Collaboration

"It's time to drop the competitive egos and thrive on collaboration and experimentation"

 - Mark Callahan, Artistic Director of Ideas for Creative Exploration

As an opening piece, I feel it extremely fit to touch light on a topic that is not only personal to myself and my creative life but also emerging as a major trend within the art world. While I've decided to choose a theme that introduces myself, values, and goals,  I come with the larger goal of setting the tone for this digital portfolio by requesting the exact thing I speak on...collaboration.

While collaboration, present in various forms, has existed for ages, there is something particularly interesting happening in today's world. We are seeing an overlapping  theme in work in which it artists take the world's increasing interconnectivity through the digital sphere and seamlessly blend it with the natural human desire for the physical. 

First introduced to me in my Net Art course, taught by Mark Callahan quoted above, this trending topic resonated the most and appeared almost every time I spoke with creatives about the future. While the Net Art course (to be discussed future posts) is a whole other monster on its own to handle, it not only changed my perspective of what others are starting to do but also how I, as a consumer and participant, act and where I want the future of art to go in this heavily digital society. 

Presented in Net Art, this video was my first exposure to the reasons artists pursue collaborative art and the captivating work they are capable of creating. Amy Franceschini is a San Francisco based artist who is concerned with notions of community, sustainable environment, and the relations between humans and nature.

While millennials are always identified by, and often taunted with, our reliance of technology and social media, I have seen a recent shift away from the expected. We no longer fully respond to solely digital campaigns or platforms. We've become desensitized to the typical banner or suggested Facebook ad. We crave something greater that will shatter the digital bubbles we've trapped ourselves in. 

As with every trend, the permeation of innovators, rebels, and avant-garde bring experimentation with components encouraging the exact opposite of that trend. Now, there's a trend promoting a greater shift back towards the physical. Consumers want physical communication, interaction, and participation. 

I believe that interactive design, specifically in regards to installations, has proven to be one of the most successful approaches toward satisfying all these recent demands. It offers the innovative and new desire towards physical involvement while still allowing us to work within a medium of technology in which we are already comfortable in. I applaud pieces in which the artist encourages participation from his or her audience then takes the multitude of responses and coherently composes them into a beautiful and meaningful work. This medium of work not only challenges the artists to think beyond his or herself, but the participant becomes fully engaged and captivated by their personal contribution to the work. They become co-creators. 

Unnumbered Sparks, presented below, was one of the first examples I found in doing further research during my Net Art class. Intrigued by this topic, I wanted to see if this type of work was even possible. Would the audience respond? Could variety in work exist? Was this just a one trick pony? 

Every day, I am learning more and more about the possibilities of interactive design. But again, it all boils down to one of the things I and many others crave most. While this blog series as a whole acts as my own response to the many things I observe and learn, I also want it to act an a medium of communication for those who also want to contribute, to respond, and to collaborate. 

Unnumbered Sparks, a monumental interactive sculpture in Vancouver, Canada created by artists Janet Echelman and Aaron Koblin for TED's 30th anniversary. Choreographed by visitors in real time through their mobile devices, at night, the sculpture becomes a crowd-controlled visual artwork on a giant, floating canvas powered by Google.