update - article

english / deutsch

Embrace The Swarm – Exploring Collaborative Authorship

Embrace The Swarm is the first in a series of projects designed to promote collaboration between students in various fields. Works resulting from the current cooperative effort by the Ars Electronica Center with University of Arts and Industrial Design, Linz and the Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication Kent (GB) will be presented.

“The undertaking calls into question both traditional educational concepts in the sense of a master-student relationship as well as the belief that high-quality creative work can result only from one individual working alone”, says Dietmar Offenhuber in his catalogue essay.

Since the emergence of the World Wide Web, many institutions have begun to experiment with temporally and geographically dispersed joint ventures taking advantage of the communications possibilities afforded by the Internet. The research project being described here, however, goes far beyond the usual modes of utilizing the World Wide Web in that it attempts to investigate the creative potential of networked collaboration in the fields of art and design (architecture, industrial design etc.).

The project’s primary objective is to ascertain the extent to which computer networks like the World Wide Web are currently able to open up completely new models of collaboration in the fields of art and design; whether there are realistic alternatives to conventional teaching methods in the artistic field, and whether the quality of the output can match—or even surpass—the results achieved by individual authors.

The way in which the project has gone about this is easy to explain. A virtual design studio “set up” in the World Wide Web enables geographically dispersed collaborators to interact. A databank, the Design Process Recorder, stores all individual contributions as well as the overall progress of the joint project and makes this transparent to all parties involved. The tools for interaction and the utilization of the virtual design studio are set up in such a way that all participants—whether artist, architect or designer etc.—can use them in relatively simple fashion and without specialized computer skills, and can also communicate their ideas by means of their respective preferred means of expression (hand-drawn sketch, blueprint, physical model or sculpture, video etc.).

During Ars Electronica 2002 the ongoing results of the project as well as a documentation of the collaborative working process will be presented at the Art+Tech Institute in an exhibition conceived by the participating students.

Project Management: Michael Shamiyeh, Gerhard Funk, Dietmar Offenhuber, Helmut Höllerl, Michael Breidenbrücker, Karel Dudesek
Students: Nikolaus Diemannsberger, Peter Freudling, Joachim Koll, Margit Nobis, Tina Reisinger, Regina Raml, Bettina Steinmaurer, Heike Nösslböck, Vinzenz Naderer Clemens Mock, Simon Wilhelm, Julieta Leveratto, Zoe Papadopoulou, Chan Ming Yee Amy, Martine Hermsen, Jon Cambeul, Steven Cullen, Wai-Sang Damon Yau, Nadia Kahn

2 comment(s)
Re: Embrace The Swarm – Exploring Collaborative Authorship (prince charmin´ / 2002/9/9 5:04:06 PM)
Re: Embrace The Swarm – Exploring Collaborative Authorship (bu5ta / 2002/9/7 9:29:42 PM)