I found interesting your IMECE connection and checked out the
interesting web site for the event in turkey this october
http://www.imece2009.anadolu.edu.tr/index.php?dil=en&icerik=konu
"" Furthermore, it foregrounds certain concepts naturally available in
"imece" practice such as solidarity, collaboration, experience
sharing, common production, interaction and common use of public
places in terms of their contribution to development of creativity. ""
I think you make a good point about scale differences between
collaborations , which usually involve smaller
number of people, and collectives which can provide shared resources
and infrastructurer for much larger
communities of practice
i just came across several interesting articles in the fall 2008 issue
of Art Journal
vol 67 nos: http://www.collegeart.org/artjournal/fall2008
From Space to Environment: The Origins of Kankyo and the Emergence of
Intermedia Art in Japan / Yoshimoto, Midori
The Public Sensoriums of Pulsa: Cybernetic Abstraction and the
Biopolitics of Urban Survival / McKee, Yates 46-67
Steps to an Ecology of Communication: Radical Software, Dan Graham,
and the Legacy of Gregory Bateson / Kaizen, William
The first , by Midori Yoshimoto, about the japanese
collective/collaboration describes the 1966 exibition involving 38
artists who worked
together to mount two exhibitions under the name of the Environment Society
Pulsa was an american collective that exibited "unrestricted public
experiments to redefine the urban environment ' ib boston and other
cities in the eastern usa and their work is described in the text by
Yates Mckee
the third text ,(authored by william kaisen),includes some interesting
discussion of the interaction of the media activist magazine radical
software( the article discussses people such as frank gilette, paul
ryan beryl korot,dan graham) but of relevance to our yasmin discussion
a panel at
the 1957 american federation of arts meeting in houston which included
a panel with rudolf arnheim, stuart davis, marcel duchamp and
particularly relevant gregory bateson
the article quotes bateson : that he gives up any notion of man,
redefining the self as an expanded mental
field ...with the mind no longer bound by the invidual body..a
conjunction of self and world produced through
communication ecologies" which refers nicely back to the early posts
on this YASMIN discussion
( even though bateson was talking 52 years ago !)
and from marcel duchamp: "..the artist is part of a larger system in
which his or her conscious intention forms
a small part"...
these discussions were of course all taking place in the same period
as the macy cybernetics conferences
a relevant comment is that art history, with its emphasis on
individual creators/art market mechanisms= finds
its difficult to give appropriate treatment to group and collective
work= and as pointed out by frieder nake in
a later issue of art journal= even in the case of E.A.T we tend to
reemmber the names of individual artists
(rauschenberg etc) and billy kluver of course, but the rest of the
collective disappears in anonymity=- and
even current artists whose work results from close and crucial
collaboration with engineers often do not
credit the engineers as co creators of the work.
the problem with the concept of genius is that it is so tied to
particular ways of writing art history
that its perhaps hard to extend the concept to radical innovation
arising from art-science or
art-technology collaborations
roger
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Murat Germen <muratgermen@sabanciuniv.edu>
Date: Sun, Aug 16, 2009 at 3:52 AM
Subject: Re: [Yasmin_discussions] collective genius
To: Kerry Tunstall <hvkerry@gmail.com>, YASMIN DISCUSSIONS
<yasmin_discussions@estia.media.uoa.gr>
let me add one more cent so that we can jump to odd and/or prime numbers:)
collaboration and collectivity are not the same thing. the scale /
number of people involved in a collaboration is usually less than what
you would expect in a collective act. in addition, collaboration does
not always involve a good deed;
there is one notion called "imece" in the traditional turkish culture
which generically means collective labor. below is a link that tries
to define the notion in english:
http://www.imece2009.anadolu.edu.tr/index.php?dil=en&icerik=index
and a quotation from mehmet kucukozer's paper:
"Another concept that promoted village solidarity was imece, or
"community project," as Delaney defines it (152). Mainly women engaged
in cooperatives but this depended on the project, which could take
various forms: pooling money for cooperative construction of
infrastructure; helping members of the village community who were in
need (such as relatives from the city when they run out of money, or
taking in their children during the summers); and organizing sporting
and social events. [...] Imece indicates the emphasis placed in
Turkish culture on maintaining the harmony of the social group,
whether the family or its extension, the village. Jenny White's (2002)
ethnographic work of a poor migrant district of Istanbul illustrates
how [...] imece continued to be the basis of social networking in the
city and provided a foundation for horizontal political organizing,
mainly among women." (from "Civil Society: A Proposed Analytical
Framework For Studying its Development Using Turkey as a Case Study"
mehmet kucukozer paper, p.21, UNIVERSITA' DEGLI STUDI DI MESSINA
Facoltà di Scienze Politiche Dipartimento di Economia, Statistica,
Matematica e Sociologia "Pareto")
reference for Delaney: Delaney, Carol. "Traditional Modes of Authority
and Co-operation," pp. 140-155. In Culture and Economy: Changes in
Turkish Villages (ed. Paul Stirling). Hemingford, UK: Eothen Press,
1993.
reference for white: White, Jenny B. Islamist Mobilization in Turkey:
A Study in Vernacular Politics.Seattle,Wash.: University of Washington
Press, 2002.
i
best,
murat
<<< +90 532 473 8970 (gsm mobile)
<<< http://www.muratgermen.com
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<<< http://www.camgaleri.com/en/sanatci.aspx?id=27
On 14.08.2009 23:58, Kerry Tunstall wrote:
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