My Creativity Final Presentation @ Winter Camp 09

MyCreativity 2 0 2 0 : remembering the creative industries

Bas van Heur Manuela Zechner Michael LaFond Branka Ćurčić Maria Ptqk Birgit Bertram Sebastian Olma & Karl Daniela Swarowsky Renée Ridgway Prayas Abhinav

Working on ambivalence
Back then, following wintercamp09 , we were inventing a culture for addressing contradictions we struggled with in our practices....

...a culture for addressing structural
and subjective ambivalences produced by the
Creative Industries - contradictions
between social and economic concerns.

Entrepreneurial Strategies?
Were we playing into the hands of policy makers
when we identified with the
Creative Industries paradigm?

What were our strategies in using entrepreneurial and consultancy models to organize ourselves?
We tried linking up with social movements and other struggles when we were addressing precarity, gentrification and privatisation.

...those terrible working conditions
...we kicked off a revolution during wintercamp09 in this town called Amsterdam!

We started a collaborative editing website *Intangible Negotiation* for ethical guidelines and working contracts for collaborations of freelancers with institutions and funders.

http://sites.google.com/site/intangiblenegotiation/

...in those years the guidelines were rapidly developed and disseminated to all areas of the so called "creative industries"!

...remembering our questions!
How did we pursue our collective *energy sparks* we had ignited?
How did we appropriate the “creative industries” vocabulary?
How did we lie in bed with the enemy without getting fucked?
What were we working for?
In using alternative business models, did we stay true to our goals and not let ourselves be coopted?
How did we turn an alternative business model into an "alternative"?
How did we avoid funding dependencies?

Economic action and beyond
Remember being constantly stuck between an urge to perfectionize self-disciplinary models (the excitement of neoliberalism) and being frustrated by it?
Difficult to imagine anything beyond individual improvement.
What was economic action during those years?
How did we imagine alternative economic structures ?

The network turned out to be a fetish.
So much hope invested, so little realized.
MyCreativity consisted of an overlap of multiple and shifting interests - the organized network turned out not to be the best format for our coordination...

.

Remember the policy makers' "narratives"? Urban competitivity, innovative milieus, places of consumption, all that shit? Remember them not wanting to address - not even name - cultural diversity? Remember that guy telling us "we don't care if you call it knowledge or creativity as long as it makes the city clean" ? Remember them saying "we want to keep the system working ... if the creative industries benefit from it or not is secondary"? Remember Richard Florida?

Debates on self-identification
Policy-makers tried to identify us as economic actors , but did we want to play the game?
Were we ready to confront the power we already had?
Were we aware of the strategic position we had in the so-called mutation of capitalism?
What made us weaker:
playing the game or not playing it?
Didn't we choose this job - art and stuff -
to avoid being part of the problem?
Did we identify with the Creative Industries as a homogeneous professional group?
I was broken! I had nothing to do with an architect!

in crisis we found opportunity
. . .. challenges and struggles including contradictory messages regarding creative industries discourse were reframed and reclaimed as opportunities ...

out of our diversity we pulled together arguments, resources and energies to support real alternatives:
open source urbanism, engaging online
communication tools in support of cultural centers in each of our cities, sharing methods and experiences to work for development and against speculation and gentrification...

crisis = opportunity
integrating culture and experimentation, civil society mobilising untapped resources and energies.... self-organised, networked..

we gave our cities the impulses to become learning cities ...
we began to place an emphasis on culture and communication,
and to use technology, as tools...
databases have been developed reviewing European examples of *open source cultural centers and creative associations *

shifting paradigms...
What was the moment in time when the creative industries' bubble along with its specific vocabulary burst?

Was that terminology influencing or damaging our critical practices and to which extent?
Did it decrease our organizational capacities?

Calling things different names –
new terminology as constituent practice?

Projects imagined and initiated

- Experiments with different economic models.
The city as a pluralistic process rejecting
singular developmental trajectories
- Intangible Negotiation:
a toolkit with templates for common contracts
http://sites.google.com/site/intangiblenegotiation/
- Radicalizing public-private partnerships

- Reflexive article in the Winter Camp reader on coordinating diverse practices under the heading of MyCreativity
- Micro-tweaks instead of macro-strategies

As if creativity had never existed before....

Was there anything really "new" out there?

more slack
Beyond networks: performing slackerdom
Questioning overproductionism -
organized networks can be 'too' productive
Questioning Time
Rethinking INC support of networks: stronger role as center of expertise concerning practical problematics of creative survival (alternative support mechanisms of cultural collaborative entrepreneurialism)
Facilitating purposeless activity

10 Minute Break
Buddhist meditation ...
a training programme for slacking!

The world is kept in balance through a mix of opposing energies ...
there is a mass of people who choose to close their eyes and watch their breath instead of watching television or going shopping.

watch your breath...

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My Creativity Final Presentation @ Winter Camp 09

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My Creativity Final Presentation @ Winter Camp 09 — Presentation Transcript