Designer/Artist + Co-Creation
Category : Nano Bio Art
It is hard (yet, obvious) to conceive that the concerns of yesterday were the same as the ones of today. One of the comments raised in class (thanks Myriam!) was that artists and designers are still trying to respond to a similar set of questions concerning society, spirituality, the environment, and so forth. With the advent of new technologies and the rapid dissemination and accessibility of information, artists and designers develop increasingly sophisticated ways of thinking about the world in visual forms and of approaching open-ended questions or specific problems in new and exciting ways. It seems that design and art now represent blurred categorizations: artists and designers grow more apt at interchanging roles and are increasingly willing to collaborate and co-create.
For many reasons, a designer’s job is to turn complex data-sets into a simple and understandable language that responds to an audience’s characteristic requirements. An artist (today) has somewhat a similar job (it seems to me at least); in that s/he gives meaning to ideas and objects that might have been overshadowed, and often-times creates new meaning and new incentives for knowledge. Artists may be addressing issues that are somewhat utopic; for instance, “What is the meaning of life?” or an even more uncanny form would be “What does purple smell or sound like?” Philosophers, in their own expressive language have long dealt (and still) with the same challenges by tackling open-ended questions that can only require multi-variable responses and perspectives, and often leave questions unanswered (and might at times leave readers perplexed).
ID/Entity: Portraits in the 21st Century (DVD) presented a number of collaborative projects from the MIT media lab, showing the value of co-creation in media art and design for the development of new ideas, perspectives and practices. Co-creation, or co-design, transcends the boundaries of specialized languages and enables both communication between different expert fields and the rise of new hybrid practices.