I keep forgetting to post something about the Distributed Creativity forum which I first heard about on the fibreculture list. Thanks to Anne for reminding me. As regular visitors know, I’m interested in emerging definitions of creativity, and I have a sense that the concept has shifted in meaning and has absorbed or displaced elements of earlier categories like “resistance”, “fashion”, and “innovation”. So I was delighted to find this definition of Mobile Creativity (which as Anne says, does sound more fun than ‘distributed intelligence’):

Distributed Creativity refers to creative practices and communities that challenge the single-artist, art-object paradigm. This is already happening all around us. Artists are organizing impromptu street actions by mobile phone, musicians are repurposing peer-to-peer applications for artistic ends, and programmers are distributing electronic toolkits to help artists leap from code to creation.

In this description, there are logics of grassroots/DIY art, political activism, and technical innovation at work. And the interesting thing is that these logics appear to work together in a harmony that I don’t think would have been so commonsense in previous decades.

Plus, there is not only a challenge to the “single-artist, art-object paradigm” here but also a challenge to the category of the “artist” per se. And of course I’m interested in the implications of all this for the professional-amateur divide on the one hand and the high-popular divide on the other.