[This is a post by MMM guest blogger Gavin Artz]

“No culture can live, if it attempts to be exclusive.”
- Mohandas Gandhi

As CEO of the Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT) I have experienced artists going through the patent process, rapid prototyping, engaging in scientific research and producing new applications in digital media.  There is a myth about those involved in creative practice, that they are not interested in business.  There is a difference though between not wanting to be a businessperson and not wanting to be involved in business.  Many creative practitioners are interested in engaging with business, being commercial, but they want to pursue their creative vision and not spend a majority of there time focused on business outcomes.  We have a creative core in our societies that are some of our lowest income earners (Throsby & Hollister 2003); that seems absurd when we are told the economy relies on people creatively resolving problems.

In Australia I have been particularly struck by the new generation of artists, for whom the distinction between creative and commercial work is diminishing.  The artists that ANAT work with have a practice that often creates work that cannot be shown and cannot be sold in a traditional Artworld context, but contributes greatly to innovation processes and the language a citizen needs to navigate a technological age.  There is a new conception of what a creative culture is and ANAT, like Mission Models Money, is looking for new approaches.  Over a few articles I will attempt to give ANAT’s experience from an Australian perspective and I hope an international dialogue can develop that sees community, culture and commerce (McQueenie 2005) as a vital and interconnected system.

Scarcity

Community, culture and commerce have always been interlinked, although we have tried extract culture from this triumvirate, it is disingenuous to think it would ever stand alone and pure.  Our traditional view of culture comes from an economic perspective of scarcity.  Scarce wall space, storage space and performance space has meant that this resource has had to be rationed rationally.  For this people have been trained, and a whole discipline developed, to place knowledge and cultural creativity into a critical historic perspective.  Because of this we have developed an obsession with attendance, as though culture is something removed from our daily existence.  As technology has become cheaper, and more powerful, and the means of distribution have got cheaper and better, a gap has been further widening between what Marcus Westbury has called the “heritage arts” (Westbury 2009) and a vibrant living creative culture.

Digital Folk Art

Digital folk Art (Artz 2009) is becoming a big part of this new creative culture.  Folk art is a decoration of daily items, it is a community creativity that is used to communicate something about ones self and culture.  Digital Folk Art does much the same thing.  There are kids in their bedrooms making Star Wars stop motion movies, there is 8 bit fan art and even sophisticated physics modeling being shared.  Just as with folk art much of the Digital Folk Art is not a profound creative experience, some times though it does reach that level, but more importantly the people creating it don’t care.  People are doing what humans have done since there have been humans, they are actively creatively communicating in a community.

Abundance

The conception of Digital Folk Art is creative communication based on the digital economy of abundance (Anderson 2006).  This model says that the capacity for production and access to markets and consumers is high.  Instead of an Artworld giving permission for others to view your work, it is all available. There are no curators, no one is placing concepts into predefined contexts, so culture can do what culture does and develop in unexpected ways, bridging disciplines and creating new disciplines.

The Trans-disciplinary

This abundance is leading to people who are not bound by specialisation.  ANAT calls these people creative practitioners and has defined them as “people with experimental, future-focused and trans-disciplinary mindsets, engaging with new ideas and technologies, articulating a process of discovery, letting innovation emerge”.  They can be found in the artists, humanities, sciences, engineering, design and research from all fields.  These creative practitioners are coming together and terms such as Trans-disciplinary, Extra-disciplinary and Supra- disciplinary are being used: (the following definitions are those used by ANAT, finding a definitive use of these terms is a rich source of research and argument.)

Trans-disciplinary: A whole ecology of creative and productive activity leading to creative practise being embedded within culture, community and economy.

Extra-disciplinary: When looked at from a trans-disciplinary perspective the new joint disciplines create an as yet unknown and unexpected discipline; a different way of viewing knowledge.

Supra- disciplinary: This is where professional and amateur knowledge engage and cross over to enrich trans-disciplinary practice.

This breaking down of amateur and professional, of specialities, of the barriers between community, culture and commerce demands a new way of thinking about creative practice and what cultural activity is.

Will an artist in the future be seen as a crucial part of a scientific research team, be adapting IP for commercial products through Ancillary IPs (Artz 2008), be valued for a capacity to imbue big business with cultural insight, be empowering citizens with a language to participate democratically in a technological age?  In the arts we are seeing a breaking down of a century of individualist expression and a rise of a collaborative imperative to return to a more Renascence style studio practice.  This recognition of collaboration is a new sense of community.  This type of cultural activity can take some direction from business concepts, the entrepreneurial team is possibly the future framework for a practising artists career, and social entrepreneurship its over arching business model.  Cultural activity cannot artificially keep itself excluded from the rest of human existence if it is truly to have meaning to us; to be our culture.

Anderson C. Long Tail, The, Revised and Updated Edition: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More. New York:  Hyperion 2006.

Artz, G. “Artistic practice and unexpected intellectual property: Defining Ancillary IPs.” 2008. CHASS. http://www.chass.org.au/papers/PAP20080709GA.php . 20 April 2009.

Artz, G. “Digital Folk Art: A whole new world of art that is not art.” 2009. Collections Australia Network. http://keystone.collectionsaustralia.net/publisher/Outreach/?p=3437 17^th November 2009.

McQueenie, J. “3cs- Community, Culture and Commerce”.  Museums Australia Conference (Conference Paper), 1-4 May, 2005.

Throsby, C.D. & Hollister, V. 2003, “Don’t give up your day job: an economic study of professional artists in Australia.”  Australia Council for the Arts, Sydney.

Westbury, M. “The ABC and Ozco: Cultural change and how (not) to adapt to it”  November 2nd, 2009. http://www.marcuswestbury.net/2009/11/02/761/. 17^th November 2009.