Creative Collaborations in New Zealand, Social Networking in Korea

Singapore.
The morning session on this second day at ISEA 2008 continues with Caroline McCaw and Rachel Gillies, with a project related to Dunedin in New Zealand. Overall, there is a series of 20 place-responsive public artworks across New Zealand by national and international artists; the Dunedin component involves three artists (Douglas Bagnall, Adam Hyde, and Zoe Walker and Neil Bromwich) in separate locations around the world collaborating over the Internet - one of these locations was Edinburgh, after which Dunedin is partially named.

Some of these artists were very familiar with Dunedin, some not at all; the project therefore aims to explore how such background information may affect the development of site-specific works. Participants in the project were given access to Flickr photos from Dunedin, and collaborated using email and a wiki; the finished art will be exhibited in Dunedin in December.

The wiki was meant to be used as a virtual site replacing Dunedin for those artists who had never been there and/or were physically distant from it. It was also a meeting-place for the artists who had not physically met, and the hope was that this process would start the collaboration. One question was how this form of collaboration may be different from other, more common forms of artistic collaboration.

However, as it turns out the artists didn't contribute to the wiki. As a second attempt, then, an email list was set up, and the wiki became an archival and storage site for past conversations and materials. Caroline and Rachel stepped in as project managers overseeing the wiki, in other words. There was also very limited email engagement, however - emails were basically send between the artists and project managers, and there was virtually no development of real community amongst the participating artists. This is driven in good part by issues of time commitment, of course, and also by questions of private vs. public information.

What are the next steps for the projects, then? The Caroline points out that what have emerged strongly here are the seams and scars of collaborative processes which are anything but seamless; Rachel also points to the issue of technological literacy and collaborative context here. Ultimately, the artists will come to Dunedin to collaborate physically, of course, so the crossover between online and offline spaces, and the impact on further online collaboration, will be interesting to watch.

Next up are Deborah Lawler-Dormer and Frances Joseph, also presenting on a New Zealand project: Co-Lab. Co-Lab has recently received seed funding from the New Zealand government to get started; it is a collaboration between Auckland University of Technology and the Media and Interdisciplinary Arts Centre. Elements of the project - which will be publicly launched in October - address research and development, knowledge sharing, partnerships, and distribution. Partnerships here will involved universities, industry, and the creative sector.

Threads of research will address mobile and locative media, social networking, interactive and performance technologies, and theory and discourse - also with a particular view towards mixed-economy business models. Artists are an important, but not the only stakeholder group here; Co-Lab will involve strong collaborations across different sectors. People involved come from a wide range of backgrounds, including virtual reality, data activation, screen works, motion capture, animatronics, visualisation, usability, interactivity, VJing and imaging.

This enables the project to operate in a wide range of areas and with many diverse technologies - immersive environments, data representation, responsive devices, augmented reality, intelligent spaces, development marketing, and many more. Key research groups will initially address interactive and performance technologies, mobile, spatial, and locative media, digital storytelling and community media practices, visualisation, realtime 3D, critical interfaces, and wearable technologies.

Finally, we move on to Hyunjin Shin, who shifts our focus from New Zealand to Korea. She begins by noting the always-on nature of modern culture, which means that what we used to call the virtual world is no longer separate from the 'real' world, but is merely an extension of it. Korea today is a leader in this field, with very high broadband availability and uptake, deep connections between online and offline culture, and extremely active online social networks (most prominently CyWorld with its 15 million-odd users, of course).

This has profound implications for users' social identities and behaviour; for example, to gain full access to the mini-hompys of CyWorld users one must portray a friendly public persona. Koreans have a very strong collectivist mentality and value relationships very strongly, and these attitudes are manifested in CyWorld and the behavioral patterns exhibited there. Hyunjin now shows a number of recent Korean artworks reflecting on this.

Further, in CyWorld there is a very overt ranking of a user's public standing (ranked according to factors such as popularity, attractiveness, etc.), and an internal market in which virtual currency is spent to furnish the mini-hompy. There are very direct messages of encouragement on many hompys that ask visitors to leave messages, and there is even a significant market in static and animated artwork that can be added to hompys which gently 'blackmails' visitors into leaving a message (thus boosting a hompy owner's social standing on the site).

At heart, CyWorld is a social network, of course, and this is operationalised through the setup of '1-chan' relationships between users (building on similar relationships in traditional Korean family culture). There is also a phenomenon called Woori-ism - if I understand this point correctly, this describes the frequent offline meetings of online communities (which has recently also had political impact).

Further, there are also impact on languages, as a new chatting language is created in the process; on the economy, as Internet shopping is becoming a major phenomenon and is impacting on the productivity of office workers; and on users' attitudes towards their own privacy, as they are now more frequently required to provide their social security and income information in order to access certain services - which also provides new opportunities for e-government services. However, there remains a question of what digital divides are being opened up in the process between younger, more technologically adept users, and older, less digitally native Koreans.

Technorati : Co-Lab, CyWorld, Dunedin, ISEA 2008, Korea, New Zealand, collaboration, new media arts, social networking
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