Collaborating

We've talked a lot about how the individual genius model is losing its relevance and how participation in the experience is the only way to really create experience in the moment. The first title for this post was "How to collaborate with other creative people" and I changed it because it seemed like replacing an individual with an elite. Better but not much. This idea is based on spontaneity..in the moment, on the fly, whatever description seems to fit. But it has much more in common with game space than traditional art space. The whole idea of "quality," judgement and criticism are much less relevant in this world than they are in the traditional art world. What is important is the "experience" and the experience is a here and now event. It includes the environment, the other people (friends, strangers, and others) that inhabit it with us, the time (real or virtual), the types of interactions possible and exercised. There has been a Fishbon discussion of the goal of ecstasy and transformation in the experience. Something needs to change, and change by your own action. Ecstasy is the degree to which the experience is free and beyond sense.

Jean Beaudrillard discusses it in his book: Fatal Strategies:

Ecstacy is the quality proper to any body that spins until all sense is lost, and then shines forth in its pure and empty form. Fashion is the ecstasy of the beautiful: pure and empty form of an aesthetic spinning about itself. Simulation is the ecstasy of the real..Anti-theater is the ecstatic form of theatre; no more stages or scenes, no more content, but theatre in the street, actor-less, theatre of all for all, which even becomes confused with the regular unfolding of our lives without illusion. Where is the power of illusion if it delights in retracing our daily life and transfiguring our workplace?

..The real does not efface itself in favor of the imaginary; it effaces itself in favor of the more real than real: the hyperreal, the truer than true: this is simulation

So, what does this have to do with collaboration? I think it's the degree to which the experience can be taken. Experience in the way Fishbon seeks to context it, is a world where ecstatic extremes are possible and transformation extends itself into a safe, but immersive simulation rather than observed stage magic.