Collaborative/Reactive Creativity

Shelley Jackson covers a lot of information in her writing, “Stitch Bitch,” but what stood out to me in particular was her ideas on what I would call collaborative creativity.

“Go write your own text. Go paint a mural. You must change your life. I want piratical readers, plagiarist and opportunists, who take what they want from my ideas and knot it into their own arguments. Or even their own novels. From which, possibly, I’ll steal it back.”

What I think she is suggesting here is not that people should steal and reproduce something in its entirety, but rather to take ideas from others and manipulate, change, and meld them into something new. Or even to find inspiration within them to create something new, which should in turn inspire another to create a new and different piece. And in this way I think that she is speaking towards something like collaborative creativity, using each other’s ideas and inspiration to create new ideas, inspirations and creative works. Or perhaps we could call the trend reactive creativity, hinting to some infinite quality that this creative process may have.

This process is only aided with the inception of the internet, where creative pieces can be shared quickly and with everyone around the world. With online usage at its peak, this is becoming a rapidly increasing process for many who are creatively inclined. One example that was brought to my mind is the musical artist Imogen Heap. On multiple occasions she has defended this exact creative process through tweets or Facebook posts. She allows for her work to be sampled by artists around the world with very few limitations, as she sees her sampling only a small piece of their own larger piece. Beyond this she encourages her fans to use her music for their own videos (on one occasion fought with Youtube to have many fan videos reloaded to the website after they were taken down for copyright infringement) and to remix her music in their own styles. In the same vain she is actually producing her whole next album using fan participation and input, which is really capturing the spirit of collaborative creativity.

Overall I think this is definitely a trend to watch and to explore with our own creative musings. I’m also interested in the possible backlash a process like this will continue to receive and how far it might go (thinking of both Girltalk and Shepard Fairey).