creativity into one thing which might be considered somewhat like a dark matter which binds everything together."
>
> In general, I agree with the idea that creativity, or creative practice, is the outcome of an agency that is located as much in a community or an environment as much as it is in an individual. The "genius", the solitary "author" is a thing of the past, which was always already an economic construct used to assign rights more than it was a description of creative practice. I believe both that creativity is enabled by communities (among other ways, by recognizing and validating  creative work as "real work") and is in most cases actually the outcome of a collaborative process (books, for instance, involve a designer, a typesetter, a bookbinder, an editor, a distributor, and so on). The culture of the network has to a greater degree made the collaborative process visible, in an odd way, because of the fact that technology enables individuals to much more of this work by themselves. A work of electronic literature can be written, programmed, designed, and distributed by one perso
>  n in a way that a published printed book could not be. Yet the very nature of producing work, for a network, for a platform, using software written by huge collaborative teams, which is then read or experienced by a participatory audience, who more often than not affect the way that the art is received and that the artist changes and changes his or her own practice, in an an endless feedback loop that cycles very quickly, strips bare the idea of "authorship" or "creativity" as located within any particular individual. I think it is now almost accepted as a given that creativity is enabled by social relations and cultural contexts more than by inspiration.
>
> Sean Cubitt:  "What is the materiality of the formative agency which constitutes relationships and forms things? (You already know which rabbit is in the hat, simon, but allow me the ta-dah moment): it is is mediation. . . . The unit question is then a question about the mode of order applied in any specific media formation. Grosso modo, we are in an era characterised by unit enumeration (as opposed, for example, to the geometrical moment of the renaissance), so the question poses itself as unitary: as digital, as inflected by the exchange principle. On one hand this is why the temptation exists to seek out the individual. The effort of thinking otherwise - deleuze's 'dividual' for example - is troubling, but is necessary if we are to understand a) how the 'dark matter' becomes the medium (!) of privation and power  that is the specific existential quality of the ontological at the given moment and b) how to operate on it in such a way as to form it otherwise - which is where
>  the creative operates."
>
> I really like this formulation of creativity, that the role of the creative within a system is to "operate on it in such as way as to form it otherwise." I'll admit that in much of my own work with the ELO and with other organizations, I have focused not necessarily on operating outside of a system or within any sort of temporary autonomous zone, but rather on the creation and formulation of new social structures both within and outside of existing systems. This is to say that I believe in the power of organized approaches to advancing a field of creative practice. Some creative communities simply emerge via loose and ad hoc affiliations. On the other hand, in putting together the ELO, we have always been focused on establishing a kind of institutional identity. The activities of the ELO have ranged from online resources, in person conferences, awards, publications and activities focused on archiving and preservation, over the years, but to be honest, I think the most importa
>  nt role the ELO has played in advancing e-lit has been that it has served as a stable point of reference for a particular discourse community. Having an institutional presence, creating a systematized social structure, makes a creative practice that was often dismissed by existing institutional structures comprehensible to them.
>
> I might be taking Sean's observation in a different direction than intended, but I believe that the best reaction to a system that does not allow for or encourage creative practice is not only to work outside of that system, but also to create a new system that does have those affordances. I argue that one of the great opportunities created by network culture is the opportunity it provides us to build new modes of creative practice, systems of distribution, and models of the relationship between artists and their audiences. A couple of weeks ago, I was at a Roundtable Seminar on "Language-Driven Mediated Research" at Kingston University, UK. There's a good write-up of the event here: (http://openreflections.wordpress.com/2010/07/21/the-struggle-to-define-a-position-what-will-be-the-future-of-electronic-literature/). Jay David Bolter presented a rather bleak history of the relationship between electronic literature and "Literature" as institutionally defined, and proposed that
>  perhaps the institutional contexts of visual art would be a better place for electronic literature to be culturally situated. My response was to suggest that we need not be constrained by the institutional definitions of the twentieth century, that instead we can and should imagine and develop other institutional contexts where digital culture can be studied and produced, without entirely adopting or being confined by the vocabulary of a particular institutional context. This sort of "third space" is not only entirely possible, I argued, we are already producing it. The challenges to developing better environments for creative practice, in my view, are not mainly problems of conceptualization, they are problems of articulation and of the logistics of formulating those environments in ways that they are able to compete and coexist with existing institutional structures.
>
> Of course, one of the things I find remarkable about my experience with the ELO was how quickly, after creating an organization that was itself a reaction to a lack of suitable institutional infrastructure for a particular form of creative practice, that system itself becomes "the establishment." Shortly after we put out the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1, in 2006, which was one of the only widely distributed edited collections of e-lit published during the decade, a debate began about "canon formation" within the electronic literature community. That is, because the formalized publishing environment for e-lit had become stagnant, as soon any sort of formalized publication activity took place, it was conceived of as an establishment (or establishment-forming) activity. The new system very quickly becomes the old system, and the cycle begins anew.
>
> I still have some notes on a number of other posts that I hope to use for further response later in the week, but I think I'll stop there for now, and look forward to the discussion.
>
> All the Best,
>
> Scott
>
>
>
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