What |

What

Tuesday, October 21st, 2008 | What is co-pilot?

Shared resources for people working at the intersection of art, technology and social change.

Collectively we have the beginnings of a useful resource of opinions, thought and ideas around how people engage in complex projects. Come and add to that resource, tell us how you learnt your lessons, how you understand participation and what we can all do better. If you have suggestions about anything then post them up!

Supporting the development of the resources is a Case Study from a project called The Not Quite Yet, a project that asked how to include older people in the future design process of technology? It was a complex project involving research, community groups, artists commissions, community liaison leading to an exhibition. Evaluative material is shown here as a framework to begin discussing some of the issues.

Creating shared resources

The places where art, technology and participation meet are already remarkable for their creative diversity and bespoke working practices. co-pilot seeks to cultivate these trends further, and open up more space for sharing and exploring frameworks, methodologies and experiences.

There are many frameworks for participatory arts practice (often erroneously bracketed under “arts education” in the UK) that span art forms and settings. Typically these cast the facilitating artist-practitioner as the ‘expert’, and position them as the centre, from where they apply their (pre-existing) skills and insights to ‘deliver a community project’. The other participants in this model may (or may not) develop art and interpersonal skills and competencies, and they may (or may not) relate a shared creative endeavour to wider social change agendas. It is common for the arts sector to claim that people are “empowered” through their participation in these frameworks, and that individual self-esteem and wider social capital is being generated. However, is it recognised that the arts sector struggles to provide evidence that might substantiate these claims on scale.

Co-Pilot seeks to explore other ways of understanding and allocating value to this work, that might exist an alternatives to these more conventional frameworks for participatory encounters. Starting from hosting conversations between practitioners who build emergent ideas and new ways of working into their practice, we also analyse case studies in depth, seeking to share learning about the successes and the struggles.

Case Study
co-pilot examines The Not Quite Yet as its first case study. We think that users of this site will find the realities of a real project to offer useful insights and inspiration. The particularities of The Not Quite Yet gives co-pilot ’s first iteration a ‘baseline’ of material that’s particularly relevant to working creatively with technology and Older People – much of the content of these pages, and the embedded media, explores this rich and challenging topic.

Art, Technology and Social Change
We believe, and our research has suggested, that at the crossroads of arts, technology and participation – there’s an appetite for the conceiving, developing and delivering projects of this kind in ways that aim to offer artists, commissioning agencies and ‘communities’ an equal voice in each of these processes. Suggesting ways of thinking about participatory media projects that allow those involved – whether artist, participant or commissioning agency - to work with each other in a flattened hierarchical structure, co-pilot hints at ways to think afresh about this work so that, once concord is achieved, everyone can offer their specialist skills and support to help each other fly wherever they want to - with an imaginative yet grounded fabric of new supporters and resources, that might reveal new horizons.

Our resources limit us to taking a long exposure, web based ’snapshot’ of this scene as it exists in late 2008 in the UK, in the hope this might act as a vehicle to lever in interest, create new connections, and see what next steps might be undertaken.

co-pilot has been developed by SPACE and Solar Associates with the generous support of Arts Council England, London through their support of The Not Quite Yet.