Models for Creative Collaboration

Washington, D.C.
The next presenters at Creativity & Cognition 2007 are Yun Zhang and Linda Candy, focussing on art-technology collaborations. Her study focussed on a specific group of collaborators developing a new media art project reinterpreting the experience of exploring the Brickpit Ringwalk in Sydney. Collaboration took place in face-to-face, proposal-assisted, drawing-assisted, computer-assisted, and interactive artefact-assisted modes, and such interactions were analysed in Yun and Linda's research. The results are perhaps what one would expect: face-to-face and proposal-assisted modes of collaboration decline over the duration of the project, while computer- and interactive artefact-assisted forms of collaboration pick up as the process develops. This indicates perhaps the growing maturity of the project itself, and points to the crucial role that mediation technologies play in developing a project.

Cathy Treadaway is up next. She's worked in textile and surface pattern design, and is interested particularly in how digital technologies can support especially the grassroots practitioners in this field. Cathy has done case study research with three practitioners in this field, focussing on artists, designers, and craftspeople. The field has been strongly affected by digital technology, of course; digital ink-jet printing, digital imaging technology, and other supports have enabled a rapid prototyping approach as well as product lifecycle management, and there are also growing trends towards collaborative design practices. How does it feel, then, to use digital tools in the creative process, and to use them for collaborative work?

After initially meeting in a shared physical location, Cathy worked remotely with an artist in Scotland to develop a shared image layer by layer, through a combination of offline and digital sketchbooks and other tools. This revealed that the camera as a digital tool here did not sufficiently convey the emotional intent of the collaborators, but the digital tools for sharing ideas did help; they continued to rely on the memory of the initial meeting, however. Making by hand remained important, too, enabling artists to convey an emotional impact which the digital technology did not provide. Collaboration also relied on a sense of trust and shared ownership in the work; shared values, a common language, and the freedom to experiment all were crucial foundations of this shared work.

Cathy is followed by Giulio Jacucci and Ina Wagner, whose interest is in the influence of materiality on collective creativity. This approach combines influences from semiotics, art and architecture, design studies, and computer-supported cooperative work. Ina begins by describing design work as transforming artefacts; designers make use of a variety of materials to convey and explore the specific characteristics of the work they are designing. Materiality, of course, engages all of our sense, and designers recognise sensory components (such as light) as materials in their own right. Materiality enables multimodality, and design concepts are expressed in multiple modes in order to convey various aspects of the overall project; during the process of design, handling and playing with material is essential to the development of design ideas.

Materiality also implies spatiality, and indeed, immersion in a chaotic mass of materials enables new ideas to emerge from this creative density by chance and accident; additionally, spatial arrangements of objects and materials enables designers to express relationships and create networks of ideas. Further, spaces are also shared workspaces in which materials are manipulated in various scales an combinations. And finally, designers interact with artefacts in expressive and performative ways, exploiting their material features; the residuals of this process remain as documents of this performance. Such expressing while doing contributes to designers' understanding of their projects and processes.

Overall, then, material features expand designers' communicative resources: multimodality allows different modes of expression, border resources allow shared interpretation. Spatiality allows for direct haptic engagement with materials and spaces and buts artefacts and bodies in direct relation to one another. Performative and expressive aspects transform material features and translate them to other media, and allow designers to perform a design concept as a shared basis for collective creativity.

Finally to Michael Century, who takes us back to the early history of animation. He begins by pointing to the continuing question of art and creative practice as/in research, which has also led to outcomes such as faux science and scientistic art, and an asymmery of power and control in collaborations. He offers the idea of exact imagination, an apparently oxymoronic concept which aims to achieve the attunement of technology and art, stretching artistic language to meet the limits of technology and developing technology to actualise artistic virtuality.

Michael now examines the history of computer graphics in the 1960s, pointing to the military origins of core technologies as well as the involvement of artists in early development of computer graphics. Such work aimed to minimise the distance between artist and apparatus, and explored potential applications of computers to specific forms of research in the artistic field. (Michael now plays an early 70s example for this kind of work.) In the process, the limitations of the system became a starting-point for the creative work - an example for exact imagination. The role of the producer (in the sense of movie/music producer) was crucial in negotiating and bridging the art/technology divide in this process. Attunement of art and technology in the collaborative environment of today may be crucial once again, Michael suggests.

Technorati : C&C 2007, animation, cognition, collaboration, creativity, design, materiality, new media arts
Del.icio.us : C&C 2007, animation, cognition, collaboration, creativity, design, materiality, new media arts