Dispatch from a Chinese art collective

“In 2020, a virus attacking the lungs spread rapidly and widely, not only to the lungs but also to the human heart, in sync with the New Year.”
 — Folk Memory Collective

For over a decade, the world-renowned Beijing-based Folk Memory collective has invited young filmmakers to visit their homes (in rural communities across China) to film their elders discussing their experiences during the Great Famine of 1959–61. This year, the collective headed out as usual during the Lunar New Year but was confronted suddenly with the coronavirus outbreak. 15 members have found themselves trapped behind severe government-imposed blockades, quarantines on entire cities and provinces. Across the country, movement and access to shops, food, and medicine have been severely restricted.

We asked Zhang Mengqi, a founding member of the collective (who joined us at the MIT Collective Wisdom symposium in 2018), to share some of the group’s photos and stories as the members experience a country under quarantine. Here is what she sent us

我是章梦奇，是一个独立纪录片导演和剧场创作者，也是“民间记忆计划”的成员。从2010年开始，我和我的同伴们在每个冬天返回自己家乡的村子记录和保存被掩盖、被忽略的普通人的记忆和生活。2020年的到来，对我来说非常特别，因为一个名为“蓝房子”的艺术空间在我的村子里建成，这是我十年时间里建造的梦想。但是完全没有想到，突如其来的病毒疫情中断了我的生活和梦。

“I’m Zhang Mengqi, an independent documentary filmmaker and theater creator, also a member of The Folk Memory Project. Since 2010, as is the idea of the project, my teammates and I return to our hometown every winter to record and preserve the memories and lives of ordinary people who have been covered up and ignored. The year 2020 is very special for me because an art space named “Blue House” has been built in my village, which is a dream I have had for ten years. But I never expected that a sudden virus outbreak would interrupt my life and dreams.”

临近春节，我回到湖北我的家乡城市随州与我母亲及家人过年，节日的的前一天（1月24日）我的城市实施强制封锁。我独自住在随州市的家里，这里距离疫情最严重的武汉市有150公里，我的母亲和其他家人亲戚们也在这个城市的不同地方自我隔离着。从这天起一切开始失控，所有人无处可逃，村子也回不去了。

As the Spring Festival (Chinese New Year) approached, I returned to my hometown city of Suizhou in Hubei Province to celebrate the Spring Festival with my mother and families. I lived alone in Suizhou, 150 kilometers from the worst-hit city of Wuhan, where my mother and other family members were isolated in different parts of the city. From that day on everything began to get out of control; everyone had nowhere to run and I could not go back to my village.

我和村子里的孩子们用手机视频联络，这是我最开心的事情。她们告诉我，村子的路口被泥土堵住，每天都能听到关于疫情防范的宣传广播。图中是5岁的婷婷，她的老师告诉她：“外面有病毒不能出门，要戴口罩。”可是商店里已经买不到口罩。

I keep in touch with the children in the village by video phone call, which is my most happy thing during this period. The kids told me that the entrance to the village was blocked by mud and that propaganda broadcasts about the outbreak could be heard every day. The little girl in the photo is Tingting; she’s 5 years old. She was told by her teacher, “you can’t go out because of the virus. We need to wear a mask every day.” But masks are no longer available in stores.

窗外救护车的声音越来越近，楼道里偶尔传出脚步和咳嗽的声音，网络中都是生死离别的故事，说真话的李文亮医生走了。一只小鸟落在我的窗前，停顿着她困惑的翅膀。

The sound of the ambulance outside the window is getting closer and closer, the sound of footsteps and cough are occasionally heard in the corridor, the network full of the story of death. Dr. Li Wenliang, who was a truth-teller, has left already. A bird landed at my window, pausing her confused wings.

进入2月，随州市的确诊人数已经过千，政府的管控措施越来越严格。一开始禁止车辆出行，很快人也不能随意出入居住的社区。我居住的小区把购买食物的时间限制在每天下午4点到晚上9点，人们在门口排队买菜。

In February, the number of confirmed cases in Suizhou city has passed one thousand. The government controls are getting more and more strict. Cars were initially banned, and soon people were barred from entering and leaving their neighborhoods. In my community, people can only go out to buy food from 4:00 pm to 9:00 pm every day. People line up at the gate to buy food from outside.

我只剩下5只口罩，只能减少出门的次数。附近唯一的超市里人们在抢购食物，在慌乱中我感受到了真正的恐惧，也加入了疯狂地购买的队伍。

I only have five masks left, so I have to go out less. In the only store nearby, people were rushing to buy food. In the panic, I felt real fear. I joined the buying frenzy.

我居住的小区有了一个确诊病例，每只口罩下都是不安的眼睛，没有人知道明天会发生什么。

There is a confirmed case of infection in my neighborhood. There are restless eyes under each mask. No one knows what will happen tomorrow.

庆幸的是，我还有我的同伴们，他们有的在村子里拍摄，有的和我一样困在城市的楼房中。在“民间记忆计划的交流邮件组”中，大家从不同位置发出拍摄笔记，这是我们把散落的个人记忆汇集在一起的地方。以前我们带着摄像机去寻找已经发生过的灾难记忆，现在镜头转向自己记住灾难中的我们。

Fortunately, I still have my companions, some of whom are filming in the village. Others are trapped in the city buildings like me. In the email group of The Folk Memory Project, we send out diaries of scattered personal memories from different locations. We used to take cameras to look for disasters of the past, but now we are turning the camera on ourselves to document the disaster in progress.

邮件组中有年龄最大（69岁）的贾之坦，他在湖南老家的村子里，每天带着重复使用的口罩拿着机器守卫在村口和村干部办公室，捍卫者自己的知情权。还有最年轻的魏轩（20岁，大学二年级），他在江苏老家的村子，守在被严格看管的村口，记录集权落地在最小的关卡时发生的奇人异事。

这些一个个具体的故事还来自北京沙子营村、湖南黑漆村、陕西史家寨村、四川米易县、云南昆明，北京秦家屯村……此刻，记住与分享不只是创作的方法，也让我们所有行动的意义都得以延续。

In the email group, the oldest member, Jia Zhitan (69), witnesses from his home village in Hunan province. Every day he is wearing the same reusable mask and holding a camera to guard the entrance to the village and the village officials’ offices, defending the right to know.

Then there is Wei Xuan (20), the youngest member, in his hometown village in Jiangsu province. He is documenting the entrance of the village, recording how power is concentrated at the smallest level.

These specific stories also come from Shaziying village (Beijing), Black village (Hunan), Shijiazhai village (Shaanxi), Miyi county (Sichuan), Kunming (Yunnan)… At this point, remembering and sharing is not only the way to create but also a way to perpetuate the meaning of all our actions.

The group continues to share with each other daily over WeChat, email, and skype. As of now, all members of the group remain healthy. The members of the group are:

• Wei Xuan (Magongdian Village, Jiangsu Province)
• Jia Zhitan (Jimingqiao Village, Hunan Province)
• Shao Yuzhen (Shaziying Village, Beijing)
• Zhang Huancai (Shijiazhai Village, Shanxi Province)
• Luo Luo (Miyi, Sichuan Province)
• Zhang Ping (Heixi Village, Hunan)
• Zhang Mengqi (Suizhou, Hubei Province)
• Hu Tao (Xiangzidian Village, Shanxi Province)
• Wu Wenguang (Kunming, Yunnan Province)
• Wang Haian (Zhanggao Village, Shandong Province)
• Hao Yongbo (Magongdian Village, Jiangsu Province)
• Gao Ang (Jiaoxinzhuang Village, Henan Province)
• Tu Haiyan (Taolin Village, Beijing)
• Liu Xiaolei (Qinjiatun Village, Beijing)
• Zhang Dandan (Ordos, Inner Mongolia)

This article is part of Collective Wisdom, an Immerse series created in collaboration with Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab. Immerse’s series features excerpts from MIT Open Documentary Lab’s larger field study — Collective Wisdom: Co-Creating Media within Communities, across Disciplines and with Algorithms — as well as bonus interviews and exclusive content.

Immerse is an initiative of the MIT Open DocLab and The Fledgling Fund, and it receives funding from Just Films | Ford Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. IFP is our fiscal sponsor. Learn more here. We are committed to exploring and showcasing media projects that push the boundaries of media and tackle issues of social justice — and rely on friends like you to sustain ourselves and grow. Join us by making a gift today.

A Country under Coronavirus Quarantine was originally published in Immerse on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Graphic: Recommendations for Supporting the Co-Creation Process

Throughout the interviews, discussions, and gatherings we held for the Collective Wisdom project, we systematically heard that co-creation insists on profound attention to process. The media industry has commodified the construction and telling of stories, so the prevailing standards of funding, researching, evaluating, and producing leave little room for process-oriented work. The current pipelines of production rely on and demand highly specialized, often extractive processes that are defined by the deliverables, and the outcomes.

In this report, we have attempted to name and illustrate processes that are all too often invisible or implicit. Our recommendations extend across individual projects, community initiatives, institutional support, and argue for systemic changes in the way that media is produced, and connected to social movements.

Key Recommendations: Support the Process

1. Research

More research should be conducted by many stakeholders, in order to map and understand the operations of co-creation in the context of our dominant culture, one predisposed to individual ownership, accumulation, and appropriation.

We need to understand the implications of co-creation in a society of systemic inequity and in an era of fast-changing biological and technological developments (AI, VR, etc.). We need to continue to learn from historical and current human practices by studying and understanding: business/organizational models; co-creation in diverse communities; co-creation beyond the U.S. and Canada; ownership and intellectual-property models; art collectives; co-operative economic models; transdisciplinarity models and matchmaking; art and AI; deepfake and synthetic media, and new non-hierarchical forms of convening.

2. A Library of Toolkits and Curricula

There is a need to create resources for teaching, sharing, and learning co-creative models. This involves co-creative strategic planning that will create networks and hubs to document, organize, and create an accessible library of existing toolkits (contracts, worksheets, community agreement forms), best practices, and document and share failures through modular curricula. These networks and hubs should include media-makers, community groups, non-profits, private companies, public institutions, media institutions, and universities. These resources should be intended for professional development as well.

3. Structural Changes at Institutions

More research and prototyping within institutions, both public and private, must be undertaken. This will develop pathways for co-creative practices internally, and methods to reach communities that already co-create. These processes must be ethical, just, transparent, and equitable.

4. Spaces for Incubation and Production

More sustainable programs, fellowships, workshops, streams, and incubators should be developed to facilitate co-creative projects that honor the processes, multiple partnerships, and timeframes involved. The governance of these spaces and the projects needs to be interrogated. These sites need to provide adequate resources, mentors, cross-disciplinary supports, witnesses, and, intentional healing and trauma-informed practices should be implemented.

5. Networks for Distribution

Spaces and networks for distributing co-creative projects need to be supported, including community centers, libraries, alternative spaces, schools, festivals, universities, and among allied funders engaged in projects.

In Conclusion

Together, we share a vast history of co-creation. From early rock art, to the development of our sacred texts, to the politicized twentieth-century newsreel collectives, to the latest experiments in immersive technologies fueled by AI, co-creation is remarkably commonplace. But it is also remarkably invisible. Before it is co-opted by digital empires, and marketeers, we have a chance to define, it, claim it, and ground it to principles of equity, justice and authentic collective models of ownership.

Media co-creation allows for new, better questions, and for paths in which there are not always singular answers. Co-creation can enrich daily practice, it demands self-reflection, and forges harmonious, equitable relationships between partners, within and across communities, beyond disciplines, and working with non-human systems, many of which we do not yet fully understand.

Throughout the making of this study, primarily through the listening, we have been humbled and inspired by the phenomenal stories of co-creation, and by the openness of all stakeholders to learn from each other and to engage in courageous questioning. The conversations have been nuanced, messy, difficult, exciting, and above all, overflowing. Co-creation carries with it a profound respect for each person’s unique expertise, and also the knowledge that we must share both the burden and the liberation of determining our future collectively. There is an urgency to the challenges we face in this moment in history, and no one person, organization, or discipline can determine all the answers alone.

Making can divide, alienate, and exploit — or it has the potential to be inclusive, equitable, and respectful. The latter conditions are far more conducive to the collective efforts it will take to address the immense challenges of structural inequality, exponential population growth, the Anthropocene, and the ever-diminishing resources that follow in their wake. In reaching beyond the mere sum of our collective intelligence, we stand a chance at finding our collective wisdom. Co-creation offers hope.

This article is part of Collective Wisdom, an Immerse series created in collaboration with Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab. Immerse’s series features excerpts from MIT Open Documentary Lab’s larger field study — Collective Wisdom: Co-Creating Media within Communities, across Disciplines and with Algorithms — as well as bonus interviews and exclusive content.

Immerse is an initiative of the MIT Open DocLab and The Fledgling Fund, and it receives funding from Just Films | Ford Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. IFP is our fiscal sponsor. Learn more here. We are committed to exploring and showcasing media projects that push the boundaries of media and tackle issues of social justice — and rely on friends like you to sustain ourselves and grow. Join us by making a gift today.

Indigenous artists, reciprocity, and co-creation

Lisa Jackson is a Toronto-based filmmaker whose works include documentary, installation, VR, animation, and performance art film. She is Anishinaabe from the Aamjiwnaang First Nation. In this interview, Katerina Cizek speaks with Jackson about her experiences with co-creation and, more recently, as an observer of some of the filming of Edge of the Knife.

How do you define co-creation? Is it a term you use?

“Reciprocity” is a word that’s used a lot. One of the things that culturally is very different within Indigenous communities — and in Indigenous communities in relation to media — is that there is a sense from the mainstream media that anytime they want to profile you or do anything with you, they think it’s some kind of privilege to be on the other side of the camera or the microphone.

A lot of people feel like they have gotten a sense of the trauma of Indigenous people for the first time and they feel the need to make sure everybody knows about it. Who does that benefit? They often have their own agenda which isn’t in alignment with the community’s, so you have to ask yourself: What are you documenting if you’re not willing to listen to what your subject wants to tell you? Which isn’t to say that people within the communities know exactly how it should all be done (in terms of media-making), but that’s where relationship-building comes in. You have to put yourself out there and be honest about what your intentions are, what you’re bringing to the table. It takes time and care and respect.

I know you got the chance to observe some of the makings of the recent film, Edge of the Knife. Can you talk a bit about that experience?

The Haida film, Edge of the Knife, is an astounding accomplishment and record of their language living onscreen. It’s a document of the clothing, the technologies, the way of life, the culture of the Haida people. It’s a feature film with a gripping story.

I know both the co-directors, Gwaai and Helen… They had the support to do a lengthy script development process with Haida communities, which was important. So there was representation during the scriptwriting process, all the people acting in it, the consultants, and they had a ton of Haida crew. I think people would have said it was impossible to get that many, but they had loads. And for the most part, when not Haida, then Indigenous.

Being on that set was a very different vibe. It was community-oriented. There were assigned roles, and everybody was doing their jobs, but they were also pitching in as needed. For example, at one point they needed a new outhouse and one of the actors helped dig it out. I arrived and started shucking clams… The lead actress was there and so was (producer) Jonathan Franz, and we sat there for an hour preparing the seafood for dinner that night.

Can you talk a bit about allyship and supporting co-creation?

I’m often asked, “I’m not Indigenous, but I’ve got an animator who’s doing some small pieces in my film, and he’s Indigenous. Is that enough?” Often what people have done is make their film and come right at the tail end and want your feedback to let them know it’s okay. But they can’t change anything. You know, there’s not much you can do at that point. A lot of times the films that they’ve made, you can see the good intentions in it, and you can see the art and the respect, but the questions they’re asking, the perspective the film is coming from, is not always helpful.

So, the whole thing is very complex. If someone comes to me with a difficult story, I’ll say to them, “Look, when I make a film, when my Indigenous friends make a film, we’re teasing out these pieces all the time ourselves. It’s challenging (for us), and we’re steeped in it.” We’re not saying it’s any failing on your part as a filmmaker or media maker but, there’s so much history, and these things are all woven together. And the other thing is, people don’t look at the history. They just want to go in and do some observational thing, which is very hip right now. But when it comes to so many Indigenous stories, the circumstances today are related to the history. And if you erase the history you erase what’s most important about what has happened and what needs to be rectified. So it kind of squashes reconciliation.

You have a lot of experience with social media. Do you have thoughts on technology’s impact on collaborative work?

One of the things I like the most about social media is that it connects Indigenous… you could say Canada, but it’s actually international. The sense of solidarity is palpable. A lot of us are lifting each other up and connecting through our shared struggle with colonial impacts.

Do you have any thoughts to share on how to improve the funding landscape for co-created work, especially from Indigenous communities?

The most important step is getting diversity inside the institutions making the decisions. And you see that when representation at the higher levels changes, things change.

This article is part of Collective Wisdom, an Immerse series created in collaboration with Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab. Immerse’s series features excerpts from MIT Open Documentary Lab’s larger field study — Collective Wisdom: Co-Creating Media within Communities, across Disciplines and with Algorithms — as well as bonus interviews and exclusive content.

Immerse is an initiative of the MIT Open DocLab and The Fledgling Fund, and it receives funding from Just Films | Ford Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. IFP is our fiscal sponsor. Learn more here. We are committed to exploring and showcasing media projects that push the boundaries of media and tackle issues of social justice — and rely on friends like you to sustain ourselves and grow. Join us by making a gift today.

In Conversation with Lisa Jackson was originally published in Immerse on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Five Media-Makers of Color Speak Out, Part VI

As part of our series for the Collective Wisdom field study, we present the sixth and final excerpt from a conversation between Juanita Anderson, Maria Agui Carter, Thomas Allen Harris, Maori Karmael Holmes, and Michèle Stephenson.

Read Part I, Part II, Part III , Part IV, and Part V here.

Thomas: I think it’s important to take vacations and mental health breaks. That’s difficult to schedule in the middle of a production schedule and you always wonder if others will think you are working hard enough — even when you’ve been working beyond capacity. But it’s a question of self-care — even basic things like taking the time to address your health and mental health. And scheduling space to recharge the batteries. I say this as an act of affirmation because it’s very hard for me to do.

Juanita: So, I just wanted to … I’ve sort of been thinking about what mental health would look like for me and I have none, I just realized. But the stories documentary filmmakers tell often get inside of us. On top of that is the issue of consistently having to deal with micro-aggressions all along the process. I realized that as an executive producer, I oftentimes absorbed a lot of negativity and bias from program gatekeepers to shield my filmmakers from it so they could concentrate more on creating the work.

Michèle: I think for me the self-care is building a community of peers who support each other — whether it’s being able to vent or create spaces that advance our work. It’s having solidarity. In those instances, I can feel the burden lighten. I totally get what you’re saying and I want to include more of that kind of self-care in my life. Just throwing that out there …

Maori: Yeah, this is a main worry. I am really troubled I think personally and professionally by this question because there doesn’t … I am not proud that I don’t have the space to take vacations. And I am kind of caught in the middle of, I think sort of generationally as a late-Gen X-person. I have all these millennials who work for me who are all about self-care and all about vacations and I can’t be upset with them at all, right? They say things like, “I can’t come in today because I’m having low mental health,” and they’re so clear about it. And the ones who are working, I’m very proud that they have the space to say this. And it isn’t like they are making an excuse but I’m also kind of baffled because I was trained by people who didn’t take breaks and so I’m kind of caught in the middle of that.

And so, I’ve been burning the candle at both ends for 15-plus years of my career. And not really sure how to move forward. I’ve been making films and doing this festival work on the side of full-time jobs. Sometimes it’s been teaching, other times it’s been other non-profit work. All of those jobs have been 60-hour-a-week jobs and then taking on another 60 hours somehow. And I know I’m not the only one doing that. I think the field is asking us to do that. The expectations require that you work this hard.

And then I think this is stating the obvious, but for myself, being a woman, and then being a person of color, feeling the need to have everything be in place in a certain way so that it’s presented correctly so that there are no questions asked, with the budget and proposal. You know, it also requires that you work even harder. No one should work this hard. The idea of self-care is very fraught on a daily basis and I don’t think I’m alone in that.

Michèle: Yeah. Just to bounce off of that, it’s so important what you mentioned, and this idea of perfect presentation. It’s an extra burden of needing to make sure that our work is foolproof so we’re taken seriously. Mediocrity is not an option for us.

Maria: But also, thinking about this one precious life, there are only so many hours in the day, so many years in a life, and how do I serve my community, honor my own expertise and unique and authentic voice and artistic output also as part of that community? What stories do I feel must be told? And I’m an artist, I’m not just a translator, so I want to work with the poetry and language of my medium. And I’m finally at the point where I understand the game and see where the funding trends are, and sometimes I need to say no, that’s not what I’m doing, because there is an even greater need I feel to tell a different story or tell this story in a different way than what the trend or the master narrative is demanding.

So, sometimes, self-care is choosing your own path as an artist and storyteller, even when the larger system tells you that’s not how you’re going to thrive within that system today.

Juanita: Maria, you said this so well. Our work is about the authentic voices of our communities, about our own authentic voices as artists, storytellers who are members of communities. I’m so appreciative of the work, experiences and perspectives that each of us has brought to this discussion. This entire community is so powerful; this conversation has been healing and a form of self-care in itself.

(Agreement and appreciation expressed by all.)

This article is part of Collective Wisdom, an Immerse series created in collaboration with Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab. Immerse’s series features excerpts from MIT Open Documentary Lab’s larger field study — Collective Wisdom: Co-Creating Media within Communities, across Disciplines and with Algorithms — as well as bonus interviews and exclusive content.

Immerse is an initiative of the MIT Open DocLab and The Fledgling Fund, and it receives funding from Just Films | Ford Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. IFP is our fiscal sponsor. Learn more here. We are committed to exploring and showcasing media projects that push the boundaries of media and tackle issues of social justice — and rely on friends like you to sustain ourselves and grow. Join us by making a gift today.

Exploring Personal Costs and Self-Care When Co-Creating was originally published in Immerse on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Throughout the interviews, discussions, and gatherings we held for this project, we heard that co-creation calls for profound attention to the process. The media industry has commodified the construction and telling of stories, so the prevailing standards of funding, researching, evaluating, and producing leave little room for process-oriented work. The current pipelines of production demand highly specialized, often extractive processes that are defined by deliverables and outcomes.

In this report, we have attempted to name and illustrate processes that are all too often invisible or implicit. The next step is to gather concrete and detailed procedures and make them available to communities, festivals, organizations, funding bodies, and colleagues in other fields. Some of this work may be appropriate in partnership with the Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab, and some tasks may best be conducted elsewhere.

Key Recommendations: Support the Process

Overwhelmingly, our research found that the key to co-creation involves supporting and investing in process, not only in deliverables and products. This recommendation extends across individual projects, community initiatives, institutional support, and argues for systemic changes in the way that media is produced and connected to social movements.

1. Research

Many stakeholders should conduct more research in order to map and understand the operations of co-creation in the context of our dominant culture, one predisposed to individual ownership, accumulation, and appropriation. We need to understand the implications of co-creation in a society of systemic inequity and in an era of fast-changing biological and technological developments. We need to continue to learn from historical and current human practices by studying and understanding: business/organizational models; co-creation in diverse communities; co-creation beyond the U.S. and Canada; ownership and intellectual-property models; art collectives; co-operative economic models; transdisciplinarity models and matchmaking; art and AI; deepfake and synthetic media, and new non-hierarchical forms of convening.

2. A Library of Toolkits and Curricula

Many stakeholders need to create resources for teaching, sharing, and learning co-creative models. This involves co-creative strategic planning that will create networks and hubs to document, organize, and create an accessible library of existing toolkits (contracts, worksheets, community agreement forms), best practices, and document and share failures through modular curricula. These networks and hubs should include media-makers, community groups, non-profits, private companies, public institutions, media institutions, and universities. These resources should be intended for professional development as well.

3. Structural Changes at Institutions

More research and prototyping within institutions, both public and private, must be undertaken. This will develop pathways for co-creative practices internally and methods to reach communities that already co-create. These processes must be ethical, just, transparent, and equitable.

4. Spaces for Incubation and Production

More sustainable programs, fellowships, workshops, streams, and incubators should be developed to facilitate co-creative projects that honor the processes, multiple partnerships, and timeframes involved. The governance of these spaces and the projects need to be interrogated. These sites need to provide adequate resources, mentors, cross-disciplinary supports, and witnesses. Further, intentional healing and trauma-informed practices should be implemented.

5. Networks for Distribution

Spaces and networks for distributing co-creative projects need to be supported, including community centers, libraries, alternative spaces, schools, festivals, universities, and among allied funders engaged in projects.

Conclusion

Together, we share a vast history of co-creation. From early rock art to the development of our sacred texts, to the politicized twentieth-century newsreel collectives, to the latest experiments in immersive technologies fueled by AI, co-creation is remarkably commonplace. But it is also remarkably invisible. Before it is co-opted by digital empires, and marketers, we have a chance to define it, claim it, and ground it to principles of equity, justice and authentic collective models of ownership.

Media co-creation allows for new, better questions, and for paths in which there are not always singular answers. Co-creation can enrich daily practice. It demands self-reflection and forges harmonious, equitable relationships between partners, within and across communities, beyond disciplines, and working with non-human systems, many of which we do not yet fully understand.

Throughout the making of this study, primarily through listening, we have been humbled and inspired by the phenomenal stories of co-creation, and by the openness of all stakeholders to learn from each other and to engage in courageous questioning. The conversations have been nuanced, messy, difficult, exciting, and above all, overflowing. Co-creation carries with it profound respect for each person’s unique expertise, and also the knowledge that we must share both the burden and the liberation of determining our future collectively. There is an urgency to the challenges we face at this moment in history, and no one person, organization, or discipline can determine all the answers alone.

Making can divide, alienate, and exploit — or it has the potential to be inclusive, equitable, and respectful. The latter conditions are far more conducive to the collective efforts it will take to address the immense challenges of structural inequality, exponential population growth, the Anthropocene, and the ever-diminishing resources that follow in their wake. In reaching beyond the mere sum of our collective intelligence, we stand a chance at finding our collective wisdom. Co-creation offers hope.

This article is part of Collective Wisdom, an Immerse series created in collaboration with Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab. Immerse’s series features excerpts from MIT Open Documentary Lab’s larger field study — Collective Wisdom: Co-Creating Media within Communities, across Disciplines and with Algorithms — as well as bonus interviews and exclusive content.

Immerse is an initiative of the MIT Open DocLab and The Fledgling Fund, and it receives funding from Just Films | Ford Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. IFP is our fiscal sponsor. Learn more here. We are committed to exploring and showcasing media projects that push the boundaries of media and tackle issues of social justice — and rely on friends like you to sustain ourselves and grow. Join us by making a gift today.

Graphic: Recommendations for Co-Creation was originally published in Immerse on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Katerina Cizek

Conventional Futurists sell the inevitability of new tech solutions and how they will improve our lives. Yet these futurists reproduce current systems that benefit only a privileged few. Rather than “predicting” the future, corporate-aligned forecasters write the future in the very act of telling it. It is not magic. It’s a design to trick the eye.

“We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backward into the future,” noted Marshall McLuhan in The Medium is the Message.

But there are also radical futurists, grounded with deep critiques of the current world, calling into action a collective future for all, based on compassion, justice, and harmony. By imagining radical futures, people’s movements can conjure these visions into actions in the present day. The newly minted Guild of Future Architects, led by Executive Director Kamal Sinclair, seeks to network these radical futurists across many fields and practices. The Guild convened for the first time in New York City in November 2019.

The key to much of this future imagination work is co-creation: collective practices that function outside the limits of single authorship, and the hierarchies of current domains of expertise and media industries, as described in the Collective Wisdom field study, which I co-authored.

At the Guild’s recent Future Imagination Summit, we kicked off the gathering by hosting a conversation between four artists who co-create blueprints and projects for just visions. The discussions were grounded in Indigenous epistemologies and antecedent technologies, critical design justice practices, Black-centered collective media and community creation, and art performances that showcase the entangled relationships between humans and artificial intelligence. All of the projects highlighted the role of co-creation in re-imagining a future built on justice.

Here are a few photo highlights from the event. For more, see the full story on the Co-Creation Studio site.

This article is a result of a collaboration between the Guild of Future Architects, Sundance Institute, NYU Future Imagination Fund and MIT Open Doc Lab’s Co-Creation Studio. Immerse’s Collective Wisdom series features excerpts from MIT Open Documentary Lab’s larger field study — Collective Wisdom: Co-Creating Media within Communities, across Disciplines and with Algorithms — as well as bonus interviews and exclusive content.

Immerse is an initiative of the MIT Open DocLab and The Fledgling Fund, and it receives funding from Just Films | Ford Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. IFP is our fiscal sponsor. Learn more here. We are committed to exploring and showcasing media projects that push the boundaries of media and tackle issues of social justice — and rely on friends like you to sustain ourselves and grow. Join us by making a gift today.

Inaugural Future Imagination Summit Kicks off With Co-Creation was originally published in Immerse on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

StoryShift: Exploring Accountable Storytelling

“You have to be a human before you’re a photographer or documentarian,” filmmaker Alexander Glustrom says in an interview with Working Films.

In September, Working Films debuted StoryShift, a program aimed at sharing the approaches of filmmakers who use co-creative practices in their work. Through interviews and resource sharing, StoryShift is opening up a conversation around authentic representation of people in documentary films. Hannah Hearn, the impact coordinator at Working Films, explains, “We were really trying to lift up lessons learned and advice from those filmmakers.”

These aims resonate with themes raised in the field study Collective Wisdom, in which similar questions of justice framed the conversations with documentarians: For what purpose are you capturing a story? For whose benefit? What are your responsibilities as an “outside” observer?

StoryShift showcases the documentary Always in Season, in which filmmaker Jacqueline Olive uses a genuinely collaborative approach to represent the history of African-American lynchings and the present-day story of Lennon Lacy, a 17-year-old found hanging from a swing set in 2014 in Bladenboro, North Carolina. Olive notes, “I don’t ever use the term ‘subject.’ It reflects the power dynamics of colonialism. You have this gaze when you talk about subjects, and too often, it’s done with people of color.”

In her StoryShift interview, Olive describes her drive to get to know the people she films, contrasting her approach with that of the “media dropping in and dropping out of Bladenboro.”

Claudia Lacy, featured in Always in Season, discusses her experience of this process in a StoryShift interview. She explains, “When [Olive] allowed to let me know that she had a 17-year-old and was a single mother, she could relate because there is something there, that bond between a mother and a child, that you never leave… She didn’t really have to tell me. ” In her StoryShift interview, Lacy also notes that Olive was able to use her compassion and position as a filmmaker to help her learn more information about her son’s investigation than she was able to obtain on her own.

Community members and filmmakers are demanding that more questions about ethics surface in documentary filmmaking. What responsibilities do filmmakers have to the people whose stories they are representing? How should a filmmaker protect the privacy and integrity of the people they’re representing on screen? What kinds of benefits should the filmmaking process offer its participants? These are complex questions with answers that might differ from one film to the next. Importantly, these are also questions that cannot be addressed by filmmakers alone.

Natalie Bullock Brown, lead strategist of StoryShift, explained, “We hope that this work will not only impact filmmakers but also expand to funders, juries… and every axis of this industry, that this issue of accountability will resonate in ways that it currently doesn’t.”

Brown further highlighted that she is passionate about funding as an access point. For the Working Films funding process, filmmakers have to answer questions about their accountability practices. During this process, Working Films may also bring in outside panelists who have experience with a particular story they’re considering. She pointed this out as a counterexample to funding situations in which, “white filmmakers can get a full budget to tell the story of a community of color, in particular, a black community, and not have crew members or advisors or anyone that looks like the community.”

When it comes to influencing popular narratives and shifting audience expectations, however, it’s clear that even ethical filmmaking and funding are not sufficient. While discussing the role of the broader ecosystem around documentary films, Brown cited “The Dominance of the White Male Critic,” a New York Times op-ed in which Elizabeth Méndez and Chi-hui Yang highlight the impact of racial inequities in representation among film critics. Brown emphasized how important it is for people of diverse backgrounds, experiences, and voices to have spots on film festival selection panels. She explains, “Different people are going to have different lenses [to] see the importance of a variety of stories.” Films responsibly, authentically depicting real-world stories may face hurdles to exposure if critics and film festival panelists are not equipped with a diversity of viewpoints to receive them.

To address these concerns, StoryShift is expanding beyond online videos, including interactive panels at film festivals and sharing online resources. By sharing filmmaking insights, compiling resources, and bringing the discussion to film festivals, StoryShift aims to make space for co-creation across the entire lifetime of a film.

This article is part of Collective Wisdom, an Immerse series created in collaboration with Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab. Immerse’s series features excerpts from MIT Open Documentary Lab’s larger field study — Collective Wisdom: Co-Creating Media within Communities, across Disciplines and with Algorithms — as well as bonus interviews and exclusive content.

Immerse is an initiative of the MIT Open DocLab and The Fledgling Fund, and it receives funding from Just Films | Ford Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. IFP is our fiscal sponsor. Learn more here. We are committed to exploring and showcasing media projects that push the boundaries of media and tackle issues of social justice — and rely on friends like you to sustain ourselves and grow. Join us by making a gift today.

StoryShift: Advocating Community Responsibility in Documentary was originally published in Immerse on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Five Media-Makers of Color Speak Out, Part V

As part of our series for the Collective Wisdom field study, we present an excerpt from a conversation between Juanita Anderson, Maria Agui Carter, Thomas Allen Harris, Maori Karmael Holmes, and Michèle Stephenson.

Read Part I, Part II, Part III , and Part IV here.

Part IV of the conversation ended with an observation by Michèle Stephenson, that gatekeepers can abuse their power by questioning the reality of the experiences of filmmakers and subjects. Here, she picks up the thread.

Michèle: I’ll use the example of American Promise. We would not be able to create that work if it wasn’t for the program officers of color who supported us and believed in our story along the way. People like Orlando Bagwell, Rasheed Shabazz, Raquiba Labrie, [and] Kathy Im. I’m not saying other program officers didn’t support the work. They came later. Black program officers came in first and immediately understood our vision in terms of our story and on how we worked with our partners as we worked on what our engagement campaign would look like.

Juanita: I think historically, the power is in the work that we do behind the scenes — that nobody ever sees. Back in the early eighties, as a first-time participant on a CPB cultural affairs funding panel, I was shocked that white panelists were about to turn down proposals by makers of color because they had never heard of this particular artist or issue. And in those instances, you have to sit there and assert that this is the very reason this artist and their story needs to be told. Also, it is important to recognize the work of black, brown, and Indigenous filmmakers and producers in founding consortia associations to help each other’s projects get into the world.

Michèle: Oh yeah. People are like, “Well, I have some money. You got some money, let’s make this move so we can help support this and that project.” And I think this kind of co-operation between those with some leverage in the industry is really important to note.

Maria: I want to jump in here because there’s a couple of things. First, I have been mentored by so many, and love so many of my black brothers and sisters in positions of power, and they have been there for me because we have fewer Latinos in those positions as program officers, as funders, as show-runners, as executives in media across the board. And I want to pick up on this concept of co-creation as our communities color supporting each other in funding and creating work.

I spent many years as Chair of the Board of NALIP, the National Association of Latino Independent Producers, now about to celebrate its 20th year. We’re the longest-running organization of Latinx media makers and many of our programs for the field have resulted in an explosion of Latinx media-makers today. And co-creation is absolutely our community of artists picking ourselves up by our bootstraps when sometimes we didn’t even have boots, and a number of years ago we began accepting non-Latinx people of color to our NALIP programs because we recognized how kindred we are with access issues around media-making. I started a [residency for women] writer/directors-of-color … across all ethnicities, and I still don’t see another residency like it. Right now, it’s on hiatus because we lost our very special (and charitably contributed) estate where it was being held. And there’s a gap because I have testimonies from women who attended the retreat, many of whom have said it was one of the most formative experiences of their careers and have gone on to do very well and to lift each other up. I think this was in large part because I also engaged mentors of color from our communities so that we could share collective wisdom of our master artists, and we also called on and honored the value of the knowledge and critiques our fellows could provide for one another.

It’s valuable to not privilege the guidance coming from people outside of our communities who may be very well-intentioned but lacking the nuance that comes from our understanding of our particular histories and priorities. Often, the microaggressions can happen from those mentoring us from outside our communities not because they are trying to hurt us, in fact, they are trying to be allies, but they don’t always have that necessary knowledge base. That’s part of why I and some other artists dreamed this retreat was necessary — it did not exist before. We had a submission and review process and selected twelve artists from each cohort.

It was such a joy to think about the specific needs of our writers and directors of color in a retreat tailored to their needs. As Artistic Director I poured so much care into it, and so much joy. We had a chef cooking our fellows multi-course farm-to-table meals so they felt how valued and cared for they were, beautiful rooms with fresh flowers everywhere, we had forest and mountain, fire circles and waterfalls and walks and picnics, and we had so much story and art and supportive criticism and deep elevation of our work and each of us questioned and pushed and held each other up, but also respected and trusted and believed in one another’s capacities. I am hoping to run that Artist Retreat Center again if I can find the support!

Michèle: Maria, there’s no reason why that retreat that you started shouldn’t continue to be funded. The need is clearly there.

Thomas: Agreed! I think that’s the kind of thing that funders should actually be seeking out to fund, especially given where we are right now in the media landscape. I mean that kind of nurturing or workshop or residency, that can really lift folks up — and also comes from a person of color perspective that re-orients assumptions around who gets to speak for whom. We are at a place now where we can question what is mainstream and who is mainstream and why.

For the television series I am working on now for PBS, I was mentored by the Center for Asian American Media. I am obviously not Asian American but CAAM was able to actually see the value of my project and how it contributed to their larger goals around representation and public media. Things are no longer siloed and we’re realizing a kind of win-win narrative as opposed to I’ve got to get mine, which is so much of the ethos of this industry on a certain level and can be very destructive. We’re supporting each other and giving back.

Michèle: While giving back and mentorship is a great thing to do and important, it’s also draining. It’s part of what many of us feel we have to do. We are constantly supporting up and coming filmmakers of color but you know, there’s only a certain amount of bandwidth. And I think in some cases if we don’t carve out time for our own creativity, our own creativity suffers because that requires headspace as well.

The other thing that will lead to this idea of empowerment is more transparency in funding and how money is distributed in the field. Give me what the real numbers are. The Center for Media and Social Impact and the International Documentary Association released a study last year on the state of the documentary field based on data gathered from non-fiction filmmakers. I felt there were some key questions around money, power and race, and class that were not directly addressed. And more importantly, we still don’t have the numbers from funders and foundations.

It’s one thing for us to answer a survey, and another to find out the lay of the land from foundations, broadcasters, streaming entities/platforms. I want to know what’s being funded, also where do I fit in the larger landscape or field. In order to see that, I need to know from the funding and investment side what their statistics are. If that makes sense? Then we can get an accurate picture and have a deeper understanding of what sustainability looks like and where self-reflection intervention may need to happen to achieve a greater sense of equity and re-imagine the possibilities of co-creation. With an accurate assessment of what the funding landscape looks like I can make an informed decision about the directions I can pursue in the field.

I feel the field is still far from transparent. We don’t have the statistics when it comes to those who hold the purse strings and power to greenlight. The studies of those trends need to come to light. It’s something that I’m hoping IDA does a deeper dive into so [that] we as storytellers can better understand the funding landscape. But also, so we as a field can render those with funding power more accountable.

Thomas: …and the idea also of sustainability.

Michèle: Yes.

This article is part of Collective Wisdom, an Immerse series created in collaboration with Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab. Immerse’s series features excerpts from MIT Open Documentary Lab’s larger field study — Collective Wisdom: Co-Creating Media within Communities, across Disciplines and with Algorithms — as well as bonus interviews and exclusive content.

Immerse is an initiative of the MIT Open DocLab and The Fledgling Fund, and it receives funding from Just Films | Ford Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. IFP is our fiscal sponsor. Learn more here. We are committed to exploring and showcasing media projects that push the boundaries of media and tackle issues of social justice — and rely on friends like you to sustain ourselves and grow. Join us by making a gift today.

Fostering Community Power Amid Systemic Challenges was originally published in Immerse on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Artist WhiteFeather Hunter creates beautiful things by growing bacteria, chatting with bugs, and collecting menstrual blood

WhiteFeather Hunter is a Canadian bio-artist and scholar who works with microorganisms to create gorgeous textiles and other inventions. Hunter describes her work within “the frameworks of craft, feminism, witchcraft, and relationships with nonhumans or nonhuman organisms.” Katerina Cizek conducted this wisdom for Collective Wisdom. To see more of Hunter’s work, visit her website.

Katerina Cizek: Is co-creation a term you use? How do you define it?

WhiteFeather: “Co-creation” is the term I prefer over “collaboration.” I’m very careful where I use that term.

Can you elaborate? What do you mean?

For me, “collaboration” implies consensual involvement of two or more parties working towards a shared goal.

I use “co-creation” or “co-construction” when working with a broader range of living organisms — for example, artworks with an animal participant. There’s an ethical conundrum when the other collaborator is forced to be there. I would avoid calling that collaboration. Co-creation acknowledges that they have some agency in the process, but it’s not taking for granted that they’re there of their own free will.

So, co-creation does not assume consent?

I don’t think so. Someone else could use the term differently, but that’s my way of negotiating that tricky issue.

In other words, you collaborate with humans, but you co-create with microorganisms?

Yes.

Interesting. You’re the first person I’ve interviewed to use the term that way. What non-human systems do you work with?

I have worked primarily with human cells, other animal cells, as well as bacteria cells towards developing new types of biomaterials.

What kinds of new biomaterials?

Anything that falls within the realm of what I call biotextile. That includes growing living layers of flesh, for simplification’s sake, on a textile scaffold as well as developing new forms of bioplastic using bacteria cellulose. I can treat it with a formula to make it more resilient and generate new textile dyes using pigment-producing bacteria.

You’ve worked with bioluminescence as well. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

I worked with Vibrio fischeri, which was very tricky. It’s a finicky organism. I tried developing a cheap DIY nutrient media for it from chicken broth, but I could never quite get it happy enough to do what I was hoping it would do. I wanted to create bioluminescent lace by growing it on the lace. Some bacteria don’t want to grow on a textile substrate. This was one of the species that didn’t want to co-create with me. I abandoned that project for now.

Can you talk about some bacteria that you feel DID co-create with you?

Well, it’s important to recognize the inherent properties of a bacteria species. One that I’ve worked with is Serratia marcescens. It’s known as pathogenic, but I managed to get a nonpathogenic strain to work with.

How is it pathogenic?

It grows rampantly in hospitals and feeds on soap scum. It will grow in your shower if your shower isn’t regularly cleaned. It appears as this pinkish slime.

In hospitals, it’s a problem because it can cause lung infections and urinary tract infections and other complications for patients recovering from weakened immune systems. I think the concentration found in our bathrooms probably isn’t much of a problem.

A strain that I’ve been working with retains all of the characteristics of the native strain except that it’s been adapted to be nonpathogenic. It’s still extremely aggressive and resilient. So, I’ve been able to grow it and concentrate its pigment on different fabrics and use it as a printing medium.

It takes the characteristics that would normally be villainized in an ordinary biomedical context and turns it into something useful and beautiful.

How did you use it as a pigment?

I was growing it directly on the fabric as well as on an agar substrate. I can use it with stencils to print patterns onto fabric. It makes a really lovely, deep red dye.

Another bacteria species we’re working with is Vogesella indigofera. This is a common freshwater species. It’s sometimes found in contaminated water. It’s another pigment-producing bacteria, only this produces indigo molecules. The amount of water being polluted has become a crisis in the fashion industry, so this is a potentially problem-solving area of research. I don’t do my research to try to solve human problems, though. I’m careful not to make those sorts of promises.

I’ve worked with a variety of human and mammalian cells. I’ve studied cells’ inherent behaviors and how to influence the way they grow by using different materials. It was really nice to discover that the intersection points — or the axes where threads are crossing over each other in a woven cloth — became information axes for the cells, where they begin to collectively build bridges.

I’ve noticed a lot of organic systems work this way, including plants, where they find a shortcut and start building and proliferating from there. I was interested in that not only for the biomaterial capacity but also for the more philosophical aspects of what it implied.

Can you talk a little bit more about that? You have mentioned witchcraft as well. How do those things connect?

Witchcraft is, for me, synonymous with feminism — two branches on the same tree. But it also has this wonderful aspect of magic, a way of negotiating the unseen and sometimes unknown natural forces around us. It’s looking at magic as an interface methodology, but it’s also poking fun at the fact that scientific methodologies often function to replace or fulfill a need similar to religion in terms of promising to explain human suffering or alleviate it or extend life. I see these things as common goals of both religion and biotechnology. A lot of scientific techniques and methodologies are appropriated from older folk knowledge. It’s all of that wrapped up into my approach that I’m labeling witchcraft.

When you’re working with these biomaterials, what surprises you? What are you learning?

I’m learning that just as I am relying on the activity and cooperation of these microorganisms, I also am relying heavily on an ever-growing community around me, mainly young women with similar research approaches and interests. My practice keeps expanding, a natural move when you gather more brains together.

That’s been the approach at my lab at Concordia University. It’s been very successful and it’s been outside of the normative structures of academia because I’ve been doing it on almost no funding whatsoever. I’m not a faculty member and I’m not a student. I’m an anomalous presence that they tolerate because we are producing exciting things in the lab and it’s gaining attention and recruiting new students.

I’m learning to just stay humble because I can’t anticipate the results of this research. It’s very much a process-based art practice. So, I’m disseminating this research in a variety of different fields: community events, Ars Electronica, or a classroom of women recovering from domestic violence who they need a creative outlet. I’m not being picky about where I share this knowledge.

Can you talk a little bit more about the relationship you have with this biomaterial? What does your studio look like?

I work in three different labs right now. The one I’m running in Montreal at Concordia looks like a standard laboratory, but it’s got mannequins that we’ve pulled out of the garbage. It’s got kiddie pools that are filled with brewing kombucha so that we can grow large-scale cellulose.

I like to insist upon using empathy as a laboratory technique.

My relationship with the biomaterials is not very scientific. I like to insist upon using empathy as a laboratory technique. I have had to push my scientific collaborators to use, to embrace, to understand this idea. It’s a very basic thing. People who talk to their plants can get beautiful, luscious plants. I talk to my microorganisms. I try to communicate my thoughts and feelings about what they’re doing to them. In a way, that helps me identify with them a little bit. I anthropomorphize them. That strengthens the care and my personal investment. I find it essential. If the care is not there, the organisms can die. They can get contaminated. Then your research is out the window.

You mentioned feeding earlier. What do you mean by that?

I feed them with my own body materials if possible. Standard laboratory materials often need special authorizations. So, I’m always looking for more accessible and feminist alternatives. The indigo-producing bacteria is an iron-loving species. My collaborators and I have been collecting our menstrual blood every month and diluting it to make blood agar plates. The bacteria absolutely love it! It’s producing the most beautiful deep blue.

The levels of bureaucracy that we had to go through to be able to handle our own menstrual blood in a laboratory was about a six-month process, including having to meet with doctors and explain to them why I didn’t need to get a vaccination to handle my own menstrual blood.

Not only is it a feminist approach, but it’s also commenting on the incredibly complex body relationships with all of these microorganisms. In a way, it’s also confronting our culture of sterility.

Are you involved in any computational systems in your work? Can you talk a bit about that?

To display the biotextiles in a gallery, I had to build a C02 incubator with a peristaltic pump system. I was hacking things together to build a protective cyborg body for these things. It became part of the care and maintenance to keep the organisms alive. This contraption was not only its body, but it was like a mother for it. I had to regularly visit the gallery to maintain this electronic organism as well as the mammalian cells.

It was really challenging because electronic systems fail a lot more than biological systems do. The peristaltic pump system was working like a stomach. It pumped the nutrient media in while another pump was sucking out and continuously circulating nutrients.

Eventually, the pumps got out of sync with one another. More fluid was being pumped in than was being pumped out. I had to do a little surgery on it halfway through the exhibition.

You talk about electronics as organisms. Do you consider them non-human systems that you’re co-creating with? Are there surprises that in creating those systems?

I’m certainly relying on them. The work won’t be able to live in specific contexts without the electronics. So, in that way, I guess I’m co-creating an exhibition with them.

It’s interesting because people are almost as afraid of electronics as they are of microorganisms. When I am negotiating with curators or gallery directors to display these works, they need a lot of reassurance. That’s often another level of bureaucracy.

People are almost as afraid of electronics as they are of microorganisms

Part of the reason I’m doing this work is to make this knowledge more accessible. I often find that people are afraid to touch anything. Artwork already comes with that baggage. You’re not supposed to touch it. But when I’m trying to extend the care and maintenance of these microorganisms and electronics to the gallery staff, I have to help them overcome their fear of working with the microorganisms and electronics. It’s necessary because I can’t be in the gallery every hour of every day.

Big, burly technician dudes setting up my work will ask whether or not they’re going to catch something life-threatening from the microorganisms. They’ll complain about a sore throat and think it’s caused by a vial of cells contained inside a box. There’s no way that’s possible. But the fear of these things is strong enough that they are manifesting physical symptoms.

Do you think a co-creative model offers the public an opportunity to think about these relationships differently?

Yes. I think that’s important. We’re so steeped in philosophies centered on humans at the top that we are alienated from other systems. That leads to fear and huge knowledge gaps. I think it has caused the trouble we’re in on a planetary scale right now.

Some of your work is speculative and offers a different kind of future. Can you talk a little bit about that?

I’m interested in flattening hierarchies in knowledge systems; I think that is absolutely necessary in order for any collaborative work to succeed. That kind of leveling needs to happen within academic institutions so that sequestered areas of knowledge start talking to each other. New forms of knowledge will emerge from this. That is the way things are going. I’m confident. A lot of institutions need to throw out their assumptions about the way universities need to work. It’s all wrapped up in funding. That’s often a stumbling block. Whose budget is paying for what when you have two completely different departments coming together to work on something?

I think there are ways around that. I think that artists can lead the way in that sense because we are extremely resourceful. We have to be. I think that women probably have the best capacity for working and thinking that way in general. That’s my future vision. Maybe at some point a university classroom will be led by a lecture that’s given by a group of microorganisms. That would be fun.

And on life support by cyborg in incubators, of course.

Right.

…being cared for by humans.

Yes. We’ll be their servants.

This article is part of Collective Wisdom, an Immerse series created in collaboration with Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab. Immerse’s series features excerpts from MIT Open Documentary Lab’s larger field study — Collective Wisdom: Co-Creating Media within Communities, across Disciplines and with Algorithms — as well as bonus interviews and exclusive content.

Immerse is an initiative of the MIT Open DocLab and The Fledgling Fund, and it receives funding from Just Films | Ford Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. IFP is our fiscal sponsor. Learn more here. We are committed to exploring and showcasing media projects that push the boundaries of media and tackle issues of social justice — and rely on friends like you to sustain ourselves and grow. Join us by making a gift today.

Better Living Through Microbes was originally published in Immerse on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Risks and lessons from the Collective Wisdom field study

Co-creation is greater than the sum of its parts. There may be a complex set of problems that people want to address together. Eventually, there will be outcomes, but these emerge out of the process rather than the other way around.

From our in-depth interviews, we surfaced practical takeaways for the process of co-creation. In this edited excerpt from Collective Wisdom, we present some of our key findings in the forms of risks and lessons.

SIX RISKS OF CO-CREATION

1. Threat to Vision and Editorial Integrity

The co-creative hope may be to flatten hierarchies and generate equity. However the “Tyranny of Structurelessness” can take over, as American activist and political scientist Jo Freeman famously described. A nameless, undefined hierarchy may emerge, which can be even harder to hold accountable.

From an artistic perspective, “the risks are totally incoherent narratives,” said Jennifer MacArthur, a documentary producer. She believes that results can become so generalized and non-specific that they are “outside of anybody’s shared experience or understanding.”

2. Heightened Expectations

The promise of co-creation can heighten expectations of trust, commitment, responsibility, and duration of co-created projects. However, not everyone can commit equally to projects. The sharing of resources, time, credit, and responsibility of a project all need to be examined and negotiated in complex ways.

3. Marginalizing Co-Created Projects

As Anita Lee, an executive producer at the National Film Board of Canada, says: “Artists of color have historically been relegated to “community media.” They have carried a double burden of both representing a community and also of being made responsible to make work about a community. Often this work has also been undervalued as having less artistic merit. Today’s progress means a new generation of artists of color that have more opportunities to create work about anything. Single-authorship has often been denied — even stolen. Does it make sense to forgo authorship now?”

4. Unintended Consequences

Co-creative projects open to public participation can be hacked from the outside. The use of bots and other software can intensify the risk familiar to anyone online. This includes reader comments on news sites and social media, where trolls and organized opposition can drive away productive dialogue.

Queering the Map (2018) is a project that Lucas LaRochelle created to gather queer stories from around the world on a virtual map. It went viral almost immediately after its first media exposure. Just as quickly, the map was attacked by a bot.

5. Theft and Exploitation

There is reason to be suspicious at the way co-creation has come into vogue as a concept, coinciding with dramatic shifts in digital-age economics. Through Uber, Mechanical Turk, Facebook, and fandoms, millions of people are lending their ideas, content, and labor to highly centralized profiteers. Participatory designer Sasha Costanza-Chock warned of media projects where all the “credit, visibility, awards, all end up just accruing to one person but then you call it co-creation so it gets this stamp of democratic legitimacy.”

6. The Risk of Co-optation

As the term co-creation circulates into popular usage, it could fall victim to shiny-new-word syndrome and get trapped in the rapid cycle of co-optation. Co-creation could be sucked up into the vortex of digital empires.

THREE PRACTICAL LESSONS FOR CO-CREATING

1. Gathering, Listening, Dialogue

Co-creative projects begin with relationships. They start by creating a space where people may gather and ask questions. They require a serious commitment to iteration and change along the way. Too often, members of projects stop the listening portion after the first round, and later, the approach is reduced to a one-time consultation or data-mining by those in control. But that is where the problems set in and co-creation ends. With a genuinely co-creative approach, these initial steps are only the first term-setting conversations, not the last.

2. Manifestos and Statements of Principles

Manifestos are declarations of the ethics, principles, and values of groups that push new ideas. Allied Media Projects, Data for Democracy, and Platform Cooperativism are only a few of the dozens of organizations that have published sets of common values that define and guide their work.

Helen Haig-Brown and Gwaai Edenshaw co-directed Edge of the Knife (2018) through a community-led process, working with existing Haida governance structures. The first thing the co-creators did was draw up a list of agreed-upon goals and values. They found that the highest priority item was authenticity. This gave the group an imperative to represent Haida culture authentically, always in close consultation with elders.

3. Contracts and Terms of Engagement

Many co-creators have identified the need for instruments that move beyond consent forms by guaranteeing rights and responsibilities to entire communities. In 2009, Screen Australia, a federal media agency, published an influential document called Pathways and Protocols: A Filmmaker’s Guide to Working with Indigenous People, Culture and Concepts. Therein, Indigenous writer and lawyer Terri Clarke offers “advice about the ethical and legal issues involved in transferring Indigenous cultural material to the screen.”

Ellen Schneider of Active Voice has been developing customized tools called “Pre-Nups for Partners.” For over a decade, she’s been working with funders, filmmakers, and nonprofits to navigate the increasingly complex nuances of co-creative partnerships that go beyond the mold of conventional filmmaking.

Meanwhile, cultural groups are exploring Cultural Community Benefits Agreements (CBAs), that spell out the terms of engagement, especially for outside organizations coming in to work with local groups. These cultural agreements pick up on the model of CBAs that have become common in urban contexts to negotiate terms for local communities when developers arrive to transform neighborhoods.

Community-benefit agreements and contracts are not panaceas. Veterans of co-creation are acutely aware of their pitfalls and problems but do use them to guarantee certain basic rights, alongside bigger policy and legislative concerns affecting the role of government. This includes how we define and use public space, the commons, and how we will govern ourselves and shared resources into the future.

This article is part of Collective Wisdom, an Immerse series created in collaboration with Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab. Immerse’s series features excerpts from MIT Open Documentary Lab’s larger field study — Collective Wisdom: Co-Creating Media within Communities, across Disciplines and with Algorithms — as well as bonus interviews and exclusive content.

Immerse is an initiative of the MIT Open DocLab and The Fledgling Fund, and it receives funding from Just Films | Ford Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. IFP is our fiscal sponsor. Learn more here. We are committed to exploring and showcasing media projects that push the boundaries of media and tackle issues of social justice — and rely on friends like you to sustain ourselves and grow. Join us by making a gift today.

How Do Media Practitioners Co-Create Well? was originally published in Immerse on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.