cutup

//url: "A Guide to Good Practice in Collaborative Working Methods and New Media Tools Creation", L.Goodman, K.Milton

2009-10-09T06:30:00.003+02:00

[http://ahds.ac.uk/creating/guides/new-media-tools/index.htm]

//prj: Michael Ogawa, code_swarm

2009-06-24T22:26:00.000+02:00

"I've been studying software projects for a while now. Not the programming, but the people -- the way they interact with each other through collaboration and communication. My investigations have always been visual: I've built applications that create pictures of what is happening within software projects. But they have always had a rigid structure to them. Organic information visualization, coined by Ben Fry, is a different approach to information visualization. It eschews traditional data confinement in space and lets the elements play together in freeform and unpredictable ways.

This visualization, called code_swarm, shows the history of commits in a software project. A commit happens when a developer makes changes to the code or documents and transfers them into the central project repository. Both developers and files are represented as moving elements. When a developer commits a file, it lights up and flies towards that developer. Files are colored according to their purpose, such as whether they are source code or a document. If files or developers have not been active for a while, they will fade away. A histogram at the bottom keeps a reminder of what has come before."

[http://vis.cs.ucdavis.edu/~ogawa/codeswarm/]

//url: Encounters in the Socialverse: Community and Collaborative Art Practices

2009-06-22T13:05:00.003+02:00

[http://www.yorku-ahgsa.ca/]
[http://inspireart.org/en/2009/02/09/yorksymposium/]

"This symposium focuses on the centrality of human participation in contemporary art practice. It seeks to engage with the ethics, the aesthetics, and the politics of community-based and collaborative art.

[...]

This symposium aims to critically address questions posed by cultural historians and critics concerning the implications in collaborative art projects. Such questions include: How does active participation influence aesthetics? Does collaborative art practice, with its social interactions, shared assumptions and invisible rules, push or hinder the limits of relationality? How does the integration of human participation impact upon works of art? How has the proliferation of outdoor art festivals such as Nuit Blanche in Paris, Montreal, and Toronto permanently affected the way contemporary artists produce work? How has the response to such large-scale exhibitions influenced art practice? How has public or private art funding reflected this increased interest in accessible art? Do such art practices allow for the empowerment of communities and participants? How might the inclusion of community-based projects in institutions like museums, cinemas, and concert halls impact their criticality?

Presentations that touch upon questions relating to community and collaborative art practice in the following sub-themes are encouraged:

* artist collaborations and interventionist works

* authorship and cultural property

* developments in Relational Aesthetics

* legalities of human participation

* theories of time, space, and place

* embodiment and performance studies

* activism and social welfare

* the politics of inclusion

* accessibility issues"

info:

Encounters in the Socialverse: Community and Collaborative Art Practices

The 9th Annual Art History Graduate Student Association Symposium

Symposium Date: March 6, 2009

//cnf: ON COLLABORATION A series of events and talks on collaborative art practices

2009-06-22T12:59:00.002+02:00

[http://www.wkv-stuttgart.de/uploads/media/trafo_01.pdf]

event held in 2006, Budapest

"On Collaboration is an international series of events investigating the phenomenon of collaborative artistic practice through lectures, art projects and panel discussions.
Collaboration is not a new phenomenon in visual art. Ever since artists have worked together in a
common workshop or in colonies, through the avant-garde movements when artists with a similar view and goals have joined forces to clarify and promote the artistic ideas they stood for we find numerous examples. The idea of sharing authorship and of the participation of communities in the creative process has been for long introduced, too.
However, the radical change in the notion of the artwork and of the role of artistic individuality
from the sixties on, moreover, the extensive development of communication technology throughout the last two decades, opened new dimensions for collaborative work. Civil rights movements, social problems and political context has also challenged artists to express themselves in new ways.
It is not just about working at the same place or in a similar style, not just about a common
discourse based on a conviction alike; the project On Collaboration focuses on the phenomenon
when it is the creative process that becomes a common act and experience so that the work born
out of these efforts can be only attributed to a collective of creators and not to a single person.
What possibilities can collaborative work offer for extending individual creativity, what kind of new energies arise when working together? What could be the strengths and the weaknesses of such methods?
In which ways can a group organize itself, how can a certain autonomy be created as a basis for
critique and resistance? How can a micro-society formed this way occupy alternative spaces of
creation and action?
What are the motivations behind forming a collective at different parts of the world – like in Central Europe or in the United States – and what are the answers to the challenges by various economic and institutional models possibly provided this way?
Does the appearance and the spread of the Internet offer new models of collaboration, how can the experience gained by using the Internet be incorporated into the artistic creation?
It seems that the claim to re-write art history, in respect to socially and politically engaged group
work, that traditionally has largely focused on artifacts and marketable tendencies is being
acknowledged and promoted by a growing number of artists and cultural workers. How can a line be drawn from early twentieth-century avant-garde movements and thoughts on collaboration, participation and social act on through the collaborative projects of the sixties and seventies to present tendencies? How can these activities be archived and presented, what are the possible strategies that curators and institutions could apply when dealing with process based collective projects – and what were and are the forms and results of such an incorporation of independent activities into the institutional and canonization system? Where would a discourse about the respective notions of art and activism lead us? How are these boundaries being dissolved in some of these projects?"

info:
ON COLLABORATION - A series of events and talks on collaborative art practices
Trafó Gallery, Trafó – House of Contemporary Arts Budapest
23 March – 01 April 2006

//quo: How I Drew One of My Pictures: * or, The Authorship of Generative Art. Adrian Ward, Geoff Cox

2009-06-19T11:16:00.003+02:00

"Digital artwork is not valued in the same way. It can be copied infinitely and there is therefore a
corresponding crisis of value. It has been argued that under these conditions of the dematerialised artwork, it is process that becomes valued. In this way, the process of creation and creativity is valued in place of authenticity, undermining conventional notions of authorship."

[...]

"Moreover, the output from generative systems should not be valued simply as an endless, infinite series of resources but as a system. To have a machine write poetry for ten years would not generate creative music, but the process of getting the machine to do so would certainly register an advanced form of creativity."

[..]

"The mathematical value 'pi' can be approximated as 3.141593, but a more thorough and accurate version can be stored as the formula used to calculate it. By analogy, it is more precise to express creativity formulated as code, which can then be executed to produce the desired results."

[...]

Ward/Cox quoting Walter Benjamin:
"'An author who has carefully thought about the conditions of production today... will never be
concerned with the products alone, but always, at the same time, with the means of production. In other words, his [sic] products must possess an organising function besides and before their
character as finished works.'"
[Walter Benjamin, 'The Author as Producer', in Understanding Brecht, London: Verso 1992, p.98;]

info:
How I Drew One of My Pictures: * or, The Authorship of Generative Art. Adrian Ward BSc & Geoff Cox MA(RCA)
Sidestream, London & CAiiA-STAR, School of Computing, University of Plymouth, UK
e-mail: adrian@signwave.co.uk & geoffcox@excite.com

[http://www.generative.net/papers/authorship/index.html]

//url: collaboration and art

2009-06-18T09:56:00.001+02:00

http://www.burundi.sk/monoskop/index.php/Collaborative_art

//quo: The Myth of Immateriality: Presenting and Preserving New Media. Christiane Paul

2009-06-18T08:52:00.004+02:00

"A lowest common denominator for defining new media art seems to be its computability, the fact that it is computational and based on algorithms.
Other descriptive adjectives commonly used for charactering new media art are process-oriented, time-based, dynamic, and real-time; participatory, collaborative, and performative; modular, variable, generative and customizable."

"Interaction and participation are key elements in transforming new media works into ‘open systems’. The openness of the system differs substantially from one digital artwork to the next, and one could argue that the degree of openness is directly related to the investment of time the viewer-participant has to make and the amount of expertise necessary to engage with it."

"Openness increases in projects where artists have established a framework that allows participants to create a contribution to the system…"

"Collaborative exchange has become a fundamental part of artistic new media practice and has affected notions of the artwork and authorship, which in turn have fundamental consequences for curatorial practice and the presentation of the art. The artistic process in new media creation to a large extent relies on collaborative models, which manifest themselves on various levels."

"While artists groups and collectives are by no means a new phenomenon that emerged along with digital media, they certainly have not been in the majority when it comes to artistic creation, and the art world in general has traditionally been focused on the model of a single creator and ’star’."

info:

The Myth of Immateriality: Presenting and Preserving New Media, Christiane Paul, 2005
in: Oliver Grau (Editor), Media Art Histories, 2006, The MIT Press

//url: open organizations

2009-06-17T09:38:00.000+02:00

open-organizations.org

about:
"'Open Organizations' is the current name for a framework for a functional organizational structure that people can choose to adopt in part or whole when working together. It can also be used as a tool to analyse other organizations and related theoretical concepts and frameworks. Open Organizations is in a large part the result of observing and distilling the patterns, or processes, in the functioning of existing organizations. It is developing according to the understanding that theory and practice rely on each other."

//def: sharon kagan

2009-06-16T12:21:00.006+02:00

paper includes a checklist with questions for successful collaboration

[http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICDocs/data/ericdocs2sql/content_storage_01/0000019b/80/14/07/f7.pdf]

//url: Beyond Teams: Toward an Ethic of Collaboration. Mark E Haskins, Jeanne Liedtka, John Rosenblum

2009-06-16T03:13:00.001+02:00

"Collaboration is characterized by what can be rightly called an ethic—a system of moral principles and values grounded in a sense of calling and stewardship. This ethic creates what one interviewee referred to as a "thermonuclear reaction," producing enormous energy that enables colleagues to achieve lofty individual and collective ambitions, and that helps them to learn and grow in a continuously self-sustaining way."

[http://www.audubon-area.org/NewFiles/ethic-oc.htm]

//quo: the ethics of collaboration. Nikos Papastergiadis

2009-06-16T02:58:00.002+02:00

"No artistic collaboration is ever either a natural or linear progression towards a higher state of aesthetic perfection. A collaboration can seem to take you backwards even when you are meant to be progressing at double speed. Learning to collaborate is often perceived as a contradiction. It is assumed to be as natural as breathing. However, submitting to the needs of others, presenting your own within a shared space, and then allowing the dialogue to shape the outcome can test the limits of an individual's faith and maturity. To develop ideas in an open environment is to risk seeing them in a naked and unformed manner, it may reveal their greatest potential but also expose their deepest flaws. This gesture requires unequivocal trust in your partners. There must be a confidence that the process of revelation is not betrayed in ways that would harm the other.
Collaboration presupposes mutual understanding, shared languages, common goals and the ability to negotiate across differences. These qualities and skills are not common, nor are they often presented as part of the identity of the artist. The mythical images of the artist are mostly as solitary figures, rebelling against social rules and pushing the boundaries of institutions. However, the myth of the artist as an outsider is a destructive self-image. It fosters contempt for the complex ways in which the artist is entangled with others."

[...]

"Creativity never occurs in a social vacuum. All forms of artistic practice are structured like a language. The proliferation in forms of practice has also extended the need to multiply our codes of reference and our dexterity in cultural translation. Learning to recognise and respond in the various languages expressed in any group activity is an essential task for collaboration. These qualities can only be achieved with familiarity, good will and an extended period of exchange. The time to develop a collective experience and the personal confidence to express inner needs are crucial elements in any collaborative process. Collaboration can either lead to a new hybrid work, in which the conjunction enhances or cancels the sum of its contributors. Collaboration can create a new third way of seeing the connection between things or it can deepen the rift between. To see a bridge may be as useful as to witness the gulf, either way the difference of others needs to be recognised. Following from here is the challenge of living with and leading towards new spheres of connection, the search for new media which contain both positions and perspectives, and a form which enables the integrity of the individual as well the space that comes from being in a collective to grow."

[http://www.capelan.com/texts/ethics.htm]

//tho: collaborethics

2009-06-16T02:51:00.001+02:00

- what could that be, what are the characteristics?

//url: Ethology of Art and Science Collaborations: Research Ethics Boards in the Context of Contemporary Art Practice. Garnet Hertz

2009-06-15T19:21:00.002+02:00

Abstract:
Frameworks for ethical review of scientific research are well established and documented;
however, many interdisciplinary artists and art institutions are unfamiliar with these policies and
procedures, as well as the potential benefits this process offers within emergent areas of
collaborative research. In this paper, we will examine currently established models for ethical
review of scientific research as they would apply to interdisciplinary fields. Using the Canadian
system as a basis for discussion, a practical overview of its guiding principles, conducts,
application processes, terms of approval and liabilities will be presented. Issues covered will
include tissue culture, animal use, genetic modification and transgenics. Relavant highlights will
be presented from the Interagency Advisory Panel on Research Ethics (PRE), the Canadian
Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of
Canada (NSERC), the Canada Council of Animal Care (CCAC) and the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Examples of contemporary artworks will be
explored as specific case studies in relation to the ethics review process. Proper navigation of
these processes may offer guidance to artists and institutions that engage controversial subjects,
use scientific facilities, or attempt to gain access to funding traditionally oriented to scientific
research.

info:
Ethology of Art and Science Collaborations: Research Ethics Boards in the Context of
Contemporary Art Practice
Presented at Bridges II Conference, Banff New Media Institute
Garnet Hertz (2002)

[http://www.conceptlab.com/ethology/hertz-ethology-notes-v20081124.pdf]

//def: collaborative authorship

2009-06-15T19:10:00.001+02:00

"Collaborative authorship is the act of co-creating and consulting within a group of people to create a project, in which the author of the project is the group itself rather than a single person."

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_authorship]

//url: collaborative authorship, def.

2009-06-15T11:44:00.001+02:00

http://wiki.media-culture.org.au/index.php/New_Media_Art_-_Collaborative_Authorship

//quo: Roland Barthes

2009-06-15T11:11:00.002+02:00

FOR SWTCH

"The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centres of culture.”

info: FOR SWTCH
Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, translated by Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 146.

//quo: Who is the Author? Sampling / Remixing / Open Source. Lev Manovich

2009-06-15T11:00:00.005+02:00

some quotes from the full text, that can be accessed under:
[www.manovich.net/DOCS/models_of_authorship.doc]

"OR SWTCHFOR SWTCHIn fact, in we think about this historically, we will see collaborative authorship represents a norm rather than exception. In contrast, romantic model of a solitary single author occupies a very small place in the history of human culture. "

new media: new types of collaboration, new relationships, new distribution models

FOR SWTCH

1. Collaboration of Different Individuals and/or Groups

FOR SWTCH

"We can think of this as a “social culture”; we may also note that while the new media culture may not have produced any “masterpieces”, it definitely had a huge impact on how people and organizations communicate."

FOR SWTCH

2. Interactivity as Miscommunication Between the Author and the User

--> relation between artist and user is that of feedback rather than of collaboration

FOR SWTCH

3. Authorship as Selection From a Menu

--> selection from a small number of choices makes user feel like an artist/creator, where really she/he remains just a consumer
FOR SWTCH

4. Collaboration Between a Company and the Users

--> incorporating users' feedback/experiences in new versions of a product
FOR SWTCH

5. Collaboration Between the Author and Software

"FOR SWTCHThe author sets up some general rules but s/he has no control over the concrete details of the work – these emerge as a result of the interactions of the rules."
FOR SWTCH

6. Remixing

"FOR SWTCHYet we are left with an interesting paradox: while in the realm of commercial music remixing is officially accepted, in other cultural areas it is seen as violating the copyright and therefore as stealing.", "FOR SWTCHno proper terms equivalent to remixing in music exist to describe these practices"
"FOR SWTCHThe term that we do have is “appropriation.”"
"FOR SWTCHAnyway, “Remixing” is a better term because it suggests a systematic re-working of a source, the meaning which “appropriation” does not have."
"FOR SWTCHAs in the case of Duchamp’s famous urinal, the aesthetic effect here is the result of a transfer of a cultural sign from one sphere to another, rather than any modification of a sign."
similar to remixing, but not the same: quoting - or as it would be called in electronic music: sampling
FOR SWTCH

7. Sampling: New Collage?

similar to collage and montage (from literary and visual modernism), but in a new cultural context
FOR SWTCH

8. Open Source Model

different types of licencing-models,
idea of the kernel, that is more persistent than the rest
"FOR SWTCHI think that the ideas of license and of kernel can be directly applied to cultural authorship." framework of rules of what is and is not allowed
FOR SWTCH

9. Brand as the Author

"FOR SWTCHWhen we think of these individual brands we not supposed to also think of all the people involved in their creations. We can see here the romantic ideology with its emphasis on a solitary genius still at work."

//url: Social Networking: Why are Conversation and Collaboration Tools so Underused?. david pollard

2009-06-14T09:42:00.001+02:00

http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2006/08/27.html

//lst: fred turner on iDC

2009-06-12T19:53:00.003+02:00

"Trebor and I have talked for a long time now about the links between American countercultural ideals and the contemporary blurring of work, play, sociability and exploitation. In my last book, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, I tried to get at some of the cultural roots of these new fusions. What stood out most to me in the 1960s was the deep critique of bureaucracy: in the two decades after World War II Americans of all sorts of political persuasions feared that working in large, rule-governed organizations would fracture the individual psyche. To become a psychologically whole person, one had to find ways to break down the walls of the organization, link minds and bodies with the like-minded, and make the work of living the work one did *for* one's living. In the 1960s, these ideas dominated the thinking of those whom I've called the New Communalists -- a generation of mostly young, college-educated or college-bound folks who formed the largest wave of communal activity in American history. Today of course, these ideas underpin all kinds of new modes of digitally enabled production and sociability. And they do so very concretely. Here in Silicon Valley for instance, the Burning Man festival, held annually in the Black Rock desert of Nevada, encodes many of those values and at the same time, provides a ritual structure with which to celebrate dominant modes of engineering practice at firms like Google (for a paper on this theme go to http://fredturner.stanford.edu). "

[https://lists.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2009-June/003510.html, 12.6.2009]

//txt: Re-Writing the History of Media Art: From Personal Cinema to Artistic Collaboration. Ryszard W. Kluszczynski

2009-06-12T18:57:00.002+02:00

Abstract:

"The author reinterprets the artistic phenomena that composed historical avant-garde art. His method of interpretation is an intertextual strategy that approaches the historical artifacts through recent phenomena. The first case study is of structural film; its most important attributes appear to be artistic strategies questioning the structural/material integrity, durability and permanence of the film work. The second case study is of the avant-garde
strategy of collective work, reinterpreted through the opensource work and interactive art
of today. The author identifies three steps in the development of the 20th-century concept of
joint creative work: avant-garde general strategies of artistic collaboration; avant-garde film
works oriented toward creative collectivism; and collaborative artistic practices that manifest
themselves in non-hierarchical strategies of contemporary interactive art."

info:
LEONARDO, Vol. 40, No. 5, pp. 469–474, 2007 (as part of the refresh! conference papers)

//txt: artistic bedfellows: histories and conversations in collaborative art practices. holly crawford

2009-06-12T11:03:00.005+02:00

summary:
Artistic Bedfellows is an international interdisciplinary collection of historical essays, critical papers, case studies, interviews, and comments from scholars and practitioners that shed new light on the growing field of collaborative art. This collection examines the field of collaborative art broadly, while asking specific questions with regard to the issues of interdisciplinary and cultural difference, as well as the psychological and political complexity of collaboration. The diversity of approach is needed in the current multimedia and cross disciplinarily world of art. This reader is designed to stimulate thought and discussion for anyone interested in this growing field and practice
[http://books.google.at/books?id=eA5G2-J-ovoC&dq=collaborative+art+practices&source=gbs_summary_s&cad=0]

info:
artistic bedfellows: histories and conversations in collaborative art practices. holly crawford
University Press of America, 2008,ISBN 0761840648, 9780761840640;340 pages

//txt: on collaboration

2009-06-12T11:03:00.001+02:00

http://www.wkv-stuttgart.de/uploads/media/trafo.pdf

//url: collaborative art practices

2009-06-12T10:59:00.000+02:00

http://collabarts.org/

//url: networked collaboration

2009-06-11T22:25:00.002+02:00

michel bauwens on different aspects of networked collaboration, peer-to-peer colaboration:

http://www.masternewmedia.org/news/2006/09/29/network_collaboration_peer_to_peer.htm

//quo: mark tribe on collaboration in new media art

2009-06-11T22:08:00.001+02:00

"New Media artists often work collaboratively, whether in ad-hoc groups or in long-term partnerships. Like films or theatrical productions, many New Media art projects -- particularly the more complex and ambitious ones -- require a range of technological and artistic skills to produce. The development of Radical Software Group's Carnivore for example, involved the participation of several programmers, and numerous artists and artist groups have been invited to contribute to the project by building interfaces. Sometimes, however, the motivation to collaborate is more ideological than practical. By working in collectives, New Media artists challenge the romantic notion of the artist as a solitary genius. Eleven of the thirty-five artists and groups discussed in the main section of this book identify themselves collectively."

[https://wiki.brown.edu/confluence/display/MarkTribe/New+Media+Art+-+Introduction]

//txt: When artists collaborate - The Third Hand: Collaboration in Art from Conceptualism to Postmodernism. Charles Green

2009-06-11T14:57:00.001+02:00

from a review:
"[Green] attempts to construct a new "model of authorship" that involves a "third artist," a phantom figure allegedly generated when artists set about working jointly"

[http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_11_90/ai_94079415/]

quo:
"The working method of collaboration implies an ideological downplaying of the role of imagination as it is usually conceived: as the expression of individual subjectivity.
Memory, on the other hand, makes things relative: It gives perspective and has therefore been considered ethical in itself because it relativizes the individual, self-centered subjectivity that is a poor guide to how to act."
[ p.97]

info:
The Third Hand: Collaboration in Art from Conceptualism to Postmodernism, by Charles Green, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2001; 248 pages

//vid: from representation to participation. ruth catlow, marc garrett

2009-06-11T14:36:00.001+02:00

ruth catlow + marc garrett on collaborative practices

orig url: http://vimeo.com/3364184?pg=embed&sec=

Ruth Catlow & Marc Garrett of Furtherfield.org and the HTTP Gallery from Renée Turner on Vimeo.

//txt: the third mind. brion gysin, william s. burroughs

2009-06-11T13:50:00.001+02:00