----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
Tim,
disturbing, I agree with Ana, but not surprising. I also find lamentable
the attempted institutional capture of start-up culture, which is
decreasingly creative and collaborative as a result. Hypervolatility of
markets seems to promise high IT investors - from both the corpocratic
and academic classes and the State - the potential for Gold Rush gain.
But the answer has been to Taylorise, incubate, hotbed, corral and
normalise, to manage, in short, innovation and collaboration.
Pitching has become theatre, the competitive edge taken off it in
rituals undergone with nothing more at stake than the spectacle, the
slideshow, the cant, than the assertion, recognition and reinforcement
of cultural belonging. Collaborative teams are vetted at open auditions,
where even the conveners of these spectacular rites concede that they
are doing little more than flattering their own egos - the new patrons
of high IT - with their involvement, arbitration, with the thought that
their input makes the slightest difference which black swan start-up
wins against the outrageous odds and succeeds - in accumulating, no, not
money, and not cultural capital, but social capital: in gaining users
online.
I've found more open exchange - equal and free - amongst the
entrepreneurs who engage in this culture and those others whose
engagement with start-up culture is disinterested - to the extent that
they mentor and invest without expectation of reward (which is nothing
less than patronage) - than within the worlds of art and theatre. This
has partly to do with being in New Zealand, part of a small town
syndrome. But it interests me, the complicity of artists with coteries
and a politics of ressentiment.
Perhaps creation will go where it has to. I suspect I am also pointing
to a frontier, where it has not yet been captured: the wild west of IT.
I am thinking of the limits introjected by the artists and theatre
practitioners I know, limits ideological, limits economic, limits
colonial, and those as consequence that come to serve to mitigate,
tranq, anaesthetise and capture the wild, the impossible overreaching -
and its violence - I consider as essential to truly creative collaboration.
Best,
Simon Taylor
www.squarewhiteworld.com
On 26/05/13 04:39, Timothy Conway Murray wrote:
----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
Dear Brooke and Gaby,
Thanks ever so much for raising the issue of collaboration and corporatization.
Many of you might have come across the widespread publicity disseminated by
Cornell University, where Renate and I teach, regarding the new Tech Campus it
is building on Roosevelt Island in New York City, in partnership with the City
and Technion University of Israel. A large emphasis of this publicity is a new
collaborative model of Master's education in Technology (primarily in
Information Science and Engineering). The collaboration in this case is
between big tech industry and graduate students eager to glean profits from
their training in higher education. This model of higher education/corporate
collaboration is well know to all of us (its precedent was collaboration
between higher education and the defense industry) and is being promoted by the
governor of New York State (who just authorized the free use of university
buildings for tech start-up companies -- at a time when the arts and
h
umanities have no funds for basic teaching needs).
So I'm so grateful to you, Ricardo, Gaby, and others who are emphasizing the
empowerment brought by collaboration on not-for-profit models of artistic
practice and social engagement. We all know that this is an uphill battle.
For the moderators of -empyre-, the articulation of these issues, even in the
relative quiet of the natural glories of May, situates new media praxis on a
different plane that found in so many of our cultures and universities as they
face massive cutbacks in the arts and cultural sector at the very time when we
need alternative models of social collaboration the most.
Renate and I are now off to celebrate the university graduation of our son who
with his classmates in Art at Cornell have been engaging in various levels of
just such artistic collaborational practice. We strongly believe that
alternative voices and practices do alter the grain of the hegemonic voice of
our corporate driven global culture.
Best,
Tim
Tim
Best,
Tim
Director, Society for the Humanities
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
A. D. White House
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York. 14853
________________________________________
From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
[empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] on behalf of Brooke Singer
[bro...@bsing.net]
Sent: Thursday, May 23, 2013 10:08 AM
To: soft_skinned_space
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Brooke's post
Hi Gaby,
Thanks for bringing up scale. This is one of the reasons that brought me to
collaborate in the first place and I think one of the most powerful forces
that bring people to work together. You can do more than you can alone. You
can do things that you can't do otherwise. The social aspect, it's more fun
to work with others than by yourself, was compelling for me as well. That
fun should not be overlooked (as Renate is bringing up in another
thread...); it has to do both with our social being-ness but also powerful
ways of learning. In my past collaborations, primarily preemptive media, we
worked side-by-side a lot of the time, learning from each other and
learning through doing. We had our own specializations but over the years
those lines blurred a lot. Division of labor, or factory style, helps to
speed things up and cannot be dismissed altogether but I tell my students
to not rely on that method solely because you will miss out. Collaborating
is skill sharing. There is also the important role of the one not "in the
know" who will most likely question assumptions and automatic ways of
working that happen when have done something over and over again for a long
time.
Also something that I came to realize after starting to collaborate was how
important group work is as incubator for socially engaged or issue based
projects. The work originates from conversation, debate, struggles, mutual
aid -- not from a single perspective.
The corporatization of which you speak is pervasive. (I see it starkly in
the language of grant writing these days.) The corporate world is very
hierarchical and antithetical to what I describe above, but then so is
academia. I try to counter it in my courses by replicating what I have
found to be successful in my own work: bringing together disparate groups
of people with differing skill sets (that is the leveler) but a common
desire. In the specific class I mentioned before the common desire is to
further the mission of the non-profits with which we work (hand picked by
me). Most of the semester is reading, discussion, brainstorming, testing...
the final production of the work is only the last couple of weeks. By
emphasizing or making space for everything but the finished project I keep
everyone in the space of experimenting and learning longer. There is time
to learn each other's languages, work different angles, learn through
doing, prototype, beta test, fail (...or not just make a company website
for the organization who does not know how to build one!). It was
interesting for me to see in the 3 groups that I worked with this term that
only one resorted to a clear hierarchy where a student stepped into the
role of the director. It's will of course be really interesting to see over
the next decade how collaboration pro/regresses in cultural production and
what it means to students who are digital natives, immersed 24/7 in social
media and grow up with the mass marketed concept of sharing.
Brooke
----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
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