“Amidst all the attention given to the sciences as to how they can lead to the cure of all diseases and daily problems of mankind, I believe that the biggest breakthrough will be the realization that the arts, which are conventionally considered ‘useless,’ will be recognized as the whole reason why we ever try to live longer or live more prosperously. The arts are the science of enjoying life.”
John Maeda
The idea of a ‘laboratory’, a workshop for creative exploration and production is neither a new nor a particularly groundbreaking one: this is why it is both important and useful—it sits at the heart of artistic practice. It is a simple notion: a group of creative and productive individuals working (and living) under a collective ethos which usually boils down to thinking about things, making those things, and getting those things out into the world. From Rembrandt’s studio to William Morris Arts and Crafts movement and the Central School in London, the Bauhaus, the Royal College of Art, Fletcher/Forbes/Gill and Pentagram, Warhol’s Factory, Archigram, Ant Farm, MIT Media Lab, Tomato, Fabrica, Hyper Island and many others, there have been many successful examples of groups whose ethos could, broadly speaking, be described as extending culture through creative endeavour.
The art school model seems to hold true (and has done through shift and change and evolution over the course of at least a century) as a convincing starting point for this kind of practice: a space, some people, some time, an open ethos that reflects the need for a continuing process of thinking and doing, and the will not to be categorised, defined or limited. Beyond that, as Wittgenstein puts it, “The world is all that is the case” . . .
A ‘lab’ of this kind, a workshop, is not built but grown. It is a meeting space dependent on the people inhabiting it and one simple ability-to make things. A desire to get out into the world (to see, hear, talk, explore), to find things and bring them back, to infuse with individual obsessions and passions the work of a group endeavour; to show and tell and provide the fuel for each other to keep on and keep on this journey, and to mark the waypoints of this journey with objects filled with experience that are potentially fragile with the possibility of failure; for this to be the centre and guiding principle tempered by one truth—time is all we have.
Fabrica, Benetton’s communication research centre, outside Treviso, applies this workshop approach across all disciplines until they blur into one: described as simply ‘a meeting place’, the implication is that it is a point of intersection—between people, philosophies, media, processes, languages and places. Fabrica is a school, a centre for research, a commercial enterprise, an arts lab populated by people working through photography, design, music, film, writing, interactive and web communication ‘to uncover the future’. It shows the way.
“I would like art schools to be “farming” the culture scene, to be looking around and saying where is it happening now? Where are all those people, those bright people who’ve got something to do and they don’t quite know where it fits in? What are they putting it into? What’s the container they’re using? And, as I say, comedy would be my choice right now, followed by painting, funnily enough. For once Charles Saatchi was right.”
Brian Eno
The Planetary Collegium expands the field of media arts through the notion of transdisciplinary research: computer sciences, communications, consciousness research, hypermedia, biotechnologies, environments and cognitive sciences being a very few of the areas that both influence and are influenced by the Collegium.
Roy Ascott, the founding President of the Collegium, was taught by RIchard Hamilton at Newcastle Art College in the fifties. He went on to teach at Ealing and Ipswich Art Schools, initiating a curriculum (of sorts) which he called “Groundcourse”. He described the course as “a microcosm of a total process of art education”, and it took in games, exercises, process projects and play that were focussed on providing ways of being and means of making that both encouraged and forced unknown outcomes. Brian Eno attended the course at Ipswich: “There were only thirty-six of us in this little college in Ipswich, we divided into pairs and each of the eighteen pairs were asked to design a game of some kind and the idea of that game was to test everybody else in the group, for them to go through the game and to play it and to see by how they played this game what their reactions were, what choices they made to try to compile a sort of description of that person, a psychological behavioural description of them.
Now I was sixteen at the time so this was pretty new territory for me, but nonetheless we all went through the other seventeen games and we all came out with a sort of description of ourselves. So this person is extrovert, verbose, noisy, doesn’t like to be left out of things and so on and so on, physically active and so on. And after that you were then asked to design the precisely opposite character to the mind-map that you had been given as a result of these games and for the rest of the term, which was another ten weeks, you had to be that person. So in my case this translated to spending the remaining ten weeks on a trolley because I was physically very active at that time. So I was on a trolley and I wasn’t allowed to boss anyone around, which of course I’ve spent my whole career doing since, and instead of I had to just execute other peoples wishes. It was a very, very useful experience for me to suddenly live another life and to be encouraged to do so.”
Roy Ascotts’ work also led him into very early explorations in cybernetics and emerging media, pioneering in interactive art and telematics (the intersection between computers and telecommunications): he aggregated influences from Fluxus, Pop Art, Dada and other movements into a working methodology for creativity— “There is no centre, or hierarchy, no top nor bottom… To engage in telematic communication is to be at once everywhere and nowhere. In this it is subversive. It subverts the idea of authorship bound up within the solitary individual. It subverts the idea of individual ownership of the works of imagination. It replaces the bricks and mortar of institutions of culture and learning with an invisible college and a floating museum the reach of which is always expanding to include new possibilities of mind and new intimations of reality.”
This workshop approach to the creative process provides methods and tools that can only contribute to productive, playful and prolific ways of thinking and making. Simple projects, like drawing to music, exquisite corpse, initiating and exchanging work between people, setting extremely limited parameters (concept/time/tools), mapping spaces and emotions, and so on, are a basis for fertile and convincing working methods, and more often than not result in unexpected, inspiring and useful outcomes. Most importantly, it places play at the centre of a joyful process: not just a lab, or a practice, or a studio, or a way of working, but a way of living.
“The technology of computerised media and telematic systems is no longer to be viewed simply as a set of rather complicated tools extending the range of painting and sculpture, performed music, or published literature. It can now be seen to support a whole new field of creative endeavour that is as radically unlike each of those established artistic genres as they are unlike each other . A new vehicle of consciousness, of creativity and expression, has entered our repertoire of being.”
Roy Ascott
Hyper Island
Fabrica
The Planetary Collegium
The Bauhaus
MIT Media Lab
Warhol\'s Factory
