Thanks for your thoughts.
I should however say I am sceptical in regard to the distinction that
you establish between linear and non linear creativity, which seems to
me somewhat schematic.
From my personal creative experience as a artist and theorist using or
examining different kinds of media, I believe that an art form should be
distinguished fron the concept of creativity. If we take the example of
a time based art work, let's say a non-narrative film, it is part of a
creative process which is certainly non linear.
Even if the film as an artefact has a beginning and an end, it is not
the result of a process of compilation or assemblage of elements, but of
moving interaction of ideas, materials, experience, temporalities,
mental processes and social pressures. In this sense it participates in
a larger, non-linear creativity project. Actually even a "linear" art
work is never definitely closed or ended. It is in constant, dynamic
dialogue with its maker and with those who experience it. As a
socio-cultural, historical and technical construct it undergoes constant
change. In fact, it is a complex, rizhomatic construct.
It seems to me that recent discussions which clearly divide linear from
non linear media, too often forget that a "linear" art work can mobilise
multi-layered mental and psychic processes at levels that non-linear new
media rarely attein. I guess it would also be interesting to examine
"linear" processes within non-linear media.
It is certain, as you say, that new media allow connectivity platforms
that linear media do not allow. It is also certain that new media
generate emergent behavior which we are compelled to analyse. I would
only like to stress that discussion on new media often seems unconcerned
by some important communication dimensions absent in technical
non-linearity.
Best wishes
Katerina Thomadaki
Artist and researcher, professeur associé Université Paris 1
www.klonaris-thomadaki.net
Samuel González Gallastegui a écrit :
> Hello Ricardo and all,
>
> I have just received your invitation to take part in the topic and I will
> try to share it. I believe that New Media is appropriate to support artistic
> expression related to social matters, because it's configuration enhances
> non-linear creativity, which is the kind of creative mode utilized in social
> connections.
>
> According to Levy-Strauss, creating artifacts requires compiling and putting
> together different elements (such as symbols, shapes, images, stiles,
> memories, precedents, materials). As far as I have observed, this process
> can be carried out in two ways. The first one consist of beginning
> assembling possibilities in a certain scheme or structure, as piling up
> sculpted stones and ashlars to create the front wall of a Romanic church.
> The second strategy is to start considering possibilities, arranging them,
> collecting, putting them together to slowly develop a certain structure,
> like Julio Gonzalez when took found elements to his studio and fit them
> together to create an artwork.
>
> I think the first strategy responds to a kind to a linear creativity, it
> starts off with an idea and necessarily reach to a final form. The second
> one do not appear to have any beginning nor finishing, and it seems that
> could be changing all the time, this is, it seems to be fluid although we
> are looking at its apparently constant manifestation. I would like to call
> it nonlinear creativity.
>
> Manovich analyzes how appearance (in a browser or other specific interface)
> is different to the content due to the modular configuration of new media,
> and as a result, the content is independent from the composition. If we
> agree to that, we should admit New Media is rather suitable for nonlinear
> creativity, where different inputs are dumped to evolve different forms.
>
> It appears to me that social connectivity platforms become the user
> conscious of that sort of work in progress. Answering to the raised question
> "Is (new) media a tool which reinforces people's creativity and how it is
> expressed in terms of social behavior?" I think New Media allows emergent
> behavior and performing, as the user can rearrange the different elements
> and use them in other way that they were supposed to. In new media rules
> occur as a result of the possible.
>
> Whatever for you use Facebook (get news of people that you haven't seen for
> decades, game, get known, select suitable people to rape, steal or kill…)
> you have the possibility of rearranging the elements to develop an emergent
> usage. (Or you can always stick to the rules). This affects to our "real
> social life" as well, because now a day's meat willing people in their
> Saturday night crusade do not ask for mobile number nor messenger, but for
> the facebook, or similar.
>
> Can we transport the idea of nonlinear creativity to the way youngsters and
> people in general construct their identity? As the profile shows all the
> modular elements of my identity, I should think this mediated identity is
> built up nonlinearly, as an assemblage of elements that I have put in there.
> So the vision that I have of myself and the vision others have appears to
> match there.
>
> Related to the question: What is the impact of the media content on identity
> in your socio-politic sphere? Media content anticipates the form of the
> identity I can express through media. Then, I cannot think of media as a
> trace of real life, neither symbolization, despite using traces (pictures,
> drawings, words, anecdotes) and using symbols. By rearranging media content
> identity seems also to be changed.
>
> In Spain there is a social network called TWENTY www.twenty.es where I have
> interacted with my pupils for a month and I could derive first of all that
> they reproduced their class relation structures in there and by the way that
> there was strengthened the idea of local community. Second, that they
> treated to express their identity the most accurate they could, for the
> receptors were known people. Third, that they did emergent use of the
> platform supplanting identities, spreading rumors… Fourth, what they put
> there was not a representation of the life but a commentary to it, or a
> continuation of it. For example, they took pictures specifically to put them
> there.
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Samuel
>
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