Collective Wisdom & Co-Creation | Watershed
Channel: Watershed
Date: 02/12/2022

This talk will be held in the building and online!

This talk is presented in partnership with iDocs and will be chaired by Mandy Rose - Professor - Documentary & Digital Cultures, UWE Bristol and Co-Convenor of the i-Docs Symposium.

Meet some of the authors/coauthors of COLLECTIVE WISDOM: CoCreating Media for Equity and Justice, a new book published by MIT Press. The book argues that  Co-creation is everywhere: c Co-creation offers alternatives to the idea of the solitary author privileged by top-down media. But co-creation is easy to miss, as individuals often take credit for—and profit from—collective forms of authorship, erasing whole cultures and narratives as they do so. Collective Wisdom offers the first guide to co-creation as a concept and as a practice, tracing co-creation in a media-making that ranges from collaborative journalism to human–AI partnerships.

Why co-create—and why now? The many coauthors, drawing on a remarkable array of professional and personal experience, focus on the radical, sustained practices of co-creating media within communities and with social movements. They explore the urgent need for co-creation across disciplines and organization, and the latest methods for collaborating with nonhuman systems in biology and technology. The idea of “collective intelligence” is not new, and has been applied to such disparate phenomena as decision making by consensus and hived insects. Collective wisdom goes further. With conceptual explanation and practical examples, this book shows that co-creation only becomes wise when it is grounded in equity and justice.

Katerina Cizek is a Peabody-and two-time Emmy-winning documentarian and the artistic director of the Co-Creation Studio at the MIT Open Documentary Lab. For over a decade at the National Film Board of Canada, she helped redefine the organization as a digital storytelling hub through her long-form, co-creative documentary projects Filmmaker in Residence and HIGHRISE. She is the author (with Uricchio) of this book and coprincipal investigator of the field study. 

Amelia Winger-Bearskin is an artist, creative director, and organizer who develops cultural communities at the intersection of art, technology, and education. She is now a Banks family preeminence endowed chair and associate professor of artificial intelligence and the arts at the Digital Worlds Institute at the University of Florida. She is Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) of the Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma, Deer Clan. She contributed the section “Decentralized Storytelling.”

The Detroit Narrative Agency (DNA) incubates quality and compelling stories that shift the dominant narratives about Detroit toward liberation and justice, in collaboration with an ecosystem of community members, storytellers, media makers, and organizers. Detroit Narrative Agency coresearchers and co-designers coauthored the sections “If You’re Not at the Table, You’re on the Menu,” “DNA Photo Essay,” and “Community Benefits Agreements.”

Join us online on YouTube Live, or in the building on Friday 2nd of December 2022 at 1pm for the talk and to take part in the Q and A discussion afterwards. 

The lunchtime talks are partly supported by MyWorld, a project led by the University of Bristol to support creative industries in the region.