# a failed art collaboration with max colson to consider an urban art mashup of max colson and nicolas moulin > when psychologists examine the lives of the most creative people they almost always find individuals who like to go off by themselves - who can tolerate the solitude that creativity requires," says cain. "they are extroverted enough to exchange and advance ideas but introverted enough to gestate them on ir own." and as barron says "novelists or painters are largely solo operators. when it is pure art or self-expression or a deeply original idea that needs to be developed solitude serves > ~ the atlantic does artistic collaboration ever work? **example artist statement** robert what: "a day out in the world with max and nic. nonlinear series of exploratory wanderings and unexpected false starts among the modern ruins of a science fiction mytho-landscape; where corporate fragments and concrete ideology mis-form the urban architecture of a monumental symbolism combining towering ghosts of time and stark imaginary dreamscapes of long calcified spatial alienation - a silent testament to shared international hyperrealites of critical design. a calculated snapshot of unemotional implication on the displaced mega-highway of tomorrow" > hi robert > > (..) if i was engaging in a process of iterative garme making would you be the consultant/ critic of the process of making teh garme? would this be a way of ensuring that there were abstract encounters within the final thing? > best wishes > max colson > // associate lecturer at central saint martins ma communication design > // freelance photographer maxcolsoncommercial dot com > // artist > maxdfcolson at gmail.com hi again! to respond to your last email - some loose notes toward a shared (/possibly lost) document of online artistic collaboration (to answer your question: to avoid delegating work schedules andor critical evaluation consider we're somehow *already+ involved in a simple (narrative) process of iterative garme design and need 'make' nothing else) **+** max i feel the/our initial intense purple-blue flame of collaborative intent has already waned. it's as you correctly suspected i suspect - that we have no clear goals we're not operating from or out of the clear creative guidelines or auspices of some famous / interesting art manifesto our time is short our coding skills are limited and 'the big payoff' creative or otherwise seems largely non existent. to this one might reply ok: in fact the only process we can possibly collaborate on is the increasingly clear perception that this virtual bus garme project feels entirely empty - and that it is precisely the sense of digital emptiness that we focus upon. (indeed we've little choice?) perhaps the bus was always merely just a convenient mcguffin andor overstrained conceptual metaphor for the electronic void which lies on/as the hyperreal surface of this project. with this in open minds let's allow the bus go on existing in its flux-state of 'not-existing'; like the proverbial undead zombie which continues to move and exist let us continue to conjure an exquisite corpse from ideas communication and the playful spirit of online (meta-surrealist).. some not-thing andor other in other words uncertainty is the (nonlinear) order of the day: hop on board the quantum bus to foamville - please keep your hands inside this poly-dimensional simulation at all times // video here **+** you are not an artist but a hot amateur postmodern theorist and altgarmes developer - acting as though this unsubtle and poorly formulated substitution isn't merely a sad attempt to swap out one set of problems and unwanted career opportunities for others. as though making up your own job description gets you off the hook of having to conform to the descriptions and 'readings' of fellow artists (whoever they are) **+** you discovered the excellent art / practice of max colson one night while in the icy usual grip of terminal boredom and insomnia. perhaps you'd been searching for something along the research lines of jg ballard + garmes. and then suddenly along the thin neon string of endless hyperlinks pops max and ir cool site. a proper artist it seems - with cultural credentials and good press a nice line in official gallery showings and warm reviews - max has a clear idea of ir own aesthetic / lifestyle and how to express it publicly **+** you find this hard to write - not because you've (/not just got) little to say about art life or existence but because the cold flat you currently live in rapidly turns your mid-morning hands to blocks of frozen stone (perhaps the kind of old rough moss covered stone seen in a semi-futuristic movie about kafkaesque bureaucracy in a digital dystopian state called the liquid internets). there should be thin writer's gloves for unpaid homeworkers **+** over the last decades the term simulation has changed its meaning both culturally and semantically. it derives from the latin words similis (similar) simulacrum (image copy illusion imitation) simulatio (hypocrisy camouflage feint) and simulare (to display to disguise to imitate to mimic). all these terms have a negative connotation; however in the context of contemporary science and media simulation has been used in a completely different manner. it indicates a process of projecting the past and present into the future on the basis of data and by means of designing virtual visual worlds - like for example in computer garmes in flight simulators or weathers forecasts > thus we might ask whether simulation is a creative process at all since it is based on computer-generated algorithms (this question has much in common with the question whether mathematics is a creative field which many mathematicians have good grounds to claim). we should further ask whether we can speak of a creative act when the simulation is produced by a rather large group of persons who might not even know each other like the scientist the designer the programmer the engineer etc. finally we might raise the question whether simulation is merely a side-product of modern digital engineering that contributes to postmodern universal alienation as some postmodern philosophers have claimed or if it is the key medium of the twenty-first century both in a scientific and in a creative context > ~ collective creativity: collaborative work in the sciences literature and the arts - edited by gerhard fisher and florian vassen **+** had a really good vegetable pie for lunch (home made) - looking out the window the gliding seagulls overhead reminded you of faded summer hope still far off **+** today in most science technology engineering and mathematics (hereafter stem) fields more than 90 % of research studies and publications are collaborative (bozeman and corley 2004) leading to a "collaboration imperative." not only does team-based collaborative research more often lead to high impact research and to commercial uses of research as reflected in patents (wuchty et al. 2007) in many fields it is not possible to thrive as a single investigator. if one's work depends on access to samples or specimens or to extremely expensive shared equipment then collaboration and research are essentially one in the same and thus the collaboration imperative. thus despite significant variation by field discipline and geography (de stefano et al. 2013) contemporary stem research is dominated by collaboration teams networks and co-authorship > beyond simply setting context for our analysis we are not particularly concerned with either the amount of research collaboration or even the broad institutional factors conducing collaboration. the increase in team projects and in individual-level and institutional level research collaboration is well documented (for an overview see bozeman et al. 2013) and thus we take the proliferation of collaboration as a given focusing instead on the processes and "mechanics" of collaboration as well as determinants of collaboration effectiveness > ~ barry bozeman and craig boardman - research collaboration and team science: a state-of-the-art review and agenda **+** that link i sent to you the killscreen article about my/the cs:go noclip exhibition was worth about three years of hard work on this anonymous site and its meagre discontents. admittedly i was the one who sent killscreen the link in the vain hope of getting some eyeballs focused in my vague direction - they did not 'discover' my inherently great / interesting art. no talent scouts famous art patrons or rich benefactors will ever read this and answer the call of my/a holy angsty plight. (upon merely mentioning the small fact of emailing killscreen to my girlfriend last night i got such a strong slight look of "gee isn't that kinda selling out?" that i remained uselessly angry and embarassed for the rest of the evening - at least till we continued watching old re-runs of magnum and i pretended not to care) **+** in the journey between modernity and post-modernity the art museum became an increasingly problematic site for artists many of whom began looking for alternative non-museal sites for ir work. richard long's fleeting non-object-based interventions in sites and landscapes are perhaps a seminal example of a discursive shift that may have played a significant role in revealing the heritage site as potential ground for alternative arts practice (roelstraete 2010 p. 3). in ir landmark essay inside the white cube: the ideology of the gallery space (1999) brian o'doherty attacked the ahistorical self-referential nature of the modernist gallery space where the white walls remain 'untouched by time and its vicissitudes' (1999 p. 16). in reaction to the gallery's disembodied visuality ('the eye') many artists were impelled out into the 'impure' world where 'indeterminate nontheatrical spaces - warehouses deserted factories old stores' could provide more authentic contexts for the making of art (o'doherty 1999 p. 47). context now becomes part of art's content the artist a cultural itinerant ir work without 'fixed abode empirical always testing experience' conscious of self and history and ambiguous about both (o'doherty 1999 p. 81). echoing baudrillard (1998) o'doherty (1999) confirms the art museum as bank certifying the value of art. the fugitive artist flees the gallery in fear of being co-opted by its consumerist economy taking to temporary interventions with site-specific work in unlikely locations (o'doherty 1999 p. 113) > one of the significant forms of resistance adopted by artists was to incorporate the idiom of the art museum space reflexively within the process of art production. from the 1950s artists such as richard hamilton andy warhol joseph beuys and daniel spoerri either created ir own museums or took control of the space in which ir work was exhibited (martin 1995 pp. 55-68). artists were becoming increasingly engrossed with deconstructive strategies aimed at 'the taxonomies and history of the museum itself' (serota 2000 p. 38) > ~ ian alden russell and andrew cochrane (editors) - art and archaeology: collaborations conversations criticisms **+** max i (currently) don't know about you but the way i approach my own art(tm) is like that of snake pliskin - flying solo no backup hunched down in the ninja stealth microlight - forever 'on final approach' to the hyper-dark megacorporate tower of deep scientific adventure kinda that is to say if i didn't inject an uncertain large measured dose of furniture chewing melodrama (ala alan rickman in diehard) and ridiculous cheesy alt.sci-fi into.. whatever the heck this is i wouldn't get up in the morning. (as it is i don't even do that. like many other researchers i keep odd hours and have barely registered the simple glory of the sun before lunchtime for several long months. my brave dim face: a pale blue ceramic-titanium face of vague artistic affectation with nothing underneath. am i a pseudo-antonymous droid operating out in the bland biomagnetic data field with an obsolete os? because part of me sure hopes so at least i could write a semi-impassioned deadpan screed about it on my lousy anonymous blog - sorry official professional website) and yet you are here with me now experiencing all this - and i'm (somehow) happy and sincerely grateful you turned up **+** jennifer roche: your article simply put seems to be a call to examine (or re-examine) the principles under which we evaluate socially engaged art. you say that most socially engaged art has been evaluated from an ethical viewpoint (good vs. bad models of collaboration). why do you think the discourse surrounding socially engaged art has lapsed in its critical examination of the field as you've described? > claire bishop: there are several reasons for this and they range from the pragmatic to the ideological. on the one hand in europe at least the influence of the art critic began to diminish in the early 1990s and was replaced by the curator as the figure who makes or breaks an artist's career. and as we know curatorial writing is on the whole affirmative and rarely expresses reservations about a given artist. when i embarked upon this research i was struck by the fact that most of the project documentation was written by curators. to an extent this is logistical: socially engaged and participatory art projects are so complex sprawling and context-based that the only person with a handle on the overall project is invariably the curator. but because curatorial work is so often concerned with fair mediation (between artists audiences and institutions) it is perhaps unsurprising that curatorial writing is oriented toward ethical questions > ~ artistic bedfellows: histories theories and conversations in collaborative art practices - edited by holly crawford **+** to consider artists as not special under capitalism merely assigned to just another convenient niche like public telephone sanitizer or kung fu christ priest. many people need to artistic however just to cope with the soul crushing mundaneness of ir existence as a component in the system. one can easily imagine some suit saying: "plug in another temporary artist module we need to shift these generic units of material consumption. oh and make the box logo cornflower blue." for every undervalued vidyagarm coder that writes and elegant line andor leaves ir signature among a dense unexplored and unappreciated forest of deep programming an artist appears - even for an instant. but then so what **+** so rather than ask "where do we go from here" let's imagine we've already arrived on our virtual quantum bus. that is 'in which what we have so far is what we only ever have': distributed data - emails ideas the spirit of artistic collaboration our own unspoken / unstated ideologies gaps distortions and (perhaps inherent) conceptual inconsistencies regarding (eg.) art / life / existence / short existential bus trips to andor from urban digital nowhere special **+** something concrete to work on in the meantime: max perhaps i could interview and ask you questions about the artistic process travel (virtual or otherwise art under capitalism etc.) feel free to write and answer your own uncommon questions / approaches you feel nobody else is currently asking **update patch** when unknown and under discovered working class artists try collaborating with upper middle class artists of whiteness who have gallery representation the only thing that results is an awkward embarrasing silence in which the political-artistc logistics of uk class warfare are laid bare by ir very absence; the rich artist while initially ego-stroked at being admired by a member of the working class almost instantly then realizes that nothing productive (in terms of capital) will come of such a collaboration and will soon loose interest andor pretend to be busy // republic of bob