Now that the talk on digital democracy is done I can focus on the one I’m preparing for the SMarts Conference at Museum London this Saturday.
I’ve started working on it here (but it may not look much like that when it’s done — specifically I’ve left out the most relevant bits).
It’s about how the web introduces another dimension to our creative endeavours, and in doing so, isn’t merely a supplement to whatever you’re already doing, nor is it separate from the real world; it changes the whole nature of what we’re doing.
It isn’t about offering alternative ways for people to buy (or otherwise obtain) your music or your books or whatever; the web creates new spaces through which to approach the whole notion of being a musician or a writer.
Why do you have to write books at all? Why not focus on the blog as the work itself… or tweets. Are tweets a genre? Could they become one? Why not?
Once upon a time it was radical for musicians like Glenn Gould and The Beatles to quit the road and focus on recording and experimenting in the studio. What will today’s and tomorrow’s performers figure out for streaming video or whatever that would not have been imaginable 5 or 10 years ago?
Should digital interactive games be classified among “the arts”?
I think so… Where might that lead?
It took decades for filmmakers to really learn what could be done with film (as I heard Denis Dyack from Silicon Knights point out at DIG London last week), and now gaming is still growing into new spaces in ways we can’t predict.
And as more and more of the old distinctions between atomic works of art and installations and performances become blurred (not to mention the distinction between subject-creator and object-created — if there ever was one) then does creating new forms, modes, genres and disciplines become a kind of art form in itself?
I think so… That’s what the meta factors concept is all about.
I want to take a megaphone and yell, GET CREATIVE WITH THESE NEW TOOLS — which means not just looking at what has already worked for other people, but experiment and play with stuff, really push boundaries, imagine new possibilities, stomp on old assumptions.
If not the arts community, who else is going to?
At the very least I’m hoping it opens people up a little more to the notion of using the web to cultivate communities that enrich the artistic enterprise (rather than just sell extra tickets).
This talk will be sort of a straight test-run. I’m trying not to let my love of recursion and autopoiesis run away with it.
I’m saving the full über for later.
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