Social
Spaces

I discovered this very interesting article about the meaning of Participatory Art and how it relates to concepts like space and time. Paul O’Neill - currently also investigating the art in public space landscape in Flanders – makes a difference between three stages of Participatory Art, being relational, social and durational art. While the first relates to what Bischop described as the authored tradition (expert vision), “social art” relates to a more community oriented and de-authored tradition (participatory vision). The third term “durational ” that O’Neill introduces is quite interesting. It gathers the first two terms in one concept (and in that way is able to go beyond a dichotomy) and adds one additional trait, namely time. Durational art produces “work” that keeps on generating social interactions after the artist has left the project site. This is of course very important when artists try to create work for a participatory culture (for more discussion around the concept of participatory cultures, join the discussion online, next wednesday!).

Via my collegue Sarah Késenne, I found an article on artistic research, which offers an interesting and provocative reflection. This sentence seams like an interesting starting point for further discussion: “An adequate research methodology has to be developed in order to allow the researchers positions on multiple social-material time-spaces of actual making and doing—positions that permit and actually encourage active involvement in the artistic processes in the stages of production before publication, exhibition, and critical reception.”
The rest you can read yourself at http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/40

Social Spaces will be present at the i-beta festival in Heerlen at the 11th of June to present MAPit, a mapping toolkit to facilitate cross-disciplinary dialogues and creation processes. The mapping kit answers to the fact that people from different profiles, backgrounds and expertise do not necessarily share the same ‘language’. Adding a visual layer, that is open and adjustable to all participants, creates a different dialogue and enables everyone to join the conversation. Via the toolkit a group of people visualises thoughts and ideas in a playful way and in that way stimulates and guides cross-disciplinary creation processes. MAPit uses an open-source set of icons indicating people, things, activities. Empty icons are also available to create new icons during discussions. In this way, icons can be added and adjusted, implying that the system is never complete and is open to iterative refinement. The MAPit toolkit also contains ’strange’ or critical icons, like ‘bombs’ and ‘locks’, allowing people to disagree and enabling them to risk a step on uncommon ground, which is more conductive to creativity. On the i_beta event, we will discuss the role of mapping toolkits in moderating cross-disciplinary creation processes in the field of e-culture and creative industries. We will also work with our own MAPit toolkit, exploring the roles of creativity and e-culture in (the future of) the Meuse-Rhine Euregion.

More information on this project here

In May a conference on Inclusive Design finds place in beautiful Norway, called Innovation for all. This might be an interesting conference for all of you who are interested in including different groups in society in design and generating innovative business outputs via this process.

Via Danny Leen I received the link to this video. Tom Wujec explains how he uses dry spaghetti, tape and a marshmallow to gather people in an intense collaboration process. Social design with fun ingredients!