creativity/machine

FREE PUBLIC TALK

The BBC’s Creative Archive Project: New Approaches to Accessing Creative Content
with Paula Le Dieu

Garden’s Point Theatre, QUT, 5.30pm to 7.00pm
Wednesday, 2 March 2005

The BBC’s announcement that it will release archived material under Creative Commons styled licences has captured worldwide attention. Paula Le Dieu has been at the centre of this development and will present an overview of the BBC’s Creative Archive initiative which aims to ensure greater community access to material held in the BBC’s archives. The talk will provide an opportunity for consideration of alternative approaches to managing digital copyright and will build on the very successful Creative Commons Conference held at QUT in January 2005, headlined by Professor Lawrence Lessig.

for my useful box - an archive of apple TV commercials

So last night saw me at the opening of Brisbane’s Bollywood Masala film festival at the Dendy, which kicked off with the very well-known Main Hoon Na. I ask you, what more could you want in a Bollywood film - witty, self-referential, and seething with intertextuality, and packed to the rafters with military heroes, action-adventure, romance, magic, teen comedy, tear-jerking melodrama, and of course very big musical numbers with very hot bodies and *very* sexy dancing.

While this was v. fun (how could it not be?), it’s all work and no play for me for the next couple of weeks while I wrestle with linguistic chaos to produce a PhD confirmation document that will do the job. And write a few lectures and so on - you know the drill at this time of year. So on the blog front, expect lame links and strange, slightly insane mutterings for a little while, rather than the fine, measured prose you’ve come to expect.
And by the way, if it weren’t for The Necks, I’d feel even less capable of taming the anxiety attacks that always come with ‘real’ writing.

numanumaye!! (embedded video - turn on your speakers)

CFP: Digital Arts and Cultures (DAC) 2005: Digital Experience: Design, Aesthetics, Practice, 1st - 3rd December, 2005, IT University, Copenhagen, Denmark. Hmmmmm….Copenhagen!

To look at properly later (seems way too interesting to allow myself to play with it now): mefeedia - a web-based videoblog aggregator, and ANTnotTV - funky desktop videoblog aggregator (Mac OS X) - thanks adrian for keeping me up to date with the exploding world of vlog distribution.

My good friend and open source crusader David Berry has taken the time to turn a plain text version of F.M. Conford’s famous 1908 satire on university politics, Microcosmographia Academica, into a much prettier pdf version. Choice cuts:

0 young academic politician, my heart is full of pity for you now; but when you are old, if you will stand in the way, there will be no more pity for you than you deserve; and that will be none at all.

I shall take it that you are in the first flush of ambition, and just beginning to make yourself disagreeable. You think (do you not?) that you have only to state a reasonable case, and people must listen to reason and act upon at once. It is just this conviction that makes you so unpleasant. There is little hope of dissuading you; but has it occurred to you that nothing is ever done until every one is convinced that it ought to be done, and has been convinced for so long that it is now time to do something else? And are you not aware that conviction has never yet been produced by an appeal to reason, which only makes people uncomfortable? If you want to move them, you must address your arguments to prejudice and the political motive, which I will presently describe.

It’s in the public domain, so if you enjoy it, spread it around via p2p or any other means of distribution at your disposal.

If you’re into copyleft, see also the libre manifesto.

So, the puzzle my Phd tries to solve (how creativity, cultural participation and the ‘democratization’ of technologies fit together) comes out of the hype around two converging ideas: the increased availability and production power of digital technologies for content creation and distribution (see Anne’s pointed mini-critique of some of this) and ‘creativity’ as life-fulfilling, as economic driver, as the means to participation and radical consumer-led cultural change (especially for the content industries). I want to find a way through this hype and try to extract what the possibilities actually might be, and for whom, and it what circumstances, and in whose interests, but first I need to say what I think is wrong with the hype.

So I love it when I find stuff like this, which contains every stereotype about creativity and every wrongheaded assumption about “production” and “consumption” I could ever wish for. Then I get depressed:

Generation C

[…] the C stands for CONTENT, and anyone with even a tiny amount of creative talent can (and probably will) be part of this not-so-exclusive trend.

So what is it all about? The GENERATION C phenomenon captures the tsunami of consumer generated ‘content’ that is building on the Web, adding tera-peta bytes of new text, images, audio and video on an ongoing basis.

The two main drivers fuelling this trend?

(1) The creative urges each consumer undeniably possesses. We’re all artists, but until now we neither had the guts nor the means to go all out.

(2) The manufacturers of content-creating tools, who relentlessly push us to unleash that creativity, using — of course — their ever cheaper, ever more powerful gadgets and gizmos. Instead of asking consumers to watch, to listen, to play, to passively consume, the race is on to get them to create, to produce, and to participate.

the fluff-piece goes on to gives lots of examples of how these manufacturers are “getting consumers” to “produce”.

See also Nations-Lite for an informative yet entertaining overview of “the most remarkable achievements and developments that are turning the UAE into a NATION*LITE* for prosperous HOME TROTTERS from Asia, the Middle East, the EU and South Africa”! Eek.

Thinking aloud here about some stuff that occurred to me while continuing to read Speaking into the Air this morning. You probably won’t want to read this unless you live inside my PhD with me (messy in there, isn’t it?). These thoughts also go some way to explaining what I was getting at with my heretical talk of ‘authenticity’ and ‘presence’ in my first post since getting hold of the book.

There is an axiom floating around at the moment that creativity is meaningful only in that it is communicative - Negus and Pickering built a whole book out of this apparently straightforward concept (it’s quite a good book too, despite others’ lamentations to the commentary). However, the axiom only looks straightforward if both the key terms are taken at face value - creativity meaning the cognitive process of innovative (usually cultural) production; communication meaning at least the transmission of information, at most the exchange of ideas. Negus and Pickering do a lot to unpack the genealogy and usage of the first of these keywords, but do much less with the second.

In my PhD research, my two detailed case studies are Apple’s iLife suite and digital storytelling. In trying to explain how these two case studies relate to each other, I’ve started to think about them in relation to two very different constructions of creativity - creativity as productive play, with no necessary relation to the social (the dominant one); and creativity as communication, which is less dominant, but far more central to my own arguments. [Before I go on, let me say quite clearly that there is no reason these two constructions of creativity should be exclusive: in fact, I might go far as to say that the kind of creativity I mean when I talk about “vernacular creativity” is precisely an articulation of play and sociality.]

But anyway, this is how I’m thinking of how my two case studies sit in relation to all this:

The iLife suite and the discourses around it structure creativity as productive play (play meaning childlike fun - I would need a whole paragraph to unpack ‘play’ as well). The dominant metaphor apple uses is, as I see it, the toybox: the interfaces all look like etch-a-sketches made of candy, and garageband is a bright tasty box of sonic lego blocks (and I wish it were play dough). To be creative in this universe is simply to make media, and to have fun making it. (there’s more to it, but you don’t want the whole chapter here)

Digital storytelling, fun as it is, productive as it is, goes much further towards the kind of communicative creativity that I think constitutes meaningful agency in the ‘network of networks’ of contemporary culture. The kind of communicative creativity I am talking about is not to be understood in the sense of communication as the exchange of information or ‘ideas’, but as social action - the test of effective communication in this sense is a kind of being there, a kind of becoming real as a participant in the network. I think this understanding of creativity avoids the emptiness of the rah-rah celebration of it as the driving force behind the ‘new economy’, which is one good thing, and it opens up the concept so that it is no longer about the expression of the creator’s interiority, but actually privileges collaborative creativity - another good thing.

Seems “propaganda of the deed” is already a slogan:

Propaganda of the Deed or Propaganda by Deed was an anarchist doctrine that promoted the decisive action of individuals to inspire further action by others.

As a doctrine-in-practise, its heyday was the period between 1881 and 1901, starting with the assassinations of Russian tzar Alexander and ending with that of United States President William McKinley.

Arguably it was in this period that modern-day international terrorism was born. The invention of dynamite, and its widespread distribution the 19th century, gave enormous power to anyone able to obtain it.

This newfound power led anarchists, notably Johann Most in his pamphlet The Science of Revolutionary Warfare, to advocate its use to further their cause through assassinations and terrorism.

By the mid-1890s it was clear that “Propaganda of the Deed” was a failed strategy, and most revolutionary anarchists, including Kropotkin and Malatesta, distanced themselves from the idea. A fringe continued the practice for a few years more.

But can’t we reclaim it, like viruses and schizophrenia, for the good?