Collaborative Creativity

This dissertation is a conversation upon process, creation and relation. It focuses on the collaborative choreographic practice I developed within my MA in Choreography at University College of Falmouth.
Drawing upon my experience, the essay approaches the processes that constitute a collaborative choreographic practice: the genesis and evolution of the articulation process, the collaboration, the performance, and the process
that begins at the performance and depends on the relation that each spectator will develop with it.
In doing so, the essay, wants to reflect upon the landscapes of relations that may develop in any of the stages described above, and the possibilities for discourse upon ethics in art practices that lie in these relationscapes.
The text follows the evolution of the process: from a prearticulated idea towards the actual performance. In between it invites a dialogue between theory and practice upon certain aspects of the process such as collaboration,
the relation between choreographer and performer and the relation developed between a performance and its audience.
Between is a key word to this essay- The essay concludes that inbetween is where creation lies, regarding all the above-mentioned relationscapes: Between the choreographer and the dancer/ the viewer and the performer, the words and the reader, creation happens in the interval between, within the developing relation.

This article investigates the existence of different kinds of User
Generated Content (UGC) and the connection between UGC and some narrative structures of the media product itself. The corpus of the analysis is constituted by videogames and the UGC related to them, in particular Halo and Metroid series and illustrates how small differences in, for instance, character presentation may influence both player’s understanding of the character itself and the kind of production is mainly created in the subject.‎

It is not possible to speak of a single systems approach. There are rather of a number of systems approaches, each loosely drawing on different aspects of a family composed mainly of, general system theory, cybernetics, information theory, chaos theory, and complexity theory. Systems approaches have been used in most of the social sciences, particularly sociology and management, but their use has extended into the arts and humanities.Creativity researchers have used systems approaches drawing on very different sources and in very different ways. The main focus has been to highlight creativity as a phenomenon that occurs in the context of multiple systems, and therefore involves a network of interactions.

Creativity and innovation as concepts have become almost meaningless in their ubiquity in the everyday language of politics and businesses. At the same time, they are needed more than ever. The problems of the 21st Century are intractable and complex and need solutions that are beyond those of individual players. However, creativity has been predominantly studied from the individual perspective , meaning the research tradition is out of step with changes in working practices as it does not provide guidance for complex creative and interactional processes. This dissertation argues that creative collaboration can be approached through the lens of the theories about complex systems. These theories conceptualize creative collaboration as an interactive and emergent phenomenon, in which creativity emerges continuously and unpredictably from the interactions of the actors and elements of the system. This argument is investigated in this study by developing a research framework based on the theories of complex systems and examining creative collaboration through empirical case studies that were conducted in the context of innovation camps. The purpose of this research is to answer the following question: How can the application of complexity sciences improve our understanding of collective creativity? The disseration summarises some of its central findings from the practical perspective proposing a set of important factors for fostering creative collaboration.

Comment co-écrire une chanson? Comment les idées sont-elles nouées les unes aux autres? Si la création collaborative fait l’objet de nombreuses recherches en éducation comme en psychologie, elle est encore peu étudiée en musicologie, encore moins « de l’intérieur ». Dans ce mémoire, je rends compte d’un projet de musicologie adoptant l’approche de recherche- création : le volet recherche vise à mieux comprendre le processus de co-création d’une chanson avec des jeunes grâce à l’observation participante active, tandis que le volet création vise à produire une chanson significative pour ses jeunes co-créateurs et créatrices. Ma démarche de recherche, ancrée dans l’herméneutique, le socioconstructivisme et l’épistémologie du lien, souhaite s’émanciper de l’injonction de neutralité positiviste. Je soutiens en effet que c’est par la prise en compte de mon cheminement que je suis parvenue à élaborer et à mener mes analyses. Celles-ci, effectuées à partir de transcriptions des rencontres, d’un journal de bord, d’entretiens individuels et d’une autoconfrontation croisée, m’ont permis de mieux comprendre, entre autres, les facteurs affectant le déroulement d’un processus de co-création, la nature complexe des interactions entre les membres du groupe, ainsi que l’ampleur de la collaboration ayant donné lieu à chaque vers et à chaque motif mélodique de la chanson. Elles m’ont aussi permis de réfléchir au rôle d’une personne en situation d’autorité au sein d’un projet de co-création : comment doit-elle intervenir pour « faciliter » le processus, tout en minimisant son influence sur celui-ci? Est-il possible de mesurer cette influence? En faisant preuve de réflexivité émotionnelle à l’égard de mon rôle, j’ai pu mettre en lumière la relation particulière entre les co-créateurs et créatrices et leur chanson. Mes résultats montrent ainsi que le recours à une posture épistémologique plus traditionnelle n’aurait pas permis de révéler certaines subtilités intersubjectives du processus de co-création de la chanson.

This chapter focusses on the second-generation of Italian studios, the S 2F M (Studio di Fonologia Musicale di Firenze) funded by Pietro Grossi in Florence in 1963; the SMET (Studio di Musica Elettronica di Torino) funded in Turin by Enore Zaffiri in 1964, and the Gruppo N.P.S. (Nuove Proposte Sonore) funded in Padova by Teresa Rampazzi and Ennio Chiggio in 1965. Those studios aimed not only at supporting collaboration between composers, musicians and technicians within their framework, but fully open to national and international networks.
I pinpoint differences and analogies between the studios, above all – in the wake of the Western zeitgeist of the late 1960s – the mutual involvement, transfer of expertise, anonymous artworks, relationship of reciprocal hospitality, deliberate lack of authorship (at least at the beginning), and the merging of music with visual art to create new artworks, as ways to break the rules of closed art forms and traditional music.
The chapter also includes brief music analyses and contextualization of the studios’ sound works, as well as discussions of the literature these pioneers produced to corroborate their artistic visions in contrast with the mainstream music scene and music composition trends, and a discussion of the books they read to validate their positions. The radical aesthetical and social positions, in contrast with the desire of these pioneers to introduce the new music into the traditional institutional scene (namely the conservatories of music), is also discussed.

Historical perceptions of sean nós singing in academic literature have often portrayed the genre as the preserve of the Gaeltacht areas, its practice best suited community focused performance settings. Gaelic League nationalism and government arts policies at the beginning of the twentieth century has helped maintain these perceptions, imbuing sean nós with a sense of marginality within and outside of traditional music. Similarly, contemporary music has struggled for recognition in wider Irish musical culture. Current Irish Arts Council funding allocations indicate that although improving, this is still the case.

Having said this, contemporary sean nós practice has experienced a fundamental shift in its performance contexts. Particularly neglected in sean-nós scholarship has been its use in contemporary music composed in the 21st century, which draws on the traditional voice as a starting point for musical collaboration. This paper aims to investigate how and why sean-nós practices are integrated into the compositional process in these collaborations. Exploring the concept of a double marginality in respect of both traditions, I will also establish how this concept is being used creatively to construct new configurations of expressive culture, and what the implications of this may be for existing conceptions of the sean-nós tradition.

Paper presented at ICTM Ireland Annual Conference (Session 5B, Tradition and Authenticity), Maynooth University, 25th February 2017.

Modern political cinema, claims Gilles Deleuze, can no longer presuppose the existence of a "people" or give utterance to its struggle, but has to invent that people through the fabrication of peripheral, collective, or "minor" images. Laboratory Athens/LabA, 1 a non-commercial initiative for the production of small gauge films, founded 2008 in Athens by the curators and filmmakers Vassily Bourikas & Yannis Yaxas, might be considered as the site of such an invention: its workshops, screenings and gatherings of filmmakers constitute not only an alternative practice outside major film industries; they also act on a dominant socio-political discourse that generated Greek and European austerity policies. At the same time, however, LabA's political impact seems attenuated by some of its own traits (a certain withdrawnness of its ephemeral events, or the 'nostalgic' aura of Super 8 or 16mm footage). Thus, with a view to several formative activities and outstanding short films of LabA, the paper locates its 'image politics' in the interstice or field of tension between the transfer of technical knowledge and latent aesthetics of experimental cinema, the creation of collectives and sense of esoterism, the involvement in topical issues of (Greek) society and use of obsolete or 'retro' media.

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The focus of this research is group interaction aimed at obtaining the “living knowledge” as an educational product. The dynamics of interactive classes on the development of students’ creative activity was structured into three parts as follows: Creation of a “relaxed attention situation”; Creation of a “situation of immersion in the collective creative experience”; Creation of an “active assessment situation”. Thanks to this structure, a scheme of an ideal learning situation at various stages of a class was created. The theory of self-organization in nonequilibrium systems (by Ilya Prigogine) was reconsidered in a new humanitarian context. The principles of self-organization in educational systems were determined through the author’s interactive educational techniques for developing students’ creative activity. The interactive and synergistic approaches were chosen as the key ones and applied as a methodological foundation of this work. The author of this research is the developer of the interactive approach. In this study, the author relied mainly on the theory of self-organization (synergetics) developed by Hermann Haken and Ilya Prigogine.

Histories of society and art appear to give us obvious turning-points and a linear story. Told in retrospect, stories of change are presented with a clear sequence of events, appearing to lay out a map for how an artist or individual can develop and achieve a successful outcome. Against this constructed impression of coherency, any emerging movement toward change looks disappointing. If we expect a linear process we are in danger of not seeing the value of peoples works, efforts, and engagements just because they don’t make sense within the established, normative expectations of the dominant culture. In this essay I explore an alternative view of ‘progress’ centred not around external measures of success but focused on an individual’s experience of change being enacted. In doing so, I aim to empower myself and others with sense of what non-linear change might entail.

Through participating in CAS’ Laboratory of Dissent (Winchester Gallery 2015) I have come to see dissent as a creative tool which can reveal opportunities for individual and collective action where no singular individual - or group - is the authority of the developing narrative, and all contribute to the experiential evolution of form and practice through discursive entanglement. ‘The Laboratory of Dissent’ was inspired by Chantal Mouffe’s paper 'Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces'. My essay also considers Karen Barad’s theory of Agential Realism which helps frame what happened when CAS artists invited multiple voices into a public space and invited dissent. In the last section I delve deeper into the dynamics of CAS’ emerging dissent methodology, reflecting on CAS case studies ‘The Laboratory of Dissent’ (Winchester Gallery 2015), 'Block_Chain The Power of Two’ (2018) in particular. These highlight how CAS’ discursive Dissent methodology has been applied in theory and in practice. Finally a conclusion will be drawn suggesting that when we are amidst the process of change, moving away from chronological linear narratives toward experiential dialogue will better help us think about and participate in change with confidence.

This paper will demonstrate how linguistically diverse audiences engage in meaning-making of linguistically heterogeneous reggaeton lyrics. It is based on analysis of 34 reggaeton songs from Billboard year-end charts (2017–2020) and activities of reggaeton listeners on digital platforms Genius.com, Instagram, and Reddit. Over the last years, reggaeton songs have been dominating global charts, attracting listeners of various linguistic and cultural backgrounds. However, so far, very little attention has been paid to linguistic features of reggaeton due to the marginalization of this music both in popular opinion and academic context. My research offers an insight into linguistic complexity of reggaeton lyrics and the listeners’ hard work on their acoustic reception and meaning-making. Reggaeton songs reflect the diatopic and diastratic variation of the Spanish language. Contemporary reggaetonero/as come from diverse geographical and social backgrounds and as a result, most songs featuring several artists contain elements from different regional and social varieties of Spanish, i.e. Puerto Rican and Colombian youth slang and colloquial language. Moreover, reggaeton becomes increasingly multilingual, incorporating further languages alongside Spanish, i.a. English, Portuguese, French, Jamaican Creole, and Japanese. Linguistic plurality is also characteristic of reggaeton audience, which can be categorized into native speakers of different Spanish varieties, listeners with some knowledge of Spanish (including Spanish learners and Spanish heritage speakers), and listeners with (virtually) no knowledge of Spanish. Additionally, each listener has a unique experience with other languages used in reggaeton and therefore a unique experience with the songs where they appear. My research reveals that all categories of listeners encounter difficulties with acoustic reception and/or understanding of reggaeton lyrics. However, their ability to decipher the lyrics appears to significantly improve due to repeated reception of songs and interaction with other fans online. Reggaeton enthusiasts who engage in these activities form a separate category of listeners, which I wish to call ‘reggaeton experts’. Reggaeton experts can have any level of general Spanish competence; however, they accumulated an extensive knowledge of reggaeton language, which constitutes their linguistic subcultural capital (Bourdieu 1979; Thornton 1995). Reggaeton experts share their subcultural (and) linguistic knowledge with less experienced listeners on various digital platforms, i.a. Genius.com, Instagram, and Reddit. In these digital spaces, reggaeton aficionados from around the world participate in co-construction of lyrical meaning of their favourite songs (Jungbluth 2016). Through engaging in discussions and collective transcriptions, translations, and annotations, listeners with diverse linguistic and reggaeton-related expertise complete the jigsaw puzzle of song’s meaning with a piece of knowledge unavailable to other contributors. Interestingly, most dedicated listeners discover lyrical interpretations and correspondences in further languages apparently not intended by the authors due to their lack of respective linguistic knowledge. The primacy of individual interpretation over authorial intent is promoted by reggaetonero/as themselves, who engage in explanations of their lyrics rather sporadically and often explicitly give their audiences the freedom of interpretation. Digital activities of heterogeneous audiences reveal a plethora of possible hearings and understandings of reggaeton lyrics and the irrelevance of the dichotomy of ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’. Keywords: varieties of Spanish, linguistic subcultural capital, collaborative meaning-making, co-construction, reggaeton lyrics

This paper presents the formulated 'play-to-engage' model for indigenous community engagement that incorporates factors in cultural protocols and game design thinking. The hybrid model of the participatory co-creation model was formulated in the study that had been rolled out in two rural primary schools in West Borneo. These schools are located in remote villages, away from urban amenities, and technological affordances and resources are limited. There are more than twenty culturally-diversed indigenous tribes in Borneo. Although it is a known fact that indigenous cultures, including those in Borneo, have many cultural protocols and distinctive custom practices, it is still a challenge for researchers who work with such communities to understand, adhere to and follow the cultural protocols. The model looks at incorporating gameplay and culture protocols to drive community engagement. Since play is universal, the creation of a trustworthy partnership between the community an...

In this paper we ask whether machine learning can apply to musical ensembles as well as it does to the individual musical interfaces that are frequently demonstrated at NIME and CHI. While using machine learning to map individual gestures and sensor data to musical output is becoming a major theme of computer music research, these techniques are only rarely applied to ensembles as a whole. We have developed a server-based system that tracks the touch-data of an iPad ensemble and have used such techniques to identify touch-gestures and to characterise ensemble interactions in real-time. We ask whether further analysis of this data can reveal unknown dimensions of collaborative musi- cal interaction and enhance the experience of performers.

In this contribution, we draw on findings from a non-formal, community music project to elaborate on the relationship between the concept of eudaimonia, as defined by Seligman, the interactive dimensions of collective free improvisation, and the concept of collaborative creativity. The project revolves around The Ostend Street Orkestra (TOSO), a music ensemble within which homeless adults and individuals with a psychiatric or alcohol/drug related background engage in collective musical improvisation. Between 2017 and 2019 data was collected through open interviews and video recordings of rehearsals and performances. Participant data was analyzed through inductive analysis based on the principles of grounded theory. One interesting finding was the discrepancy in the participant interviews between social relationships indicative of a negative affect about social group interaction versus strong feelings of group coherence and belonging. Video recordings of performances and rehearsals s...

This chapter focuses on the analysis of “Taras su tre dimensioni” [Taras on three dimensions], a work realized by Teresa Rampazzi in 1971-72 in the course of a transitional phase (her transition from the analogue to the computer music technology).
The approximately eleven-minutes work represents an unicum among Teresa Rampazzi’s repertoire. It is made from the juxtaposition of three typologies of sounds: analogue, concrete and computer made sounds, and is also the only piece in her catalogue which incorporates concrete sounds.

The article is a review of “Yael Davids: A Daily practice” an exhibition of the performative artist Yael Davids at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. It draws attention to the research project on which the exhibition is based, to its curatorial valence and to its specific temporality.

As the world becomes increasingly more turbulent, complex and competitive, there has been an increased interest in creativity as the major force to prepare students for these demands. At the same time, digital native students today are used to working in an environment rich with instantly accessible information and knowledge, yet paradoxically students are less satisfied with their courses in the online environment.
Educators are thus challenged to use innovative methods to nurture creativity online as they would do in the face-to-face classroom.
In 2010, six European universities created an international project, named Cross Border Brand Communication (CBBC) that has taken place every year since, but in 2020 it took place online due to the Covid-19 pandemic. This article describes and analyzes the best practices resulting from this case and addresses the research questions as to whether the creative learning outcomes and teaching practices online are the same as face-to-face and to what extent are students satisfied with this learning environment. Focus group discussions with a small group of students and the lecturers
involved facilitated an in-depth reflection on the project and the case indicates that although learning outcomes online are “virtually” the same, the student experience is inferior to such face-to-face projects.

Thank you readers for downloading a PDF of Dissent: A Creative Practice a collection of 3 essays developed and published with funding from Chapel Arts Studios and Arts Council England. The book now has a beautiful new cover, and can be purchased in hardcopy here: https://www.blurb.co.uk/b/9344772-dissent-a-creative-practice

Abstract: This paper sets out to challenge the habitual distinctions between education, the workplace and society, using the paradigms of design methodologies to collapse differences which are meaningless in principle and which — in practice — can present obstacles to human understanding
and growth. It is possible to view the classroom as a mere rehearsal for life with no real stakes for its participants; the workplace can be seen as a proscribed, controlled, managed world of finite expectations, methods and behaviors; and the structures of social governance and representation as an ideal, projected structure which is separate from everyday life. I wish
to argue that design methodologies can attribute common characteristics to all three, allowing an enrichment of techniques of communication and self-actualizations. The protagonist in a parliamentary debate can benefit from the playful mindset of the actor in the rehearsal room, the
workplace — constrained to produce “real” results — can learn from the uncertainties of pedagogic exploration. In the same way, the classroom can embody questions of equality, difference and governance.

Keywords: Transdisciplinary practice, social interaction, design education, collaborative learning.