Ideas for remote collaboration
Last summer I flew to Perth, on the far west coast of Australia, to spend a week and a half working with Sam Fox of Hydra Poesis. During my residency there, at the Center for Interdisciplinary Arts Studios, Sam and I reflected on our experiences collaborating from across the globe via Skype, writing, and video exchange. My trip was generously funded by the Network of Ensemble Theaters, who recently published our notes for a workshop exploring new models of co-authorship in online collaboration:
This is a critical moment in the culture, in the life and development of the internet, virtual embodiment, and the aforementioned ubiquity of handheld devices and webcams as a cultural phenomenon.
... remote online collaboration following open source principles inherently challenge artistic authorship, even suggesting the destruction of the innate value of the material. Employing a “commons” ethos, we might treat our works with less reverence, and give over the rights to (conditionally) over-author our works, as a function of the possibility for decentralization of the collaboration structure.
