Collaboration & Co-Creative Media Making in Precarious Times

Abstract

This contribution fathoms the potential of collaborative, co-creative media practices in precarious times – in times of climate emergency and a terrifying loss of biodiversity, accompanied by socio-psychological and socio-cultural crises. It is set in times in which, despite the urgency to react, we are still often facing a lack of comprehension for the complex global dimension of these crises, accompanied with a paralysing apathy, passive-depressive resignation and sometimes even a refusal to face collective and individual accountability as well as respond in actual doing to the urgent call to action. Taking Félix Guattari's ecosophical thought of three interdependent ecologies (1989, 1996) and their prolongation in currently emerging environmental humanities with recent discourses in documentary and digital theory as a framework, the objective of this contribution is to discuss approaches in emerging media making and to deduce strategies how to 'make things matter'. Within this bigger context, the theoretical argument is based on key concepts in co-creation as well as aspects in the creative use of mobile, interactive, networked devices to 'craft' media assemblages in which often, processes are more important than artefacts and which make participants/user-creators aware of being themselves entangled in multifaceted biological, psychological, physical, social and cultural contexts. The nucleus hereby resides in the intertwining of emplaced interaction in hyperglocal contexts, the idea of focussed perception and perspective taking, and foremost the potential for networked|networking (Wiehl 2019). The hypothesis runs that due to their specific affordances, especially co-creative media practices can contribute to a shift from mere matters of fact in climate communication to matters of concern (Latour 2004) and – ultimately hopefully – matters of care (La Puig de Bellacasa 2017). The idea is to mobilize (co-)creative participants not only to witness climate change and document the most often invisible shifts in their surroundings, but rather to invite them to engage in local and at the same global interventions and thus to rediscover collective responsibilities and communal agency in this situation. Through the lens of these features, different strategies of how to mobilize user-participants will be discussed, focussing on different venues to encourage an empathetic idea of local as well global consciousness, care and emotional engagement – an approach which goes beyond top-down communication of (scientific) facts but which encourages creative communal action-taking. As paradigmatic projects, we will examine The Disaster Resilience Journal (2014) and ISeeChange (2019) – both of them being multilayered configurations building on various activities around 'doing documentary'. It will be discussed how interdependent entanglements of agents in these two projects aim at catalysing meaningful place-based environmental engagement, including community-based citizen-science driven action-taking but at the same time experiences that go beyond cognitive understanding.