The Future is Social

The research done to date has focused on working with groups and individuals in the 'public domain' often organised through arts organisations. The Future is Social is an experiment that aims to embed some of the findings, the discourses and practices of collaborative and participatory art within an academic environment.

This will involve 15 Future-Social participants, comprising of students and lecturers from the Camberwell, Chelsea and Wimbledon (CCW) Graduate School of the University of the Arts London, in a rigorous three-week programme to explore four main areas central to the process of collaboration and participation, with each session facilitated by a practitioner from the field in question.

The four areas are:
Modify
The aim of this session will be to get Future-Social participants to bring a drawing to be modified by someone else in the group. Through the activity of drawing in a collaborative context we will discuss how to evaluate each contribution to the final outcome and assess the future of the object. Previous experience with this has uncovered the competitive undercurrents of art practice, i.e. who has contributed most (qualitatively) to the authorship of the object, who can claim ownership of the final outcome (economics), the status of the object and its after-life. We would aim to discuss why work collaboratively? What is gained and what is lost?

The Document
Documenting the fleeting nature of social exchange has been an ongoing enquiry in my research. This session will tackle the question head on with Future-Social participants bringing along a mechanical device that documents: comprising both the medium and subject matter of the session. Mindful of the many debates about the incursions of photography in relation to performative actions, here we shall address a recent essay by Rebecca Schneider The Document Performance (The Live Art Almanac) that questions prevailing attitudes. We shall also explore further the debates that critique the documentary turn in contemporary art as an aesthetic enquiry. Here, I am mindful of an essay by Okwui Enwezor, Documentary/Verité (The Green Room: Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art # 1).

Together
Divided into three discreet sessions, the Together laboratories will look at creating something concrete out of a social yet ephemeral situation: singing, dancing and engaging others in the public domain.

The singing and dancing sessions will look at the dynamics of working together and the momentum of sound to create collective festivity. The issues to discuss will include: performativity and performance anxiety; awareness of self/awareness of others; singing in unison and noise as dissonance; competing egos; what is material about sound; and making social sculpture.

Participatory practice often involves engaging with strangers to illicit 'the work'. This laboratory will take us out onto the streets to engage with the general public. The issues to be addressed are: encountering strangers and eliciting a response, and what is at stake for those we want to engage in these art practices; the gift economy at work and how we can think about this critically, including the notion of indebtedness (participants as content providers).

Negotiations
The aim of this session will be to explore the dynamics of groups and the roles we take up. Some of the skills that Group Relations use will be employed to enable us to step back from the midst of a situation to gauge the dynamics of the group for creative and practical use.

Here, we would also look at social contracts (appearance release forms and letters of agreement): negotiation skills, working with the dynamics of differing power relations, and the antagonisms of working collaboratively - exploring more rigorously the notion of co-operation.

To add a critical overview there will be a public day-long panel discussion, the results of which will be published online.

The first two years of my 3-year AHRC research, focused on working with groups and individuals in the 'public domain' often organised through arts organisations. The Future is Social is an experiment to embed and extend in a much riskier fashion some of the findings, the discourses and practices of collaborative and participatory art in an academic environment.

This will be the first time that I am actively engaging lecturers and postgraduate students, all of whom work within this field, to take part in my research. The hope is that by creating a discursive space many of the issues that arise during the making of projects will come to the surface and become concretised not only in making, but also through reflective discussions.

Good engagement and communication:
To be able to deliver what will be an abundance of audio and visual material on to a dedicated website a practical workshop will be arranged with the University AV Technicians on formatting material appropriate for the Internet.
The AV Technicians will also run a workshop on documenting whilst out on location, with an emphasis on both the technical issues to take into consideration (noise and weather conditions) as well as risk assessment issues.
The Co-ordinator will maintain a critical writings resource for all participants to access.
The Future is Social website will host a blog that all participants and visitors to the site will be able to access.

Collaboration - roles and responsibilities:
The 15 postgraduate and lecturer Future-Social participants will be expected to commit to the three-week programme.
The Co-ordinator will be responsible for the administrative support of the programme, liaising between the Principal Investigator, the Future-Social participants, the Web Editor, the venue staff and the University.
The Web Editor will be responsible for managing the material that comes out of the research exercises and the Panel discussions through agreement with the Future-Social participants, the Panellists, the Co-ordinator and the Principal Investigator.
For the 'Together' and 'Negotiations' sessions Facilitators will be brought in to lead the activities.
The 'Together' sessions, will aim to work with artists who use singing as part of their visual arts practice to lead a workshop; and, artists whose practice involves eliciting the involvement of strangers will lead the activities where the Future-Social participants go out on to the streets.
The 'Negotiations' sessions will aim to work with a consultant in the field of Group Relations to lead a session on the dynamics and positions taken up within groups; a consultant from DACS will be asked to lead discussions on contracts and agreements with collaborators and organisations; and an artist/arts consultant will facilitate a session on the antagonisms inherent in working collaboratively.

The Panellists (artists, critics and curators) will consider the process of the Future is Social and the questions that are raised.
The Principal Investigator will liaise with her Line Manager and the AHRC Fellowship Steering Committee.

With the website disseminating the research as it happens - the content and form of which will be largely shaped by participants; the editorial mapping managed by the Web Editor through discussions with the Co-ordinator; the panel discussion will aim to add a much wider context and attract a larger audience beyond the University; and, as Principal Investigator, it will be my job to steer and track the process. I shall occupy a constantly shifting identity: at the centre of the activity one moment and detached at another. As an 'observer', I hope to return to some of my initial research questions, i.e. who did what when within a social situation? Asking what difference this makes to the final outcome.