Creative Industries

Washington, D.C.
I'm spending the next couple of days at the Creativity & Cognition conference here in Washington. Ernest Edmonds begins by noting that the conference series itself (which has been running since 1993) started from the intention to bring together artists and scientists, and that it's been successful at setting the seeds for increased collaborations between the fields; indeed, questions around creativity and innovation have become highly central to many projects and programmes in scientific research and beyond.

Boston.
From the packed plenary theatre we have now moved on to the first of the smaller sessions (which is similarly full) - one of nine or ten parallel sessions (so please don't take these blog entries as entirely representative of MiT5 proper...). This session is on creative labour in a produsage environment, and Mirko Tobias Schäfer begins by "Revisiting the Case of Interactive Audiences and the User as Producer". He notes that in 1983 TIME nominated the (personal) computer as 'machine of the year' - an interesting precursor of the recent nomination of 'you' as person of the year 2006, which has perhaps redressed the balance again from technology to users.

My colleague Justin Brow is next; he's been involved in the development of Sticky.net.au and is a researcher in the QUT Institute for Creative Industries and Innovation (iCi). He begins with a brief introduction to the economic role of the creative industries - some 140,000 people are working directly in the CI in Australia, but the focus of CI analysis is now shifting from the production of creative outputs themselves to creative industries' input into other industries; some 160,000 people in Australia work in creative occupations within other industries. A further 150,000 people work in managerial and administrative roles related to the CI, establishing a 'creative trident' of occupations and contributing some $21billion to Australian GDP (this is set to double in the coming years).

At the Creative Places + Spaces conference in Toronto last year, I met a couple of colleagues from Breda University in the Netherlands, who run a number of creative industries-related courses - but in a leisure management context, which is quite different from the approach we're taking at QUT, but also includes exciting new concepts such as ' imagineering'. This week, Peter Horsten and Arend Hardorff are in Brisbane to visit QUT as well as a number of other local organisations (such as Michael Doneman's Edgeware) and explore opportunities for further collaboration. Last night, Ann and I took them out for dinner at the Tibetan Kitchen, and ended up chatting until the restaurant staff had to tell us in no uncertain terms 'we're closing now'. Let's hope we can maintain the connection - good to see you again, guys...

Tartu, Estonia
Well, after a brief few days visiting family in Germany we've now made it to the 100,000-strong university city of Tartu in southeastern Estonia (the country's second-largest city). I'm here for the CATaC 2006 (or Cultural Attitudes towards Technology and Communication) conference, which will take place here over the next three days. This is actually my second time here in Estonia - ISEA2004 was in Tallinn, and the presence of such conferences is a clear sign of the keen interest of the Estonian university and government sector in embracing technological and intellectual advances. By now Estonia is one of the best-connected countries of the world, with WiFi hotspots virtually everywhere in the major centres.

Dresden
The next session is on creative commons-related issues; Mark Latonero is the first speaker. He notes that Tim Berners-Lee suggests that the whole added value of the Internet is serendipitous re-use. The creative commons represents an emerging technological and legal mechanism for this re-use, and a significant challenge to the traditional copyright industries. It is a legitimising tool for cultural technologies on the Internet. Mark adminstered a questionnaire to the winners of the recent Wired creative commons remix contest.