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Hi folks

Thias, Neil and I have been plugging away at the Technology Strategy Board about what was called the Creative Industries Technology Innovation Centre.  Now it's the Connected Digital Economy Catapult.

1202_CAT_DIGITAL_RegistrationForm_19869-142290_v3.doc Download this file

More background on my blog http://digital-citizen.co.uk/wordpress/?p=1553

Cheers

B

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C4CC is up for an Award

The Competition

As part of the European Commission funded, Ulab project, the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford is organizing an online competition to identify the most innovative outreach and public engagement activities that have been carried out by European Universities. We define outreach and public engagement in the broadest sense to incorporate all forms of interaction with individuals and organisations outside the university. Examples of outreach and public engagement may include initiatives that engage with school children and / or their teachers, interactions with commercial organisations that lead to new technological developments, or activities that connect with policy makers and support the policy making process.

C4CC's entry:

http://engageawards.com/entry/98

Please make some noise on whatever social media etc you prefer.

There's some money involved - €5k - but the recognition and people knowing about what we've all done is more important!

Thanks

B

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I’m a musician - it’s what I do and who I am, and as such collaboration is central to how I think about what I do. All music is collaborative in some way - collaboration between people, collaboration with history and tradition, and with performance or work spaces to create sound. Almost all music-making situations rely on the combining of skills, ideas, experience, metaphors, sounds and personalities. Music has been an amazing training ground and sandbox-environment for me to explore the meaning and vitality of collaboration.

Collaboration is a foundation stone of both my own working life and the places I look to for inspiration, those most meta of experiences where I get to collaboratively explore the parameters of collaboration.

All of which points to the Centre For Creative Collaboration - perhaps nowhere in modern life is better placed to benefit from collaborative practice than academia - the very environment where the present and future can be unpacked and explored, where arts and sciences can collide to provide new learning, new perspective, new media, where the unjaded impetus of the undergraduate mind can meet the wisdom and resourcefulness of those with honed expertise.

The changes in University funding in the UK have forced a rethink of so many aspects of academic life. Of teaching and research, of accreditation, assessment and commercial viability. Of creative independence and of partnerships with the worlds of business, commerce and civic life. Of what the ‘output’ of academia should be and can be.

None of these are best served by siloes, by hatches being battened and resources being hoarded. The exploration of both the systems of education and the learning itself require us to pool our intellectual resources, to open ourselves to the collision of wisdoms and to pursue knowledge for its own vitality.

So the timing seems perfect for C4CC, placed as it is at the intersection of so many establishments, a neutral ‘play space’ for ideas, a messy space for making things, a kitchen garden within which potential can be watered and allowed to flourish... There are so many metaphors for what’s possible in a place like the Centre For Creative Collaboration, but few can add to what has actually happened there. Of the key ‘targets’ set when the centre opened, a few of them are astounding - the original plan for 12 collaborative projects happening in the centre of its initial period was dwarfed as 106 projects came through the building. The desire for 200 visitors paled against the reality of over 3,700 people coming through. The range of partners was bigger than anyone expected and - crucially - the number of SMEs (Small/Medium Enterprises) that were involved surprised everyone.

All in, the reality has surpassed even the most optimistic view of what ‘should’ have happened in the Centre. Ideas have been formed, projects realised and businesses started. New courses have been taught, students have been given ‘thinking space’ away from their usual environment to let their imagination and learning combine in dreaming up new things, discovering new modes of working and ways of thinking.

As a ‘collaboration junky’, I’ve always felt at home there, felt my spirit fed by the ‘buzz’, the excitement of so much happening under one roof. Long may it continue.

Steve Lawson

@solobasssteve.net

http://www.stevelawson.net/

Photo: Benjamin Ellis

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My task now: to articulate, briefly, what this place is. You would think I would know by now. But this is a difficult question. At the very least, I should be able to say what it has been for me. I have asked many of the other residents the same question, and now I should answer it for myself.

Ten years ago, I went to a theatre school where I learned about collaborative theatre making. Every week we put on a short scene devised by us. No one directed, and we all acted. It was always difficult and sometimes painfully so, but occasionally you would have a brilliant success. These successes showed me that a group can create something much richer and more surprising than one writer can.

Though I entered the school with acting ambitions, I realised over those two years that I feel most comfortable with writing; I see myself creating theatre more than enacting it. After graduating, I worked on a few fully collaborative theatre pieces that were, in some sense, failures, and then spent time writing on my own because I needed to take my work into my own hands. After a few years of this, I found I was missing the input of others. Last year, when I began my PhD, I knew that I wanted to understand how writers, who typically work alone and cherish the control they have over their work, manage to open their process enough to work with a group of opinionated actors and a director. The times I have tried this have been difficult to say the least: wrong group, wrong writer, or wrong approach, I don’t know. If I could spend time with this question of writing and creating, creative collaboration, as my vocation, perhaps I could understand how to do it myself. There were obvious challenges to this, which is perhaps why academics have not charted collaborative processes satisfactorily yet: they are hard to plan for and frequently change midstream, and seem to be impossible to talk about after the fact. So I had a good idea that it wouldn’t be simple.

But maybe the Centre for Creative Collaboration (c4cc), which is in a funded, experimental pilot phase, could help me get closer to understanding what happens when people bring their creative energies together, or at the very least why they do so.

So I applied to become a resident. After a bit of a grilling from one of the board members about what my intentions were and how I would give back to the Centre, I decided that I would give myself the project of interviewing as many of the residents as I could, attempt to draw some conclusions in the form of some writing, and offer this to the Centre. These interviews, would also give me a variety of perspectives on collaboration.

But first I had to understand what this place was. I spent a few weeks sitting around c4cc to listen and watch. I was immediately struck by the lack of structure. It had an energy of its own that wasn’t organised or masterplanned. Sitting up on the balcony around the central atrium, I could hear everything, I could peak downstairs at the informal meetings that happened down there, the scheduled networking sessions, events, and conferences. See visitors ponder the photos on the wall. Hear difficult conversations between collaborators trying to find common terms. Watch newcomers come in and try to figure out just what is going on in here, like I was doing. I could watch as people talked across the space, and down into it.

And also working with others. I met a theatre producer who told me about an idea he had been thinking about, and we began to work together. I talked to many people at the weekly informal networking session, Tuttle, who helped give me a new perspective on my ideas. And I had my own perspective on theirs. And talking, always talking, to the other residents to learn who they were and what their work was. These were small steps, but I felt I was part of the place.

It’s hard to pin down what I learned in those weeks. As I recall, it was more of a feeling. It was a sense of how simple and how complex it all was. Creative collaboration was really all there was to it—you came here and you worked—though what that means is as subjective and nuanced as it could be.

There was a set of observations also. I saw how an idea would come out of a conversation that started: ‘How’s work going?’. Someone would say, ‘That reminds me of...’ or ‘I should introduce you to...’ or ‘Send me an email...’. I saw how radical open-mindedness and cheeriness were the norm. How you made a point of starting conversations in the kitchen over tea. And I saw the waves of people that came in here some days, and the quiet days that followed. And how you never really knew which to expect.

The interviews confirmed my vague feeling. I was amazed how articulate the residents were about their working process. There was a huge array of approaches, but in essence it was simple, everyone said. There was no real catch. You set yourself up in the space, and you worked with others. If you pursued your project, made yourself open to unpredictability and available to others then collaborations would propose themselves. It was a question of mindset.

But the complexities emerged as well. I heard about ‘failed’ collaborations and ideas that went nowhere, disagreements and differences of opinion. When asked about why things didn’t work, there were always perfectly good reasons. And it was always complicated.

I was able to gather a few definitions of collaboration: To some it was as simple as sharing ideas and offering advice, to others it was mutual help on separate individual projects. To some it was taking charge of different parts of one project, and to others still it was creating and executing a concept together from start to finish.

I asked my interviewees if they thought everyone should collaborate in their working lives, and I don’t think anyone said no. Many said it took a special approach to your work, a certain mindset (that word again) and a willingness to take more time with your ideas, but that the benefits for all were clear.

Most of my interviewees agreed that collaboration was harder than it seemed. Several of them referred to a set of conditions that needed to be in place in order for collaboration to really happen. I heard about neutrality, mutual trust, structure and leadership. One person summed up the preconditions by saying that all parties have to come to the ‘acceptance that a group of minds is always going to be stronger than a single mind’—in other words, you have to want it for it work. All of this corresponded with my experience. And thinking of my failures, I knew well that it’s not often that you find all these qualities in a group of partners.

I heard also from several of my interviewees about something called ‘true collaboration’. The implication that there is such a thing as ‘false collaboration’ immediately rang true for me. I know that many so-called collaborative creative processes are in fact red herrings. As little agreement as there was about what collaboration is, it is clear to most people what it is not. I have experienced this myself in the theatre world, where a creative process is called collaborative, but all the members of the team are beholden to one creative mind who can’t let go of his or her singular vision, or where the institutional context of the work makes the leveling of an equal playing field impossible.

One interviewee said there was a difference between ‘teamwork’ and collaboration. Teamwork is working together on a project—even if it is framed by a hierarchical power structure where the terms of the project are predetermined by a relatively small number of people. Collaboration is working together on a project with all partners having significant input on the outcome. The line between the two is fuzzy. Collaboration does not mean everyone is the same, or that every partner is equally responsible for everything. Many interviewees stressed this point. To collaborate, you need to bring different skill sets together, with the stress at times on one skill over the others. Then the output will be something wholly new, a product that could only have been created by this particular group of people.
   
Another resident said that collaboration is necessarily a re-imagining of the way work is structured. And this, I realised, gets to the crux of this place. What all of us are doing here is re-imagining. We are going about our work, our projects, starting our businesses, meeting our deadlines, pleasing clients, seeking profit, putting up plays, but doing all this with a mind toward new ways of getting there. In some way we are building the future. I realise that’s quite grand, but I think it’s true.
   
Amongst all these thoughts and observations, I was to write an article summing up my findings. What is this place? The mission I had set for myself of defining the c4cc seemed hopelessly difficult. What right did I have to delineate the possibilities of the Centre in some academic argument? What conclusion could I possible draw except to say, banally, it is what you make of it?
   
Instead of conclusions I had questions; this place, I understand now, isn’t about answers, but inquiry. We don’t know where this grand experiment will take us, but we will try things and ask questions along the way: How do you achieve something predetermined, like the launch of a product or the production of a piece of art, if you keep the process indeterminate? How do you find ‘true’ collaboration if the idea is yours, and you therefore ‘own’ the idea more than your collaborators do? What happens with a collaboratively-generated idea once a partnership disbands? How do you recreate success if each process is unique? These questions are just a start.
   
At this point, we are not answering questions, really, but asking them. Any answers we embody through our work processes are not definitive responses, rather, attempts.
   
Where does all this leave me with my project? With my desire to ‘figure out’ this creative collaboration thing? Full of questions. Without formulae. What I know a little more intuitively now is that there are no formulae. Collaboration, actually, is the anti-formula. The point of a process guided by inquiry is that we don’t know what’s on the other side of the equation, or even what’s on this side. My hope is that by articulating the questions that c4cc asks, I will know what questions to ask myself in my practice and research. I don’t expect answers, really, but I do hope for some new lines of enquiry to help me come closer to finding out how collaborative practice can actually work for me. So far, what I have learned is that I will have to create the models for myself. Damn. I knew it wouldn’t be easy.

Among all the challenges and uncertainty, the caveats and conditions, the question begs itself: Why bother? There is more than a love of challenges that draws me to this minefield. I still believe in the value of collaboration, for some reasons that are easy to articulate and some that aren’t. I believe in the power of a group to come up with something more compelling, inventive and surprising than an individual can. And, like all of the residents at the Centre, I believe that collaboration is the future of both work and creativity. But more than that, I have a feeling that all of us who work this way, in spite of the challenges, are onto something exciting. That there is much we have yet to figure out. That the more these ways of working catch on, the more new ways of working, ways we haven’t discovered yet, will be created. That this search for individual and innovative ways of getting our work done will make our work matter more, to us and to the people it serves.

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Sitting in Tuttle talking to Julian Maynard Smith AHRC research fellow in telematic theatre at Central School of Speech and Drama about a project he wants to base at C4CC.

An example of previous work is HERE

Julian is looking for collaborators to work with especially people interested in realtime video and telematics, networks and other wizzy stuff.  Please get in touch if you'd like to find out more!

The proposal is for a collaboration using the expertise of people working in the areas of theatre/performance and new media/IT. The aim is to set up a system for telematic theatre based on video streaming and interactive technologies.  This would be dedicated to developing ways to bring live performance from different locations into a single production.

The question is how the core quality of theatre as being a live event witnessed by an audience in a shared space, subject to degrees of physicality, unpredictability and interaction, is modified by the use of media and where this will lead in terms of the possibilities of live theatre and performance.
The assumption of the project is that it is possible to maintain the attributes of human presence in a performance space that is highly mediatised, although in new forms.
 
The specific aims of this collaboration are:
1)  to create, as close as possible, a plug-and-play telematic system that is available to a wide range of users, inside and outside of the institution.  This implies ease of use by non-technical users and affordability.
2) to explore how the spatial, aural and physical qualities of the live theatrical experience can be maintained in modified form when performers and/or audience are distributed in space.

The project has at present one specific production scheduled, a piece designed to explore the spatial qualities of distant locations via moving cameras and projectors, to be presented at The Roundhouse on 12th and 13th December 2011.  After this further developments are anticipated, including extending the collaboration internationally.

The video-streaming system developed so far uses an axis video encoder to stream to the web, and decoding by VLC, which has the advantage of being more flexible than QT and being able to have multiple versions on one PC.   Thus a single PC is able to receive/display four channels of video.  This system allows high-quality streaming to multiple screens with low latency, allowing free-flowing interaction between performers in different locations.

In the Roundhouse project, cameras and projectors in two locations rotate at identical speeds, so that an image of the distant location is projected onto the walls as if through a moving window, scanning the world beyond.  The speed and direction of the motors are controlled from either location via Isadora.  The sound is automatically panned through four speakers, so that the sound follows the picture as it moves across the walls.  
For simplicity of use, all devices at any location are linked via a dedicated router to the available network.  One of the locations will be outdoors, in a rural or semi-rural setting, using a 3G connection.

The technical aims for the proposed collaboration are to establish:

• workable, 3G-enabled mobile set-up.
• a simple, plug-and-play network solution.  
• a system with minimal latency.
• a solution for sound that minimises the sound echo or feedback while allowing performers and audience alike to hear clearly.
• a set-up that allows for further investigation in interactivity between locations, using sensors, electro-mechanical devices, etc..

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A simple and unoriginal experiment.  

Prepare the ground with a set of children's magnetic letters arranged evenly and without order on a surface that people will pass regularly.  Stand back and see what happens.

A few observations:

1.  The first couple of arrangements were made within minutes of the letters showing up.

2.  The first arrangement was a greeting to The Creator (for it is I)

3.  "hello" soon became "hope"

4.  Nobody told anyone what to do or what not to do.  Nobody asked for permission.

5.  Strong personalities shine through.  Among the C4CC inner circle few could doubt the authorship of either "meow" or "granularity"

6.  As well as words a figurative structure appeared (just below the word kiwi in the fourth picture)  To me this is clearly a representation of a unicorn charging towards the right (or perhaps just deeper into the building) with an apple skewered on its horn.  The symbolism is obvious.

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We're all familiar with being on auto-pilot.  Usually because we come to a sudden realisation that that's where we've been.  Luckily most of the time it's because something or someone interrupts us gently.  Occasionally it's more serious, it's the car horn that alerts us to the fact we've stepped into the road without thinking. 

I think we're all also familiar with the paper tissue or towel on the public bathroom floor.  Who's going to pick it up? Not me.  God knows what's on it, what it was last used for, whose hands it has been in.  I may have just exposed some of my most intimate parts to a piece of porcelain that is less clean than that tissue, but I'm not going to pick it up.  It must be someone else's job.  And anyway how the hell does it get there?  How can people be so messy, dirty, slovenly?

Here's my theory on how it gets there.  Someone drops it accidentally and unconsciously while on auto-pilot.  They're on their way to meeting someone, having lunch, getting back to a knotty problem at work and they're oblivious to the single sheet of tissue falling to the floor.  Simple as that - it happens everywhere, it's not a measure of the depravation of the people using it, it's a measure of how unconscious they are, and I'd argue unconsciousness is, if anything, more prevalent in communities of clever people who are doing lots of thinking.

So what happens in a place where it isn't anyone else's job to pick it up?  At C4CC we do have cleaners who come in regularly, but not at the end of every day, nor does anyone do a regular cleanliness check during the day and scribble their signature on a chart on the back of the loo door.  What's the solution? Employ cleaners in such a capacity? No money.  Put up signs to encourage mindfulness of your surroundings while you're here? Signs are highly susceptible to being ignored by unconscious people.  Hold meditation sessions every day to generally raise the level of consciousness of people working here? Tempting... very tempting...

Or how about, whenever I find myself in a conscious state in the bathroom and I spot the residue of someone else's unconsciousness, I just pick up that piece of paper, put it in the bin and wash my hands afterwards?

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See the full gallery on Posterous

Thias Martin, Tony and I discussed how it might be:

"The sense of being ‘in between’ – and working in the gaps between institutions, between Universities and freelancers, between business and home, between spaces designed for learning and other ”informal” spaces where learning happens.

We discussed the concept of lily pads – and the idea of instability; the search for identity and stability; and how meaning and space interact “in the margins”.

Tony has a collection of materials; photographs, writing - and now needs feedback on where he is, collaborators to assist the process of his thinking and to expose the work to inclusive collaboration rather than an exhibition of “finished” product.

The work offers the potential to explore what we mean by ‘stability’ both in our lives and the lives of others and how we relate to institutions and our wider environment.

The camera is both an observer and a participant in mediating the interactions betweeen people and spaces. The use of ‘less intrusive’ technology (such as the iPhone camera) also merits exploration in how the interactions happen. Tony looks at social networks and how they can help to disseminate knowledge and experience. And how participants remote from the space and the installation can be included."

Tony's work also has potential to share collaborative energy with other projects such as Madaleine Trigg's "Valley of the Darkness" cameraless photography and darkroom project, Tuttle and collaborative writing and transmedia storytelling.

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Cross posted from my personal blog

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p1241.mov Watch on Posterous

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See the full gallery on Posterous

Today we had a fab day at #c4cc. Kicked off with Tuttle - conversations and coffee. Announcements. Energy from conversation. After Tuttle I talked to someone who might be a new project - community management; a smart, inspiring person.

Later, Geraldine Fourman, who leads one of our resident projects had a photo shoot. At the same time we had a 'crit' with the Poetic Practice students and staff from Royal Holloway. Upstairs, Pavegen Systems worked away - paving slabs that generate electricity from the kinetic energy of footsteps. They have a major breakthrough. Their technology was on 'Blue Peter' last week.

Matt Shaw (UCL/Bartlett) and Will Trossell (Architect and ex UCL/Bartlett) were working with the guys from Pavegen who were helping with flat panel LCD backlights.

Liam Barrington-Bush, another resident, was working in the space and also making content.

I was invited to take part in the Crit for the RHUL MA students. Such work and thinking - difficult to describe; impact and deep meaning.

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