This Symposium aims to bring together a range of practitioners from the Performing Arts and theorists, including those involved with, but not limited to, dance, music, opera, theatre, magic, puppetry, and the circus. To discuss issues and opportunities in designing digital tools for communication, artistic collaboration, sharing and co-creation between artists, and between artists and actively involved creative audiences.

There are numerous existing online platforms that provide immediate and easy access to a vast range of tools for creative collaboration, yet their majority create and maintain networks within a ‘noisy’ social media environment, are based on a centralised model of collaboration, and are built on corporate infrastructures with well-known issues of control, identity, and surveillance.

Focusing on the Performing Arts, the symposium will take a bottom-up approach on how to design online collaborative tools without the noise of social media, drawing on peer-to-peer decentralised practices, infrastructures for building communities of interest outside the imperatives of corporate control, developing new kinds of narratives and synergies that add depth to artistic practice, blurring the distinction between artist and audience. We will discuss about what participation, collaboration, and co-creation means for the performing artists and their audiences in an online networked world and bring to the dialogue the needs, expectations, desire, aspirations and fears of working online collaboratively. We will identify, articulate and discuss artistic, social and design issues and opportunities, analyse existing projects and current practices, experiment with ideas and concepts and visual designs.

In brief, the symposium’s goals are:

• to gain insights on how to design online spaces for collaboration that empower the emergence of communities of interest, without the noise of generic social media platforms 
• and discuss how to build them free of corporate control and to ingrain into the design the choice of anonymity and multiple identities (privacy preserving by default)
• consider how to use such spaces to overcome, through increasing digitally-enabled creativity, the negative effects of funding-cuts in the arts and the imperatives of the austerity economy
• and how to produce, through emergent creative practices, models for gift and sharing economies that can be facilitated by digital cultures (e.g. open-source software, file-sharing)

The insights of this workshop will provide the base for a second, multidiscplinary workshop that will bring together performance artists and creative technologists and coders and whch will take place on the 14th July 2015 as part of the British Human-Computer Interaction conference at Lincoln, UK.

http://designdigicommons.org/http://british-hci2015.org/participation/workshops/

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