Minutes of meeting Thursday 14th of December 2006

Hi everyone,

Thanks Sian for your post, that's brilliant to hear we can use the ROAR premises to our collaborative hearts' delight.
Thanks also for recovering the topics we discussed in our last meeting, as unfortunately the recording was full of sirens and thuds and car horns (none of which I remember hearing-it's amazing what the ear filters out). From the scrawl of notes we wrote I can also add that:

Sian talked about the collaborative efforts of bands. Alex pointed out that the heirarchical way a band presents itself on stage can be completely different from the way they collaborate offstage. Thomasin talked about the way performing and practising can be completely different collaborative experiences. She also brought up that collaborations can only work when individual agendas are set aside in pursuit of a collective goal. I wondered if you can only say a collaboration is successful once the process of a collaboration has ended? Then again it seems collaborations can 'really work' on some occasions and 'really not' work on other occasions if you view them in terms of an ongoing process.

Alex talked about Artists and Muses as collaborative partnerships and drew some fancy diagrams for different collaborative circumstances (one of which also happened to be the diagram for probabililty)

We deliberated over the differences between 'participation' and 'collaboration'

Liz introduced Cuckoo as an initiative which is administratively collaborative but who's output is not altogether collaborative (eg the collaborative projects in which artists and writers were still limited by their pre-set roles)

It was also discussed whether a performance/participation artist who frames the audience as part of the work can consider their work a collaboration? eg Maddie Leach's dance floor work as a provider of context, but not an opportunity to affect the outcome of the project(?)

We thought of linking our blog/website to wikipedia as there is no definition yet under 'artistic collaboration'.

In terms of documenting our project we questioned whether or not we should photograph ourselves. One suggestion was that we dress ourselves in lab coats, yellow safety glasses and hairnets... Alas! We made a consensual decision not to physically present ourselves in photographic documentation because it might shift the focus from our practice to our appearance as individuals. We also thought a video of us would be more true to our process-focussed practice than a static image.