 A Guide to Good Practice in Collaborative Working Methods and New Media Tools Creation Chapter 1b - The RADICAL Manifesto (abridged) CREATIVE RESEARCH AND INTERDISCIPLINARY DYNAMICS Europe's creative landscape features numerous research organisations characterised by their engagement in community-building relationships. Because they are finely tuned to social behaviours and environments, these organisations are generating a specific kind of fundamental research, notably in the areas of collaborative creation and collective authorship afforded by digital technologies. Today more than ever, this research has a vital role to play in optimising and widening ICT assimilation, thereby promoting more participatory, creative kinds of citizenship within and beyond the borders of the newly redefined European Union. Over the past decade, many research organisations grounded in contemporary artistic and cultural practice have built interdisciplinary platforms drawing people from highly diversified social backgrounds. A strong, shared commitment to promoting the "culture commons" - analogous to the "knowledge commons" endows these structures with real cohesion. At the same time, by virtue of their social and disciplinary heterogeneity, they are natural and effective team workers and partners within all sorts of research consortia. CULTURE COMMONS AND KNOWLEDGE COMMONS Many media arts and cultural organisations are experienced in the management of research platforms designed to ensure interdisciplinary openness, convergence, and synthesis. They can thus counter the fragmentation which occurs when proprietary research areas are fenced off by businesses seeking immediate revenue sources, and by blue-sky institutions whose lengthy research programmes preclude swift dissemination of findings. These two types of activity lead to compartmentalisation of precisely those sectors that need to be connected to ensure and promote sustainable research. Media arts and cultural organisations offer a third model, together with the microenterprise clusters that are frequently our partners. Small creative companies engaged in new media production are often a less visible but more audacious force of innovation than their large-scale industrial counterparts, and are apt to provide unique input to new media consortia. Media arts and cultural organisations are ideally placed to act as the necessary intermediate R&D force, federating and synergising energies from academic and industrial sectors. The sharing and transmission of public knowledge is a prerequisite for a thriving, participatory society based on equality while valuing diversity. In addition to their ability to pool know-how apt to spearhead ICT research, media arts and cultural organisations offer models of alternative practice, and a unique contribution to ongoing debate about intellectual property rights and the knowledge commons.
Infocommunications technologies provide powerful new means for exchange and expression in the redefined agora. National and international organisations are today seeking to enhance creativity by setting up pioneering programmes geared towards socially meaningful appropriations of ICT. Media arts and cultural organisations with solid track records of sustainable research into creative, participatory uses of new media are potentially invaluable contributors to ongoing community efforts. This potential demands full recognition in the framework of the European Union's R&D programmes. Criteria currently used to assess research proposals and to define, thus legitimate, researcher status, fail to cater for certain areas where innovation is vigorously occurring and is moreover vitally needed by the broader community. Benchmarks instated by traditional academia tend to favour peer-review validated research by university specialists working within disciplinary confines, rather than interdisciplinary research undertaken by heteroclite teams with overtly social preoccupations and goals. Yet social issues are endemic to the forms of expression emerging with infocommunications technologies: the value of many R&D projects carried out by media arts and cultural organisations is anchored in tools and technologies that by their very nature demand open, multidisciplinary, participatory development processes. These processes must take into account the need to build economically viable knowledge enterprises, which at the same time are able to uphold European identities and ethics. REMAPPING EU, NATIONAL, AND REGIONAL POLICIES Europe's strengths and weaknesses lie in commonalities and differences manifest at all levels, from physical geography to cultural practice. Optimising this diversity for the benefit of Europe and the rest of the world means making and implementing audacious, incisive, cohesive European policy. Ongoing and imminent remapping of the EU, with negotiations under way for accession of 13 candidate member states, will decisively influence European lifestyles and identities. New forms of communication and exchange to weld and promote the extended European community are becoming more necessary than ever. Structural support mechanisms like the European Regional Development Fund and European Social Fund, along with solidarity programmes inspired by the European Cohesion Fund, will be heavily solicited for the building of integrated infocommunications routes to effectively link greater Europe. Since these funds were first set up almost three decades ago, many regions have built dynamic axes of transnational exchange by teaming up directly with other European regions, often revitalising ancient historical trajectories and alliances. In 2004, structural funding will predictably give impetus to a new set of alliances, enhanced by state-of-the-art communication and computing infrastructures. Transverse cultural strategies have a decisive role to play at local, regional, state, and European Union levels, to accompany and weld the new components of an enriched European identity. Media arts and cultural organisations engaged in interdisciplinary experimentation with infocommunications technologies are unique vectors for generating dialogue and meaningful symbolic landmarks within the enlarged, remapped European Union. RECOMMENDATIONS To ensure formal recognition of the uniquely transversal, interdisciplinary qualities of research driven by artists and creative practitioners, and their desirable integration in the shaping of ICT consortia, we hereby recommend: - That specific support mechanisms be implemented to promote interdisciplinary research platforms which explicitly include media arts and cultural organisations and creative practitioner-researchers; - That creative practitioner-researchers who have submitted EU external evaluator files be regularly called to serve on FP6 research proposal evaluation teams: i) to input cultural expertise allowing a wider range of original creative research proposals to be validated by the European Commission; ii) to give European Commission representatives a better grasp of the scope and potential applications of creative resources within the EU; iii) to provide creative practitioner-researchers with firsthand knowledge of the stakes and procedures of EU framework programmes, facilitating their participation in future calls; - That the unique networking abilities and strategies of media arts and cultural organisations be actively and proactively employed to spur the development of culturally meaningful infocommunications activities in greater Europe, particular importance being attached to central and eastern European networking; - That the need to uphold the culture commons and maximise equal access to infocommunications technologies, in order to promote the new creative, participatory kinds of citizenship they afford, be recognised and defended; - That the need to valorise and invest in Europe's future heritage by actively supporting today's artistic and cultural practices, including and especially those which have outstripped the confines of traditional 19th and 20th-century cultural institutions, be recognised and defended; - That effort be made by the European Commission to simplify administrative procedures and requirements, and to accelerate financial management processes to shorten payment and reimbursement schedules, which are currently untenable for many media arts and cultural organisations, to allow their more active participation in future framework programmes. EUROPEAN CULTURAL POLICY DOCUMENTS 1997 1997 1998 1998 1998 1999 1999 1999 2000 2000 2001 2002 continue to CH 2 - Humanising Technology: the Studio Lab and Innovation return to table of contents |
