Deterritorialized, multilocated and distributed: Musical space, poietic domains and cognition in distance collaboration

Abstract

Abstract This article presents detailed descriptions of a series of distance collaborations between two institutions of music education; the State University of New York, Oneonta, in the United States, and the Musrara Naggar School of Art in Jerusalem, Israel. The collaborations between Oneonta and Musrara encompass multiple modes of collaborative interaction, including asynchronous, interstitial and synchronized collaboration. As such the collaborations between the two institutions provide a rich case for understanding practical considerations for and implications of technologically mediated and distributed distance collaborations in music. The authors analyse the collaborations between the two institutions to demonstrate how the increasingly deterritorialized, multilocated nature of technologically mediated distance collaborations generates and encompasses multiple levels of poietic space. Those poietic spaces include micro poietic spaces representative of the individual participants, larger poetic spaces representative of co-located collaborators and contributors, and still larger macro poietic spaces that do not exist in anyone single locale but, instead, encompass the entire poietic sphere of such collaborations. To further understand the dynamics of technologically mediated distance collaboration, the authors introduce an emerging model for understanding such collaborations. That model draws on the philosophical concept of poiesis and on distributed cognition theory, framework drawn from the field of human–computer interaction (HCI).