Creative Practice for Communicative Spaces

London.
Next at Transforming Audiences is Nicola Kaye, who focusses on developing communicative spaces through her creative practice. This is in line with the idea that the role of the artist is now to construct the social spaces and constraints for the audience to co-construct the work, and builds on the increasing availability of digital, social, creative tools such as Flickr or YouTube while highlighting the as yet undecided power structures within such spaces. Creativity has an important role to play in examining the potential uses for such spaces.

One example for new approaches to structuring political exchange in new ways is OpenDemocracy, but there are also problems with its approach, and a generic understanding of all such sites as new social movements may overlook the significant differences between individual projects. Other examples cited are Witness, Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping, and GetUp! Such spaces allow new voices to be heard, and allow for the creation of new political action. One of Nicola's own projects was the Physical/Virtual Sites project, which works with video of the cultural centre of Perth in Western Australia (and she runs through a number of others, but I'm afraid that there's not enough time here for her to go into enough detail for us to really understand what they're aiming to achieve).

One question which emerges from such new forms of political communication and open participation is what to do when such open spaces also attract those with whom the initiators of such sites do not want to engage (participants holding fundamentally oppositional and/or unacceptable points of view, for example).

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