This talk reflects on some of the opportunities and obstacles for collaboration between academics and artists by offering testimony from the project ‘Parameters & Practice: A Year of Tasks for Creative Collaboration’.
The Parameters & Practice project has been designed to lay the groundwork for a collaborative mode of hybrid artistic/academic work and works as an extended investigation into the conditions and methods necessary to such collaborative work. It has been undertaken by two collaborators, dance artist Marie Hallager Andersen and film professor Alan O’Leary, who are also life partners, so that the activity of the project negotiates questions of intimacy, along with those of equality, status and division of labor, in creative and knowledge production.
The project is structured as follows. Each week, one of the collaborators sets a task for the other. The second person performs the task and records a response (which can take the form of mark-making, moving, filmmaking, writing etc.), and the following week sets a further task for the first person… and so on from October 2018 to October 2019. Tasks and responses are posted weekly on the project website
The talk asks: what are the advantages of this iterative, constraint-based approach to creative collaboration? What are the challenges? How can distinct creative and cognitive personalities combine for a dynamic and powerfully collaborative and hybrid mode of artistic/academic work?
This talk is sponsored by the Departments of French and Italian, History of Art, and Comparative Studies.