Collaboration is ‘in’. As during the creative world’s embrace of political art in the 80’s, a lot of people who have been working collaboratively for a while are quite excited about this development. But with any style or method that becomes popular, eventually, inevitably, there will be the flip side when it all seems so “15 minutes ago”. For this reason and others it is important to critically understand what collaboration really is in this moment, and why it is having its moment just now.

For this purpose it is essential to look structurally at what collaboration is. In the current environment there seems to be a great number of people claiming to work collaboratively when a closer look reveals that other terms would more accurately describe what their process actually is. There are any number of ways of people working together artistically, ranging between collaboration, cooperation and coersion. Perhaps it is more useful to think of locating any group project along this scale in terms of ‘degrees of collaborativeness’ rather than labeling in a simple binary fashion.

Collaboration in its clearest sense is a strictly voluntary and non-hierarchical cooperative group effort. While a collaborative team is most successful when the different individuals bring complimentary skills and conceptual talents to the table, ideally all members of the team should share in both technical and creative efforts, rather than being divided into groups of ‘artists’ and ‘techs’. This is not to say that significant work can not be made otherwise, but simply that the effort is less ‘collaborative’ in that case.

Because much of the rise in collaborative work recently is facilitated by digital technologies, and because there is significant overlap between digital arts and the media/film world, one hears frequent reference to the “collaborative nature of filmmaking” While there certainly are films made collaboratively, these are indeed rarer than honest producers in Santa Monica. Filmmaking practice at its best is more accurately described as ‘cooperative’, and all too often is actually toward the ‘coercive’ end of the scale. While there is absolutely nothing inherently wrong in assembling a group of people in a team to work together in a hierarchy realizing one person’s artistic goal, it is somewhat disingenuous to call this process collaboration. There can be a spirit of cooperation that makes traditional film teamwork exciting, and there is certainly no doubt the distinct combination of talents and visions on a film crew can facilitate a creative synthesis that is greater than the sum of the individual voices of the project. These are qualities that a non-hierarchical collaboration can also have, but as long as the film crew structure is essentially hierarchical it is not collaboration in the truest sense.

Getting Specific:

While there is quite a bit of confusion about these basic concepts in circulation, there are a number of individuals and organizations that are diligently working at clarifying distinctly what collaboration in the arts really is, or can be, and advancing the effort with the general goals of creating a clearer discourse, and facilitating and propagating an open ‘creative commons’. The work of Trebor Scholz and others at The Institute for Distributed Creativity (http://distributedcreativity.org/), and Geert Lovink at the Institute for Networked Cultures (http://www.networkcultures.org) are excellent examples of these efforts.

While much can be learned by looking at traditional team effort disciplines like theater and film, as technology opens new opportunities for collaboration, and in particular distance collaboration, new methodologies for working need to be developed and discussed. Sometimes solutions are counter-intuitive. For example while one would expect that optimal results would come from collaborations where all members are working confidently and specifically in their field of expertice, Ars Electronica Director Gerfried Stocker has noted that the most successful collaboration often come from situations where all team members are challenged by working somewhat outside their realm of mastery.(1) It seems that in these instances the shared experience of dealing with the unknown in the collaborative process builds a creative union that moves individuals past the limitations of creative territoriality, and opens the door to mutual innovation.

It is precisely in these instances where the dynamics of creative collaborative process surprises us that we see that the real potential for collaborative work is still to be discovered. Collaboration at its best is not just sharing the work that needs to be done, but rather discovering in the work what can only be done because of the alchemy of the freely shared process.

Teaching collaboration:

Collaboration in the educational setting has another set of challenges in understanding and implementation. Considering the great deal of team-work that students of Electronic Media are likely to complete in their future careers, it is essential that they be given a range of collaborative projects during their education. But it is not enough to give them a project assignment with a due date and simply throw them into groups. An essential part of the process must be an introduction to the collaborative process. This it all too often overlooked in curriculii.

Of particular importance if students are to understand the essence of collaboration (as distinct from the cooperative and coercive models), is the full disclosure and discussion of the hierarchical structures inherent in the project team, the assignment, class and the educational institution overall. It is in this context that the discourse developing around nodes such as IDC and INC (see above) can be particularly helpful for teaching.

As exciting as the prospects are for all artists in the development of technology enabled distance collaboration, the potential for students is even greater as they generally do not have so much access to a broader professional community and discourse. It can certainly be argued that the growing opportunities in engaging communities of net culture are creating for our students very different arenas than the ones we trained and operated in. As educators we have a significant responsibility to help students engage these virtual communities, and more pointedly, learn the essential skills for doing this critically, creatively and proactively. Perhaps this may be a pedagogical process that we can best pursue in a spirit of collaboration.