0. Prelude: Meta Contexts
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How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else.
—R. Buckminster Fuller |
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Figure 0.0.
Alaskan south central, aerial view from Cessna 180 light aircraft, mid 2005
Having grown up in Alaska spending a great deal of time in small aircraft (my first fly-in camping trip was at the age of 3 months), I grew up accustomed to seeing and thinking about vast and variegated spaces from an aerial perspective (see figure 0.0). Later in life, I came to realise that my thinking had been dramatically shaped by this —I still experience a strangely disorienting feeling in new places if I don’t know what the terrain looks like from the sky. This desire for aerial, meta, holistic and encompassing understandings has stayed with me throughout my life, evolving in its application and complexity.
After exploring the idea of ‘becoming an inventor’, I entered the world of music with gusto at the age of 11. Declaring with youthful exuberance that I would never do anything else, I played and wrote music for hours everyday alone and in groups. A decade later, I found my self on the other side of the Earth at the University of Melbourne’s Conservatorium, studying composition. There I applied my capacity for aerial perspectives in the conceptual engagement of works of large scope and high complexity. Inspired by the likes of Bach, Brahms, Ligeti, and Cage, I soon discovered electro-acoustic music, improvised live computer processing, and most importantly, collaboration. In order to push my practice beyond my own understandings I explored the capacity of the ideas I discovered, the technology I could acquire, and the (often cross-cultural) collaborative relationships I forged.
Yet another decade later I found myself to be a practicing composer-performer-collaborator deeply engaged in an inquiry into the nature of reality, collective consciousness and our relationship with the material world which seemed increasingly virtual. The Twin Towers had just been destroyed and despite the largest collective protests the world had ever witnessed, the U.S.A. was invading Iraq. The intersections of the democratic and the unilateral, the civic and the political, the collective and the individual, the open and secret sparked an idea—an Internet driven, large-scale collaborative opera, explicitly devised to subvert the traditionally lofty and dictatorial position of the Western composer while commenting on the assumptions we make when we hand over our individual rights to larger institutions. Further, these ideas and this opera would provide the subject matter for of a PhD.
In commencing my initial research at the Centre for Ideas—a theory and philosophy hub for a multi-disciplinary arts institution (the Victorian College of the Arts)—I discovered much to my surprise that the composition of just such an opera was already underway. What I discovered was the Open Source Software movement, the ‘Wikipedians’1 and Second Life ‘residents’ who had already established the methodology I was interested in developing, though, not (yet) in the language of music, but rather in computer code, knowledge and virtual 3D worlds. As I continued my research and explorations, I quickly became aware that the issues involved in such collective creative efforts were deeply complex and that the possible outcomes were much broader than a single opera. As a result, my understanding, experience and interests began to shift and expand beyond that of seeing music as the most engaging outcome of the collective efforts I could pursue as part of my PhD.
In fact, my interests had shifted from that of composing music, to composing collaborations. Could a collective creative process become a medium in its own right, subject to the design interests of a ‘composer’? If so, in what ways might a composer guide this undoubtedly unpredictable and emergent process in order to serve their interests? These initial questions intrigued and inspired me as I realised I had been doing precisely this for years, only on smaller scales. I had been creating musical and artistic instructions for collaborative activities, often through the process of collaboration itself. Situating my collaborative designs online therefore seemed little different—code, conceptual and site architecture felt only a step away from the written language of music and compositional performance planning and design. Bringing people together around a means for collective creation is nothing new for many composers, however the combination of increased scale, ‘collaborativity’ and the realisation that the output could be anything—even defined by the collaboration itself—was tremendously exciting for me as an artist.
However, a formidable and fundamental question confronted me in theorising this new terrain: ‘How am I to discover just what the nature of this emergent form of collective creativity is?’ While the notion of methodology is of course the cornerstone of research, the perplexing issue was that the subject of my research entailed a wide range of topics, many of which are situated in well established paradigms—for instance, information and communication technologies (ICT), media and communication theory, psychology, sociology and the anthropology of collaborative and creative activity, the biological coordinative mechanisms of social populations, emergence and complex adaptive systems to name a few. However it was transdisciplinarity which provided a general methodological approach for the following work, in that the objective was to explore a subject where the problem domain is unstructured and that much of the contributing research exists across and between disciplines, while the theoretical frameworks to be developed may finally reside beyond all existing disciplines (Klein 2002). Transdisciplinarity therefore enabled my ‘meta’ oriented interests to be engaged on the level of the methodology as well as the subject matter, while reflecting one of my favourite aesthetics—the simultaneous mirroring of form within content and content within form.
Concerning the generation of new knowledge, the objective of every PhD, I will not claim specific allegiance with either constructivist or essentialist positions. My reasons for this are not so much in maintaining a ‘trans stance’, rather my motivations for pursuing the creation of new knowledge are perhaps more aligned with the evolutionary epistemologists.2 I am interested in proposing the ‘best fit’ between my observations, experiences and applications in order that they may aid our collective attempts at making our world a better place—although all such propositions are only provisional, in that through the course of our bio-psycho-socio-material evolution, any and all reference points may and are likely to shift in order to better represent the reality that we experience. The reality I am currently experiencing and sharing with others, and the one I wish to make comment on here, is one of increasing complexity in the domain of collective activity.
As a long time artistic collaborator, I feel my senses are reasonably well tuned towards the participation, or lack thereof, in those around me. In relation to this sense, I have witnessed and been apart of a good deal more cooperation and collaboration in the past five years than in the previous, largely in relation to the Internet and other network-based activities. For instance, I cannot count how many times I have received unsolicited and extremely valuable contributions to my research (often quite serendipitously) via my blog, website or email lists, while many of ‘my’ ideas have been collaboratively developed in a variety of forums. One such forum being MetaCollab.net, a project founded as part of this PhD, is a cross-disciplinary collaborative research project aimed at building knowledge and theory on and around collaboration. MetaCollab.net has served as a repository for many of the ideas presented in the following chapters, however during their stay in this repository, the ideas have been further evolved by many others—often anonymously.
While this form of anonymous collaboration is one of the many hallmark traits of the increasing capacity some of us have for collective activity (activity that is simultaneously selfless and selfish), the fact that together we are creating more and differently does not mean that what we create or how we apply our creations will all be positive. However ensuring positive outcomes is not the task of scholarship, or art. Instead, both pursuits share the task of re-presenting our state of being, individually and collectively, in order that we may do our best to provide a birds-eye-view of terrain which would otherwise be new and ’strangely disorienting’.
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1: ‘Wikipedians are the people who write and edit articles for Wikipedia’, from Wikipedia article, ‘Wikipedia: Wikipedians’ <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedians> retrieved 13 April 2007.
2: See ‘Evolutionary Epistemology’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (online resource), <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology-evolutionary/> retrieved 5 April 2007.
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