Translaboration?
Posted on December 14, 2010 | posted by:
Nothing is original nowadays. Location used to be the only means of distinguishing original thought. This was the case for millennia, where massive distances separated people and the ideas they held precious. However, now we are living in a paradox where localities are evaporating due to the connective power of the internet. Transnational populations of individuals connected via common interests provide new considerations with regards to location, collaboration, and emergence.
I was compelled to think about emergence after a friend sent me a link to a project titled, ‘Northern Sky Circle‘, designed by Molo Studio. The work is amazingly similar to an installation I coordinated titled, ‘The Snowtorium’. The point is not to question originality, but rather why this form emerges in artistic endeavors, separated by time and space.
In describing the TransDesign program, I sometimes mention we are learning about ants – specifically how a colony grows smarter over time, developing collective intelligence. Steven Johnson’s book, ‘Emergence, the connected lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software,’ articulates how society might harness these natural tendencies to leverage the human experience. As ants traverse a territory they leave behind pheromone trails, influencing the behavior and response of the swarm. Will our hyper-documented creative dribbles influence us in a similar manner? I posit that ideas and interests will begin to congeal like oil on water as our level of connectivity increases exponentially, following Moore’s Law towards an interesting future. Imagine when overlapping intrinsic motivations bring like-minded people together to collaborate on physical projects, across continents, around the globe…Is this translaboration?
