Integrative Collaboration: Transforming the field and the Participants

• Participants suspend their differences to create a new vision
• Rapid, condensed, embedded in the cognitive styles of those individuals who challenge the known
• Requires expansion, challenge and dialogue.
• Motivated by a desire to transform existing knowledge and paradigms into new visions

This is the collaborative methodology I would like to pursue in my forthcoming collaboration project.

In classes, and whilst preparing for my upcoming sound art collaboration, I have been considering not only the end result but why the manner of creating it matters equally as much as the outcome.

Typically, in my past collaborative works, one often leads while the other follows, or with roles divided neatly along lines of creative specialism. Yet in ‘integrative collaboration‘ as I have chosen here, both participants can agree to something altogether more interesting: to suspend their individual differences and work toward a shared vision that neither could have arrived at alone.

My own practice is largely uncompromising, I have my routines and rituals that are concrete. Inversely, I feel that with this upcoming collaboration, ‘forcing’ myself to compromise on these principles for the purpose of creating something entirely new is a wildly exciting opportunity.

It is the quality of genuine transformation, of the work and of the people making it, that draws me to this approach.

I can assume that such a methodology may not always be a comfortable way to work. I predict that through the method’s demanding of an openness and a willingness to not always know where things are headed, due to the suspension of differences in approach – that something genuinely new will surface. This ‘something’ that belongs to neither of us individually but emerges from the spaces between us as collaborators, (most interestingly for me perhaps) shaped by the friction, the dialogue, and the slow building of a shared creative language.