Elisenda Ardèvol, Debora Lanzeni, Gemma San CornelioUniversitat Oberta de Catalunya (IN3)

“Mapping”: collaborative creation practices and media sociability

ECREA, Digital Culture and Communication, 27th October 2012

Introduction

• “Digital culture and cultural production” -- MEDIACCIONS research group-

• “Creative practices and participation in new media” --CREATIVE research project, funded by MICINN (HAR2010-18982)

• Research project on free culture movement

Methodological approach

• Theories of practices. Theodor Schatzki (2001). Avoiding the "mediacentrics" approaches (media influence), "textcentrics" (based on the interpretation of texts or representations) or "technocentrics" (technological determinism).

• Case studies. The production of empirical data is based on case studies; using techniques of netsurfing, participant observation and interviews, and their interpretation and analysis, taking into account the perspective of actors and their material practices... to attend to "people's doings and sayings"...

Mapping and free software culture

•How mapping is characterized as a collaborative creative practice?

•How the process of creation and the mapping performance are

shaped by the free-software culture?

•How mapping is related to social innovation?

The work we present today is based on an ethnographic fieldwork among free culture activist and technology makers mainly set in Barcelona. People who support the movement through create, circulate and connect knowledge and information and people who make things such software, images, hardware, art, etc.

Participation in digital culture

• Hybrid identities and products: 'prosumer' (consumer + producer); 'proam' (amateur + professional); 'viewsers' (viewers + users); 'produser', user-generated content, long tail.

• Liberating discourses vs free labour discourses. The uncertainty around the restatement of creative work and professional roles: fusion of leisure and work through play. Free labor (Lazzaratto) The institutionalization of the bohemia (Neff, 2005)

• Co-creation. The phenomenon of consumers that are increasingly participative in the process of making and circulating media content and experiences (Banks & Deuze, 2009). Relating (implicitly or explicitly) industries with external agents that include audiences, fans, amateurs, or independent artists.

Theoretical background

Creative industries and new media

• “Fusion of traditional arts (individual) with cultural industries”. (Hartley, 2005). Cultural and audiovisual industry currently is no such But are multiple micro initiatives that are created for a specific purpose. importance of social networks (Hartley, 2005)

• Based on individual work and free-lance, logic-based project, the hacker ethic of work and pleasure (which has always been a feature of the artists). Features of the "creative class" (Richard Florida, 2002).

• “Design thinking” as a driver of innovation instead of the cultural paradigm of the Information and Knowledge Society (Catells, 2002).

Theoretical background

Independent creators

Users, prosumers,Proams, etc.

Industries

Social innovation

• Immaterial labor (Corsani, Negri, Lazzarato, 1996) Innovation is beyond the control of corporations (Corsani, 2004:91). To produce this transformation is necessary to forget the segmentation: labor / leisure, production / creativity, duty…

• Mass creativity. (Leadbeater 2006:4-9). Innovation is not just a mass-produced thing but also produced by the masses. Wikipedia, or free software are a new paradigm in such modes of production. In this context ProAms (Professional Amateur), are the main drivers of innovation on the Internet, through spaces as Youtube, MySpace, etc.

• Hidden innovation. (NESTA, 2007:17). There is innovation that is not controlled by scientific indicators located only in scientific and industrial centers. Create new indicators to account for all the invisible creativity. The concept of "open innovation" in which companies must learn to use ideas from external sources rather than trying always invent for themselves.

Theoretical background

Case Study: Mapping with Telenoika

Video projection mapping by Telenoika, an audiovisual open creative community sited in Barcelona that uses and promotes open source software in the context of the free culture movement.

• Augmented Space (Manovich, 2006) new aesthetic paradigm of the space experience” “is the physical space overlaid with dynamically changing information” (Manovich, 2006, p. 220)

• Informational territories (Lemos, 2010, p. 405), “the digital layer is in relationship with other layers like laws, regulations and subjectivities constituting then a “new sense” of the space. The intersection of the digital media with other uses and social conceptions of space is explored by artists and activists as a way of re-appropriation and creation of new meanings of a place.

• “the technologically mediated world does not stand apart from the physical world within which it is embedded; rather, it provides a new set of ways for that physical world to be understood and appropriated” (Brewer and Dourish, 2008, p. 969).

Theories of space

MediaSpace (Couldry, 2004) is a multidimensional approach to the relations established between media and place.

“the artefactual existence of media forms within social space, the links that media objects forge between spaces, and the (no less real) cultural visions of a physical space transcended by technology and emergent virtual pathways of communication. It is also expanding too. We can no longer ignore what Thrift and French (2002) call the 'automatic production of space' through software, a condition of spatialized governance in which media and space quite literally merge in architectural infrastructure”. (Thrift and French 2002:314, 317).

“ the politics of media images and economies are not separate from the politics of space”.

MediaSpace

MediaSpace: The moment of performing mapping

The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as all of society, as part of society, and as instrument of unification. As a part of society, it is specifically the sector which concentrates all gazing and all consciousness. (Debord 1983, paras 2-3)

• Space ecology is not only present during the event or mapping display, but also in every step of the practice, from the very creation of it.

•This technique, especially when done by open code, implies a sophisticated coordination of software and hardware in real time.

• Open software vs private software. The risk of projection.

•The ideological position of sharing.

•The necessity of collaborating

MediaSpace: The moment of performing mapping

The process of creating the mapping could be considered as a kind of iterative design process where the work of the computer engineers is being produced in parallel to the creative or audiovisual work, full of specific moments of ‘illumination’, for instance when they create a line of code to make a window or any other effect:

SharingSpace: The moment of creating mapping

We hear waves of uplifting and happy if!, Ohhh!, Well,Molt Be!, Que bonic! in unison, coming from the row in front of computers of those who were playing with software doing mapping. Enric, who was with the projector comes running "what happened, what happened?”

"Oh, you missed it, you had to be to see it!" Oliver replied sarcastically. What had happened is that, in real time, they had managed to open a "window" that worked with pyton from blender and wormap, but what everyone saw it was a red shadow crept symmetrically from the outside right towards the western side of the same building-image taken from the film Metropolis and projected on the wall on which was mapping. The same effect for about 30 minutes.

Here, several parallel activities began while Carles, hastily opened the wormap and began writing new lines of code that would be able to share to the Blender community. Not 10 minutes had passed when they got the first comment.

SharingSpace: The moment of creating mapping

• The members of the collective are working professionally for other companies or individually as free-lancers. So the teams of work are variable in scale and components.

•They organize themselves in relation to the projects and their own availability.

• They develop software and other technical solutions for collectives, or even for institutions, but also their own projects

•“they do things”

WorkSpace: Labour aspects and organization

•They often mention the notion of ‘play’ regarding their professional practice. “We gather togheter to play for a while and make mapping”.

•They discuss every project in terms of being payed depending on the client- ehtic dilemmas.

•They are sustainable

WorkSpace: Labour aspects and organization

Mapping is the result and the intersection between creative practices and mediated sociability that take place in a thickish digital environment or media ecology (Horst, 2008).

For Telenoika members Creative practices and digital media are both constitutive to “mapping” as a collaborative practice.

They need to collaborate in order to keep running the creative process. Since they are using open software, many hands, minds and creativity is needed in order to produce their works. Collaboration is not only a choice, is a necessity.

Sharing is a constitutive element of the creative practice, influencing the creative process and also the results. By this process of sharing they do not only create a cultural product or an artistic performance, but a certain moral order (that they need to continue creating). They know that the only way of creating and developing new products freely is by sharing.

Conclusions

Again, it is a necessity, since they know that if they don’t share, they will depend on the private programmes which are inaccessible for young creative artists and engineers. So the gate of innovation will be closed. They must be social innovators if they want to continue developing their technical expertise and artistic expressions.

By doing so, they believe that they move from improvisation to innovation. That is, they are social innovators.

Their innovations are intrinsic to the practice of hardware design and mapping.

They want to influence the market.

But they also want to change the world.

Conclusions

Thank You!!