[-empyre-] Creativity as a Social Ontology

[Scott Rettberg]

Hello again,

To Ruth, of course I would say no apology necessary. I don't think it's even possible to be interrupted on a mailing list, and I appreciated your post and the view into the creative environment at Furtherfield. It sounds like an inspiring environment, in spite of the challenges of sustaining an arts NPO in the current economy and political reality in the UK.

I did the thing that I always do when I post to a mailing last night, which is read what I posted a few hours earlier and find myself surprised that I don't entirely agree with everything I just posted. (This is why I rarely contribute to discussion-based mailing lists). Specifically, I want to clarify what I meant when I said that you might argue that art is the "surplus value" of any given environment or system is the art produced within it. By that I don't simply mean that I believe that art generates more economic value in a particular environment (it may or may not). What I mean rather is that at the end of the day, the art is the remaining value that the culture has generated, in a long-term sense. The cave paintings at Lascaux, Mayan figurines, Grecian urns, Gilgamesh, the Odyssey, Shakespeare's plays, and so on give us far more to work with toward an understanding of cultures past and the human race in the process of becoming and the relationship of the individual to society than would a history of crop cycles and droughts or currency fluctuations and recessions. So maybe it would be better to say that I don't think art is "surplus value" but rather "the historical remnant value" of the system. The extreme version of this argument would be to say that we produce art and we raise children, and little else matters after we are dead.

I can already see the holes in that gross simplification, but I won't bother pointing them out. There are a number of other values that matter to us now, of course. 

I believe that the main cultural function of digital or network-based art and literature in the future will be to provide us with ways of understanding how human expression and discourse changed during the period of adapting to a globalized technologically mediated communication environment. Of course, maybe the cultural historians or anthropologists of the future will simply download the facebook archive, but I think there is some value to reflective artistic production that is less inherent in the sorts of discourse we engage in on social networks.

Also, while I provided the example of an accountant walking to work in a sculpture garden vs. fighting traffic en route to work as a way in which I think that art can create a more playful and more humanizing environment, this is not to say that I think art should always comfort or console. If the same accountant encountered a photographic exhibition of dead sea turtles and oil-covered pelicans, was deeply disturbed, and immediately walked into his office at BP HQ and quit his job, to devastating personal consequences, I would also consider that a successful work of art.

One of the things I really appreciated over the course of the past week was the juxtaposition of Magnus' story of the Chit and the Chateau with Ruth's narrative of Furtherfield. Both were clearly successful in generating social environments for creative practice. I thought that Magnus' observation that he is glad The Chateau did not outlast its drawbacks was particularly indicative of  a distinction between the two sorts of collective activities. The Chateau, it seems to me, is an example of a locally-based ad hoc artist's support network, a sort of flower that sprung from the weeds of a crumbling architecture. It reminds me of the sort of environments in which the Dada loosely and temporarily organized themselves. Furtherfield, on the other hand, seems to have a fairly clearly articulated mission "for art, technology, and social change." I admire both sorts of commitments: on the one hand, in the case The Chateau to take advantage of a certain chance set of circumstances and meeting of personalities to produce a temporary network and environment for creative practice (a sort of happening with an extended if temporary duration), and in the case of Furtherfield, to support a number of diverse artistic, technological, and activist practices under one umbrella in a sustained way. 

One aspect I'm interested in exploring about the differing natures of these sorts of collectives, organizations, etc. is the way in which locality and sustained in-person interaction are at play with network-based practices that do not (or do they) depend on as much on face to face interaction.

I thought that Eugenio's earlier observation of his experience illustrates this tension and one potential resolution: 

"The experience I have had with my work so far has been mostly with "hybrid" communities: groups of people who get together face to face, but also in virtual environments. I believe that the limits of digital networks are compensated by physical gatherings, and vice-versa. Of course, it is not always possible to bring about this sort of experience, but I believe it propitiates an environment in which people can potentially get the best of both worlds. There are elements in each which can encourage creativity: in gatherings, people get to socialize and thus build relations of trust. They find common interests and goals, and start to imagine together. In a digital network, people find tools to empower communication: folksonomies, maps, multimedia communication, etc. So, to wrap this up, I would say that gatherings provide a "heart" and "spirit" for the group, and that digital networks provide tools for efficacy. When combined, these elements can result in powerful creative endeavors."

My experience both with the ELO, and with a number of creative collaborations over the years has been the same. The ELO was born in 1999 as a network-based organization. Where the office has been located (first in Chicago, then in LA, and currently in College Park, MD) has never been as important to the work of the organization except to the extent that a basic support structure was available to keep the machinery of running an NPO in motion, in comparison to the work carried out in different locations, which then comes together on the network. The board has always been geographically dispersed. On the other hand, without regular in-person interactions at ELO conferences and elsewhere, I don't think the network of social relations and collaborative activity on which the organization is sustained would exist or last. 

As an American living in Norway, I have a local network of friends and collaborators, of course, but many of my deepest friendships and most productive collaborations are with people I see in person only once or twice a year. Yet the magic of networked communication technologies is that those people don't *feel* any further from me than do my colleagues down the hall. I do think there is something to the idea that the network can collapse geographic distance and change the nature of human communication and interaction.

I'd like to follow up on Johannes and Simon's discussion of authorship later in another post, but back to work for now. 

(I just read your excellent paper, btw, Simon:  http://www.littlepig.org.uk/texts/authoragency.pdf)

All the Best,

Scott

p.s. I appear to be having trouble getting messages through to the list from my work account. My apologies if you receive this message twice.
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