Collaborative Art Practice Research Articles

Participatory presence – social connectedness through collaborative art practices

ABSTRACT In a post-Covid context, the term presence has become the subject of renewed academic focus, amplified by mass phenomena such as Zoom fatigue and online classroom teaching. The prism of new materialism allows for a new reading of relationships between technology and human sensing, physical and virtual presence and copresence, with possible design implications: Current research in public health and social-environment discourse is interested in the effect of presence on well-being. As a theoretical framework, new materialism provides a lens that foregrounds complex relations between affect and technology, enabling us, through interventions like the KIMA: Colour participatory artwork, to interrogate the broad discourse on mediated presence and social connectivity. This paper provides an overview of the AHRC-funded research project, 'p_ART_icipate!', which is a collaborative investigation led by the University of Greenwich, CNWL NHS Foundation Trust, and Brunel University. This paper describes one of the case studies within the project, ‘KIMA Colour’, a collaboration with the art collective Analema Group, the National Gallery and the Royal National Institute of the Blind (RNIB). The case study explores the effect of collective cultural experiences and participatory art on a sense of social connectivity and copresence. In collaboration with RNIB and a group of visually impaired individuals, the team asked how we can design meaningful and accessible online interfaces that actively contribute to a sense of ‘participatory presence’. Findings suggest a possible link between the experience, presence and social connectedness. This research aims to contribute to our understanding of participatory art and to provide recommendations for accessibility and facilitation designc for participatory online interfaces.

Artists’ books as a qualitative research methodology in multidisciplinary contexts

This practitioner piece outlines a novel method for practice-based research centred on the production of artists’ books. There is growing evidence for the benefits of artists publishing as an alternative route to disseminating academic research (see Bodman, ‘Towards a community of artists’ books’, 2019; Taylor, ‘The artist’s book as collaborative art practice’, 2017; Vieth, ‘The artist’s book challenges academic convention’, 2006). However, there is only limited research to help understand how the unique qualities of the artist’s book as a medium – and the processes and methods used in its creation – can be positioned to scaffold a process of mediating knowledge and hierarchies of practices. The insights from the study have significant benefits beyond art and design where they can be useful in STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) contexts, especially where this involves diverse multidisciplinary groups and specialist/non-specialist participants. The research focused on designing a practice-based method which positions the artist’s book edition as a visual verbatim facsimile. The project’s initiating concept and conceptual anchor centred on the etymology of the prefix ‘re’. As a facsimile, each iterative edition revisits, reuses and reassembles, making visible the traces of individual interpretations and interventions as well as the technologies and materials deployed in the process of collaboration. As shown through the study, the method proposed offers an inclusive collaborative process where progressively more complex relationships are formed and synthesized through subsequent editions. A series of four iterative editions were developed through the study, each following a cyclical method involving three phases: (1) transcription and documentation; (2) constellation and translation; and (3) publication.

Biomodd: The integration of art into transdisciplinary research practices

Biomodd is an artistic project with the potential for supporting transdisciplinary practices in blended virtual and in-person environments. After describing the project components, we discuss the collaborative process of idea generation and participant engagement.In this paper, we argue for the integration of collaborative art practice in transdisciplinary (TD) research to generate ideas and engage researchers and non-academic stakeholders. We draw on the virtual and in-person (hybrid) participation of members of the TD collective Space Ecologies Art and Design (SEADS) during Biomodd, an art installation that addresses global challenges in ecology, humanity, technology, and technological waste. Using survey responses, diaries, and meeting minutes, we reflect on the process, methods and ideation during Biomodd and map them to the concept of the “idea journey” discussed by Jill E. Perry-Smith and Pier Vittorio Mannucci. We find that while in-person ideation was driven by utility, materiality, and emergence, the hybrid mode provided favorable conditions for a feedback loop of expansive, individual experimentation and online sharing.

When the Crow Caws: Performance and the Relational Politics of Hospitality in Hurmat Ain and Rabbya Naseer’s Art Practice

This article examines the complex meditation on domestic environments as relational spaces in Hurmat Ain and Rabbya Naseer’s solo and collaborative art practices. Often rooted in physical sites and material elements of domesticity-from live performances in bedrooms and kitchens to installations with textiles and food-their works orchestrate intimate situations where the meeting of performer and spectator doubles as an encounter between visitor and inhabitant, citizen and foreigner, guest and host. In doing so, the artists reveal how practices of hospitality-the everyday rituals through which ‘home’ is enacted and extended to others-serve to uphold cultural, patriarchal, and nationalist values, while simultaneously opening up space for their transformation.

The Role of Creative Placemaking

The Role of Creative Placemaking

AYAH - Sign: Collaborative Digital Art With The Grenfell Communities

Coinciding with the one-year anniversary of the Grenfell tragedy, local artistic practitioners Oliver M. Gingrich, of media art plat­form ART IN FLUX, and artist researcher Sara Choudhrey, curated a series of workshops and events as part of the project AYAH – Sign. Significantly, the project places collaboration at all stages of its conception, implementation, and its outcome. Members of the local community and the wider general public were invited to explore new forms of artistic practice with a focus on Islamic pattern-making. These practice-based community-focused activities contributed towards a collaborative digital artwork, publicly displayed as a site-specific installation opposite the Grenfell Tower site. The participatory activity and artwork were designed to bring the community together in a time of need, to provide mutual support through joint creative engagement. Social con­nectedness, i.e. the experience of belonging, and relatedness between people (Van Bel et al 2009), is becoming an increasingly important concept in the discussion of social benefits of media including participatory art practices (Bennington et al. 2016). This paper reflects on the potential for art to bring communities together, to contribute to wellbeing and social-connectedness and providing a more inclusive experience for a range of community members. The project was conceived within the context of deeper research into participatory art and its potential to contribute to mental wellbeing, providing social cohesion for com­munities and acting as a creative support strategy in times of need. Collaborative art practices, such as AYAH - Sign, not only inspires further creativity among local residents through collaborative engagement, but also encourages community members to reconnect both physically and emotionally with one another.

Becoming One with the Neighborhood: Collaborative Art, Space-Making, and Urban Change in Izmir Darağaç

Darağaç is a former industrial, lower-income neighborhood in Turkey’s third-largest city, Izmir. In 2015 several artists settled in the area and started a nonprofit initiative called the Darağaç Collective (DC). DC has since organized numerous art events and exhibitions, receiving considerable interest and publicity. Yet, to date, the changes in Darağaç’s material landscapes have been subtle, and the area remains ungentrified, unlike similar examples in Turkey. This article argues that the collaborative art practice spearheaded by DC played a major role in the preservation of the neighborhood’s urban texture. The artists became neighbors with the residents, benefited from the expertise of mechanics, and drew inspiration from the site, while the local community has contributed to the production, exhibition, and appreciation of artworks. Thus, art has become a tool for sociability and a catalyst for interpersonal, cultural, and cross-class exchanges, which could offer an alternative route to art-led urban change in Turkey.

Entanglements of Difference as Community Togetherness: Faith, Art and Feminism

Using a feminist, new materialist frame to activate ethico-political research exploring religion and gender at a community level both on Instagram and in arts workshops, we show how sharing ethnic backgrounds, religious beliefs, gender identities and sexualities through art practice entangles a diffraction of differences as ‘togetherness’. Such entanglement creates cross-cultural interfaith understandings and gender diverse acceptance and inclusion online. We use diffraction, intra-action and entanglement as a way of framing our understanding of this ‘togetherness’ and show that human feelings rely on more-than-human assemblages; they rely on homelands, countries, wars, places of worship, orientations, attractions, aesthetics, art and objects of attachment. The feelings of ‘community’ and ‘belonging’ that we discuss are therefore direct products of human and non-human interactions, which we explore through arts-based research. In this article, we apply Karen Barad’s feminist new materialist theories of ‘diffraction’, ‘intra-action’ and ‘entanglement’ to ways of thinking about human experience as intra-acting with aspects of the world that we classify as non-human. We use these new materialist frames to reconceptualize the human feelings of ‘community’, ‘belonging’ and ‘what really matters’ in feminist and intra-religious collaborative art practices and Instagram-based art communities. To better understand and encourage communities of difference, we argue that the feelings of ‘community’ and ‘belonging’, which are central to human subjectivity and experience, are produced by more-than-human assemblages and are central to identity. The methodologies we present are community focused, intra-active, arts-based research strategies for interrogating and understanding expressions of ‘community’ and ‘belonging’. We identify how creative methods are a significant and useful way of knowing about communities and argue that they are important because they are grounded in being with communities, showing that the specificity of their materiality needs to be considered.

Theatre on the Move: Sakurai Daizhou's Tent Theatre in East Asia

This paper discusses Japanese director Sakurai Daizou's theatre productions known as the "tent theatre," a genre which first emerged during the Tokyo student movement in the late 1960s. The study focuses on Sakurai's collaborative productions, particularly the theatre's style and politics. Japanese tent theatres are distinctive in their combination of itinerary performance and temporary, guerrilla stage arrangement. Sakurai's theatre is a descendent of this tradition of political theatre; however, it departs from the other postmodernist Japanese aesthetics of the 1960s and 1970s while rendering folklores mixed in avant-garde abstract fragmentations as its signature dramaturgy. This essay discusses Sakurai's unique insistence on collaborative productions in light of the international theatre network he and his troupe members established in Taiwan and Beijing since the early 1990s. The discussion of Sakurai's collaborative art practice will contribute to the conversation on the post-1968 generation of socially engaged art from a non-European perspective, challenging the scope related to the problem of reification.

Sites of Dissensus : Sensing Borders and Affective States

This essay considers the shifting representation of borders and territory in a North American context and how these sites continue to exert force on the political imagination through a language of crisis and emergency. While the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (2002) and the establishment of the U.S.-Mexico border wall (2006-8) are among the most obvious manifestations of a transformation in border policy, calls for greater protection along sparsely populated regions of the Canada-U.S. border have surfaced repeatedly in the media from 2017 onwards. In both the U.S. and Canada, the gaze toward “the border” has remained steady for some time. I argue that the relationship between sight and site was pressed into service in the creation and maintenance of national borders and that the mediated image of the border has been critical to shifting attitudes toward the role of borders and migration from the late 19th century onwards. But borders are also paradoxical sites that become knowable, however, as affective states. Drawing on the disparate work of Walter Mignolo and Jacques Rancière this paper explores the role of the senses in both historical and contemporary bordering processes through looking at a range of collaborative art and activist practices that align with relational and decolonial aesthetics. As the decolonial project becomes increasingly imperative for both indigenous and non-indigenous people in North America after the recommendations of the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Report, I ask how the reactionary and populist forms of border fortification can be countered and unsettled by hemispheric perspectives and migratory routes.

Hemispheric Conversations: Exploring Links between Past and Present, Industrial and Post-Industrial through Site-Specific Graffitti Practice at the Carrie Furnaces

In this article, I briefly discuss a project I co-organized this year in collaboration with Oreen Cohen, Shane Pilster, Rivers of Steel, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Partners in the Arts, and the American Studies Association. Named “Hemispheric Conversations: Urban Art Project” we used international collaboration between artists in Chicago, Pittsburgh, and León Guanajuato Mexico as a platform for conversation about how to reimagine our shared urban spaces. In a political moment that might be a cause for despair, collaborative art practice in urban space can serve as one vehicle to reignite our shared sense of possibility and energy.

Collaborative art practice as HCI research

This forum highlights conversations at the intersection of design methods and social studies of technology. By highlighting a diversity of perspectives on design interventions and programs, we aim to forge new connections between HCI design and communication, science and technology studies, and media studies scholarship. --- Daniela Rosner, Editor

Comment from the Field

In this special guest lecture, held at Liverpool Hope University on 26 July 2016, Professor Petra Kuppers paid tribute to life and work of her friend and colleague Tobin Siebers.1 As David Bolt explained in his introduction to event, Professor Siebers served on board of JLCDS for over a decade. He was an active reviewer and edited a special issue of journal with Alice Hall shortly before he died in 2015. His work continues to make a leading contribution to field. Given her work and friendship with Tobin Siebers and her role as a disability culture activist and community performance artist, it was more than fitting for Petra Kuppers to give Tobin Siebers Disability Arts and Culture Lecture.The Centre for Culture and Disability Studies at Liverpool Hope University welcomed academics, independent researchers, artists and representatives from disability arts organisations across UK to this memorial lecture. Taking place only shortly after UK vote to leave European Union and horrific murder of 50 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Kuppers's talk addressed relevance of disability activism and disability arts to asylum and sanctuary. These themes have resonated equally through her distinctive pedagogy, research, and arts practice. Beginning with personal insights into foundations of disability studies community at University of Michigan, we were reminded of its emergence through activist rather than academic energies. A further account of playful nature of community arts activities at Michigan offered a moving description of early days of this important work, of which Siebers was a significant part.Kuppers's address centered on importance of and mutuality to arts practice through an exploration of her shared experiences of two site-specific pieces of work with her partner, somatic poet Stephanie Heit. Kuppers began by acknowledging influence of poet Audre Lorde on her exploration of collaborative arts practice, disability arts, and activism. The significance of interdependency between women is acknowledged by Lorde as the only way to freedom which allows I to be not in order to be used but in order to be creative (Lorde and Clarke 111). This sentiment is evident in Kuppers's emphasis on mutuality in her pedagogic approach as well as through her arts practice. She was keen to connect with her audience, prompting us to explore who was in room and who was not, a pedagogic approach explained in Disability Arts and Culture. She engaged us in a fluid, conversational sharing of experience through uses of participatory approaches, such as audience/group sourced visual descriptions and communal readings of text. These approaches enabled us to share potentially distant personal experiences making them live again in this new space. …

Provocations of the present: what culture for what geography?

Cultural geography finds itself in a very different place from when Peter Jackson’s Maps of Meaning first appeared in 1989. Provocations for culturally attuned spatial thinking made at that time have either altered or at least been significantly reframed when issues of wider public engagement, collaborative arts practice and new ICT-based social and creative media are changing the terrain on which cultural geography is made and practiced. We introduce a collection of 11 short essays that set to provoke questions relating to cultural geography today. The essays stem from the Doreen Massey Annual Event ‘Provocations of the Present: What Culture for What Geography?’ that took place at the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK, in June 2014. We are not suggesting that there is a ‘malaise’ requiring revitalization, neither are we proposing a single best way forwards. Rather we suggest that a collective focus on how cultural geography can remain a lively place from which to engage with might provide a moment in which the diversity of cultural geography would be profitably mobilized for the future. In this introduction, we encourage geographers to think about where cultural geography is and where it is headed by considering three areas of interest: dis/locating provocations; re/defining culture; and changing geographies.

Innovation through Collaboration

The true meaning of collaborative contemporary arts practice is personified by El Hadji Sy (El Sy), the internationally renowned painter, curator and live performance installationist who – along with fellow Senegalese intellectual and activist Issa Samb and theatre director Yussufa John – founded the influential Dakar-based collective Laboratoire AGIT’ART.

The Turn to Community: Exploring the political and relational in the arts

Abstract This article builds on Mulligan and Smith’s notion of The Turn to Community in the Arts. Recognizing the lack of official histories for these forms of relational, social and collaborative practices, the article offers an expanded cartography for this collaborative art practice through three interrelated terrains: as identity politics; as governmental intervention; and finally, as contemporary art. This new mapping has implications not only for how the field is theorized, but also how its value is understood artistically.

The collaborative theatre-making project: a space to challenge, explore and re-imagine accepted mythologies

This short case study gives insight into a theatre-making project with young lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans-identified people. The author reflects on the capacity of collaborative arts practice to open discussion around identity and allow space to re-imagine lived experience through metaphor and mythology. She focuses on the central role of the participant and the value of applied theatre projects for young people who disassociate themselves from heterocentric discourse.

Putting Collaboration Front and Center: Assessment Strategies for Theatre Departments

Putting Collaboration Front and Center: Assessment Strategies for Theatre Departments Monica Stufft (bio) In a time of economic downturns, the contraction of governmental funding sources, and shrinking budgets, academic departments increasingly find themselves locked in a struggle for limited resources. As much as we strive to make interdisciplinary connections, departments must carve out places for themselves within institutions. We need to swell our ranks by attracting students, for an increased number of majors leads to budget considerations, space allocations, and additional tenure-track lines. As students become progressively more concerned with their employment options after graduation, departments respond with well-defined messages about the valuable transferable skills gained through the major and the kinds of professional training acquired due to the curriculum. Alongside honing particular skills, developing critical and creative thinking, increasing an understanding of key terms, and acquiring historical knowledge, our mission statements often highlight collaboration as a key element to the educational experience. This is not surprising, as theatre is by its very nature a collaborative art. In the presence of audience members and through the hard work of performers, artistic staff, backstage, and house personnel, theatre is made possible by a rich exchange among numerous individuals who rely upon partnerships and engage in acts of cooperation. The centrality of collaboration to pursuits is not shared by theatre alone, of course. In business, medicine, and science, it is only through the coming together and sharing of resources that the most substantial achievements are made. Some have even argued that collaboration, or working jointly together towards a shared goal, is fundamental to the human experience. In his book with the Dalai Lama, psychiatrist Howard Cutler has argued that “the tendency to closely bond with others, acting for the welfare of others as well as oneself, may be deeply rooted in human nature, forged in the remote past as those who bonded together and became part of a group had an increased chance of survival” (59). As a result, our proclivity for collaboration serves not only as a vital transferable skill for our students, but also as an extremely effective academic-survival technique for ourselves. Collaboration, however, has not figured largely into our understanding of human nature for over a century; the idea that human beings are essentially selfish and only interested in meeting our own needs has dominated. Cutler points out that this view of human nature “is deeply ingrained in Western thought” thanks to canonical works by Thomas Hobbes and Sigmund Freud, to name just a few (56). Collaboration also occupies a rather tenuous place within academic institutions; from grading practices to the tenure-review process, we are embedded in an educational structure geared towards clearly delineating and evaluating an individual’s work. Grades are awarded and degrees are conferred to specific students, not to groups. The dominant discourse in the humanities and liberal arts, where most theatre departments reside, privileges sole authorship or intellectual property. Colluding together is viewed as plagiarism, worthy of academic sanctions if ideas are not correctly attributed to a specific individual. Jointly written pieces are often less valued than single-authored works, and faculty members must tout their personal achievements in tenure files even if engaged in collaborative art practices. The even larger dominant cultural discourse underpinning this is neoliberal individualism, where what is mine is mine and what is yours is yours. [End Page 53] In addition, we are also witnessing a rise in the culture of assessment. Departments are asked to clearly articulate learning outcomes and then substantiate their claims by proving measurable growth in our students given pressures put upon universities by regional and national accrediting agencies. Many resent and even resist this trend, perceiving calls for accountability as external mandates or administrative tasks that take time and resources away from what we do in the classroom. Often, the payoff is seen as minimal and the impact on our students’ learning negligible or even detrimental. At least for the perceivable future, however, assessment is here to stay. Given that reality, one possible approach is to do the least amount required in an attempt to minimize the impact on both students and faculty. Yet our field offers us insights that suggest...

Building Creative Partnerships through image and text

This paper reports an Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) Creative Partnerships project. This comprised three stages: professional development of artists and teachers at an experimental lab; artists’ residencies in Foundation Stage classes; and evaluation of the experience by the artists, teachers and researchers of achievements made. An inspiration for the project was the Reggio Emilia approach of northern Italy that emphasises design and physical arrangements in space; valuing collaboration among all adults, the teacher (educatore), artist or art educator (atelierista) working together and pedagogue (pedagogista) who provides leadership; documentation and reflections on artistic experiences and ample support by art resources. A case study approach using multiple sites and multiple methods was adopted. Results showed relationships among creative activities, collaborative actions of artists and teachers and actions and responses of children. Multiple perspectives identified by Creative Partnership representations were seen as a means to free up the curriculum by head teachers, a form of inter-disciplinary sharing of ideas by artists and, by teachers, a complex three-way learning relationship between children, artists and teachers that was vital for children's learning. The project team created an equal partnership in negotiation, debate and reflexivity, the teacher became a learner and active participant in collaborative art practices in which children appeared to be developing autonomy and other modes of thinking. The aspiration was longer-term change in understanding of learning, knowledge and skill acquisition within the community of learners.

Listening when others ‘talk back’

This paper addresses the ethics of inter-cultural collaborative art practice from an Australian perspective, through examining aspects of the project, Weaving the Murray . Anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose in her recent book, Reports from a Wild Country; ethics for decolonisation (2005) notes the legacy of white settler society in Australia, claiming that 'We cannot help knowing that we are here through dispossession and death' (Rose 2005, p.6). This is a shocking proposition and an uncomfortable position for white Australians. Yet to ignore this reality is to concede to the continuation of a present violence against Indigenous Australians. This is perhaps not now enacted through dispossession and death, but through another type of violence that sets the past aside and ignores the 'vulnerability of others.' (Roth 1999, p.5) Rose suggests an ethical position that 'would replace (this) violence with responsive attentiveness', an attentiveness to place and people, located in the here and now, that takes account of the past, and is based on listening to Indigenous Australians talking back 'in their own terms' (Rose 2005, p.5). When listening however, it is also necessary to pay attention to 'silence' to consider why words fail and how not-speaking can be used as a strategy of resistance. This paper reflects upon the ideas that underpin Rose's ethical position as they were played out with varying degrees of success, in the inter-cultural collaborative project, Weaving the Murray .