Collaborative Culture and EmergentC's
An essay by Sher Doruff in the context of the "Collaborative Culture" master class, during DEAF03.
A remarkable, if contentious, trend of the past few decades,
has been the trans-disciplinary current of complex system
theory running through and between all fields of research
practice, from physics, biology, neurology, the social,
computer, political and cognitive sciences, to philosophy
and art. Though interpretations and assessments vary, there
is an appetite for models and methodologies that reveal
elements and conditions of non-linear dynamic interaction
in systems: in cells, in brains, in social networks and
human-computer convergence. It is a study of the interaction
and organization between things in their environment and
the processes that emerge from these conditions. The
dynamics, the enigmatic inter-ness - flow, dynamic, movement,
process, synapse, circuit, stigma, information - "between"
organisms, nodes, individuals and societies is the stuff
of life. Complexity provides a provocative contextual topology
from which to approach a discussion of collaborative practice
in new media and live arts. The focus here is on practice
that extends well beyond the conventions of working relationships
in inter-disciplinary arts projects and moves towards a
synergy that marginalizes individual contribution over the
relational dynamics and emergent possibilities of the collective.
That same collective that can only flourish from diversity
and difference among its group; that looks towards the inter-authorship
process as viable artistic expression; that builds and uses
media technologies that both reflect upon and engender new
types of social interaction and critical discourse. The
implications of emergent social behaviors, communication
skills and aesthetics arising from collaborative interplay
and its dynamic properties is potentially far-reaching,
given the cross-cultural breadth of informatics. Much of
this discussion in theoretical practice is old news, worn
thin from cybernetics to rhizomatics. The vivid plausibility
of empowered, emergent networks sits uncomfortably on the
utopian/dystopian dialectical fence. Global political trends,
as a case in point, contribute to the dualism between neo-19th-century
hierarchical colonialism and the bottom-up revisioning of
20th-century social democracies. Distributed real-time
interaction strategies and negotiations for data sharing
and processing are examples of dynamic systems with a high
degree of complexity, just as culture itself can be viewed
as a highly complex system. I will point to contingencies
that appear relevant with respect to issues and phenomena
that address emergent behavior and distributed cognition
within collectives that are connected and facilitated by
malleable media. The unpredictable, elastic modification
of this media by multiple users is essential to this discussion. As
the term "Collaborative Culture" suggests, this essay and
the master class at DEAF03 in March 2003, are an attempt
to provoke both critical and playful investigation into
tools and techniques that incorporate social networks, live
mediation, synchronous co-creation, real-time access to
and transformation of databases and living archives. The
technology enabling the practical interplay for the class
was KeyWorx (Waag Society); the theoretical topology was
complexity. Excerpt by Sher Doruff, 2003
