 A Guide to Good Practice in Collaborative Working Methods and New Media Tools Creation Chapter 1 (Introduction): Mapping Good Practices in and through Creative Praxis  In an age of diversity, it is both impossible and inappropriate to consider anyone's practice to be "best practice". It is, however, widely acknowledged to be important to strive towards the best practices we can muster and upon which we can agree, and meanwhile to offer examples of "good practice" wherever they be found. The notion of "good practice" was one of the most controversial we encountered in our attempts to create a set of helpful guidelines for the making and sharing of new media tools by and for artists. Here, "praxis" is a very useful term: "praxis" = (in my definition, drawn from experience) the process of practice, the active making and sharing of practices, usually referring to professional skills and art forms performed live or in some process-driven way. Creativity is a mode; praxis is a method. Praxis has, more formally been defined as: prax·is ( P ) Pronunciation Key (prkss) 1. Practical application or exercise of a branch of learning. praxis \Prax'is\, n. [NL., fr. Gr. ?, fr. ? to do. See Practice.] 1. Use; practice; especially, exercise or discipline for a specific purpose or object. "The praxis and theory of music." - Wood Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc. praxis praxis: in CancerWEB's Online Medical Dictionary Source: Online Medical Dictionary, © 1997-98 Academic Medical Publishing & CancerWEB The RADICAL project, which supported the research that in turn led to this book, was conceived as a process-driven research and development tool. It takes good practice examples and weaves them together to show how each field, each discipline, each notion of the European and of media can inform, shed light on, and also confuse and obscure others, unless differences are acknowledged and celebrated, even while a common cloth is woven. Through the European Commission's IST (Information Society Technologies) RADICAL project, a team of artists and cultural activists representing a range of European countries chose to work together to create a "digital seedbed" for the European community. We were a very unusual gathering: an American woman working in England, a New Zealand woman working in France, a Dutch woman with wide international experience, an Englishman, an Irishman, and a Greek man working in England. For various reasons, the three male partners eventually dropped out of the project, and the three women "drove" the project through to completion, including wide international dissemination and carry-through to the next set of project proposals for future work under the Framework VI programme. This little anecdote, though it reads like the beginning of a joke ("there were six 'Europeans' in a boat...") is indicative of a very important good practice development that arose from the RADICAL project: for the first time, three women, and three women artists, were, by hook or by crook, leading a major EC project. Each of us brought professional arts practice to bear on the work, in performative, aesthetic and communicative terms. Each of us drew in the support of other artists, and interestingly, of a range of women working in the arts and culture. Though the budget for the project was not sufficient to cover all our costs, and though the time it took to complete the administration was overwhelmingly above the level allowable on the project time sheets, this group of (primarily) women, this group of (practicing) artists, made the project work. It is this which sets RADICAL apart from the vast majority of projects that preceeded it, and also this which we would like to put forward as part of a working model for creative praxis in Europe, and internationally, in years to come. Good practice model one: solidarity. Useful skills for project partners: patience, flexibility, modesty, ability to multitask, willingness to continue work for far less than the allowable minimum wage, sense of humour. Perhaps it is no surprise - given that these same skills have always been required of professional women, and professional artists - that in this particular project, we were able to succeed as a small working group of committed (primarily women) artists, and thereby to make an impact (however modest) on the future policy for funding for the arts and culture. We would not encourage a continuation of these inequities of pay, nor of workload, in the arts or in the gendered division of labour more generally. It is simply interesting to note that women and artists alike have a body of lived experience that may be helpful in shaping a more productive working praxis for the future of digital culture. When pay scales and workloads are adjusted to allow those with the expertise, talent and vision to express these most creatively and effectively, then the "digital divide" we've all heard so much about might really and truly begin to be bridged. In the mean time, this book sets out a series of chapters covering the range of digital arts and media subjects of most pressing relevance to the current generation of makers and users, ending with a series of position papers on the funding and political frameworks in which this body of work is set in the European Community at the turn of the new century. The authors/the texts
We begin with a short, inspiration call to arms by Michael Naimark, one of the most prominent artist/scholars in the field today, whose work has been hailed by industry and the SME (small to medium-sized enterprise) sectors of the arts as important and visionary. Naimark's work at Interval can be seen as one of the first major bridges between civic arts and major corporate sponsorship. His endorsement of this text, and of the RADICAL project more generally, helps to place this work in the international context of future-oriented new media (and newer media) art development. Michael Century's history of the "rise of media labs, their projects and resulting tools and productions" gives a deeper and more extensive context for discussion of the work that follows, including the data obtained through the RADICAL project, analysed in these pages by Katherine Milton, in her piece on "softwares we desire and desiring software". Geoff Stephenson, a stalwart of the EC art and technology circuit, contributes to the debate with his (toned down but still controversial) views on "Creative/Technology Synergy in Research Development Tools". All that in Part One of the book. In Part Two, we look at two major areas of controversy in the field: collaborative models and competitive markets, providing case studies from the major arts and media disciplines to models of action research and the reflexive practice shared by toolmakers, human factors in artistic research and development in multi- and interdisciplinary collaborations, and the area of collaborative working methods as developed in one major North American partner institution, by way of example. We then consider the experiences of a number of professional artists whose work has been developed through trial and error over a period of years, often without sufficient funding to allow constant documentation or publication of results, but with significant impact on the community nonetheless. The case study section digs into controversial areas including documentation of the live event, and the area of "creative labs" and think tanks where work is made and tested collaboratively without any foreseeable immediately marketable outcome: a case of the praxis model embraced as a good practice method. In the third chapter, we consider communities of practice, connected learning tools and practices, with five case studies and essays exploring the making and sharing of tools by and for artists, from both a practical and a theoretical perspective. Finally, we offer a closing chapter of financial and socio-economic "good practice" models by leaders in the EC field, including some very practical words of advice from Bernard Smith, a leader in the IST programme. In all these pieces, and in the larger project too, we come up with one main conclusion: the status quo has not supported artists sufficiently to allow our aesthetic and creative ideas to make their greatest impact. We therefore need to make one main suggestion... Good practice suggestion: Get RADICAL!
In all the papers included here, and in the many parallel publications that have documented the RADICAL project as a whole, the "mapping of praxis" is the primary aim. In that larger geopolitical activity, many roles have been performed by many people. Most have not been paid well, or at all, for their time and dedication to the project. This is still "common practice" in the unevenly funded fields of "art and science". We hope that the RADICAL project may, in practice and in continuing praxis, have made some inroads into that problem, and that better practices and praxes will emerge. The RADICAL project's many published reports are all available online Mediatheque RADICAL - Research Agendas Developed In Creative Arts Labs The project's most "radical" publication, the RADICAL Manifesto, is cited in part here, as the most fitting call to arms for readers of this book. Also, see Michael Naimark's extensive report to the Rockefeller Foundation, in which SMARTlab structures and practices and the results of RADICAL are given a high profile in international good practice methodologies in development: http://www.artslab.net - continue to 1b - RADICAL Manifesto |
