Peer2Politics

This session looks at novel models of creativity in reference to collaborative practices, co-creation and peer production focusing on their spatiality within a transglobal and digitally-fused environment. Within this context, creativity is understood as a synergy of spaces, practices and artifacts, interlinked in such a manner that their singularity(-ies) form an assemblage. We can consider creativity, and subsequent knowledge formation, as forms of social interaction rather than the outcomes of social activities. Whilst we commonly perceive creativity as the product of the individual artist, or creative ensemble, from this perspective creativity can also be considered an emergent phenomenon of communities, driving change and facilitating individual or ensemble creativity. Creativity can be a performative activity released when engaged through and by a community. Creativity, thus, can be also regarded as an emergent property of relations, of communities. As James Leach (2004), the British anthropologist, suggests creativity can be proposed as a collective becoming where the creation of new things, and the ritualized forms of exchange enacted around them, function to “create” individuals and bind them in social groups, thus “creating” the community they inhabit and generate new places in the landscape.