Art, Media Design, and Postproduction

14Distributed Collaboration

Collective Work across Networks

Premise: This chapter is an examination of collaboration as a creative process across networked communication. It considers collective efforts relevant in art and media design.

There are two basic ways to collaborate, which can be categorized as the individual-led model and the collective-led model. For the first, a person invites or hires collaborators; a variation of this model is at play in research centers, where there is a principal investigator who will work with a support team. For the second, there may be a leader or key organizer, but the activities of the group are not credited to one person but the collective. The second model is common in activism as well as art and design ...