But a lack of organizational structure doesn’t per definition mean that a network lacks an added value. Because what especially is the added value of an organized network? What’s important for the MyCreativity network is that information is exchanged amongst its partakers as Bas explains. And from my own experience of sitting-in during some of their sessions this certainly happened, but if this is enough for a sustainable network to grow out of it, well, I have my doubts. Regardless of my doubts, a concrete group end product was realized, the intangible negotiation website. Described by themselves as, ‘a collaborative editing site for ethical guidelines and working contracts for collaborations of freelancers with institutions and funders’.

But only zooming in on the creative industries through a present day perspective didn’t provide the overview the MyCreativity network needed to map the issues at hand. They decided to project themselves into the future, the year 2020 to be exactly, and look to the present through a future day perspective. Well, see it yourself.

MyCreativity is a network primarily communicating via their mailing list, if, in fact you can call it a network at all. At least it provides means to think about the limits of the network, and one limit of this group seems to be organization. It is a network of expertise and/or reflection, but this does not seem to flow back into something like a MyCreativity network. Another limit is related to the idea of the creative industries, which has the connotation, although plural, of one industry when in fact there are many, some of which might not even qualify as industry to begin with.

The topics addressed are however important ones and have a lot to do with the problem of communication between governmental institutes and their policy makers and people who produce creative products. Local politics for instance often see the creative industries as both a way to do nice and fun things as a way to solve other political issues such as unemployment and uneducated youth (or undeveloped talent) for (re) integration into society. The division is often between creative elites receiving funding and the more socially involved creatives, being used for a political agenda. In cases where politicians ask the creatives for advise, a high consultant fee is seldom paid for this valuable advise.

Something which might be at the foundation of the problematic communication is the lack of a creative industries business model or at least means to measure its value. This makes it hard to situate it as a profitable industry or distinguish between those parts that need subsidies and those actually having a large influence on the economy. The influence of design in what are seen as regular industries should not be underestimated, without design (or the creative labor of advertisers and brand makers) companies often fail to get market share.

MyCreativity is a topic, a topic that needs to be addressed by the creative workers, political policy makers as well as the so-called regular industry. As it is right now it does not look like MyCreativity will function as a body that will initiate projects or action, but rather will use the shared knowledge to improve their individual areas.

Similar to the first day, also on this second day of Winter Camp the MyCreativity session was structured around individual presentations, offering topics for discussion. The first presentation was by Birgit Bertram from the Secret Service arts collective. Unfortunately the call for a blogger (to document the discussion) came too late, and I missed the presentation, but I was still in time to make sense of the discussion that followed.

It revolved around a subject of general importance, a subject that especially in the creative industries regularly pops up. Money! And then mainly in relation to the notion of precarity, which in practice means something like being free, but mostly broke.

The financial issues of precarity that thrived during the discussion related to overcoming the irregularity of wages (or not getting any at all) as creative industry ‘employee’. And connected, the often non-existence of (temporary) labour contracts. An interesting group fact was that no member knew what each other earned, but each of them was very interested in knowing. This interest not only came from a personal curiosity, but also from a collective need to produce an ‘earnings’ map out of it. Thus getting an understanding of the spread of wages by making it transparent. Two people ‘revealed’ their monthly earnings but, for a still obscure reason, this idea blew over. In its place the subject of standardized contracts (E.g. http://www.ownterms.org/) was discussed as a possible solution for the financial irregularities. But, as most projects in this case, the secret service collective occurs within an environment of acquaintances, where asking for a legal contract often is skipped. Instead, within this trustworthy environment, the verbal contract dominates, which isn’t a rock-solid basis for a regular income.

The second presentation by artist Daniela Swarovsky, dealt with the issue of (pre)gentrification and the arts. Daniela showed a flood of projects undertaken in areas of gentrification surrounding Rotterdam. Again a key issue in these projects revolved around money. There are almost zero initiatives for gentrification coming from the community itself, mostly because as Daniela explains, ‘Everybody wants to make their money’. In short, everybody focuses on their own income but doesn’t care about the neighborhood in which they live. Another major issue seems to be the sustainability of these projects. As these community art projects seemingly are short-fixed, fitting in the strategy of ‘open source Urbanism’ that fittingly describes this short-term perspective of government policy. Question is if government and housing corporations even have an interest in the gentrification of old neighborhoods at all. Leaving it temporarily open as a haven of experiment for the creative community, or rather just upgrade it a.s.a.p, bumping out the existing community (local stores, restaurants, etc.), and replacing it with middle to upperclass living spaces.

Personally the most rewarding, and certainly the most fun, was the final discussion. Highlighting the key issues through the individual projection of desirable futures. This method for having conversations called ‘The future archive’, revolved around projecting yourself in a desirable future, while actively remembering the present. The future perspectives primarily focused on issues of finance/precarity, and collaborations. Some interesting ‘remembrances’ came up, which set out what for us, actually is the present;

• ‘Sustainability question was a huge issue within the project framework. Often no money was got for the projects’.
• ‘At the time of Winter Camp, no apartment (saving money), no stable job (teaching gigs, workshops)’
• ‘Juggling between unemployment and small projects’
• ‘Having a job, being unemployed, having a job, being unemployed, etc. Paradoxically this situation makes it possible to do the things I wanted to do’
• ‘Women dominate today’ (future)
• ‘Masculinity has become extinct now’
• ‘Women had a better network strategy in those days. They grew a network     of support in there direct locality’
• ‘Competition was always there – Hunting for the cv – developing networks to get there career going’
• ‘Open CV was developed, thinking it would help the competition amongst cultural people’ (E.g. www.bioswap.net)

So, to sum up, following these last remarks in a loose interpretation, money, the precarity issue, in terms of irregular wages, or not receiving any, actually proofed to be primarily a male issue. Women on the other hand, exploited the practice of networking, collaborating with equals, sharing CVs, and actually survived. This evolution seems to evolve naturally, so where does it leave the practice of the – not yet officially – set up MyCreativity network?

Anthony Iles on the 2012 London Olympics and Flexible Architecture
Anthony Iles addressed the group on issues of industrialism concerning the upcoming Olympic Games in 2012, as well as questioned what flexible architecture says about the collapse of play and work. For instance once you create a flexible scenario: how is it structured and how is it governed?

The architect Cedric Price’s Fun Palace is an early example of flexible architecture: a building comprised of pre-fabricated walls,  floors and stairs that could be moved and reassemble by cranes. He wanted to use cybernetics to model the activity of visitors and to see how interactive and playful they could make an area; resulting in a model which stressed the distinction “this [here] is play, while this [over here] is industry”. Illes pointed out the influence of Price’s Fun Palace on Richard Rogers’ Pompidou Centre and went on to ask, “Where are the Fun Palaces of today?”  To which he replied that the modern examples can be seen in Roger’s Millennium Dome as well as in the upcoming design of the 2012 London Olympics.

As the site of the London Olympics are confronted with issues of money, funding and other unforeseeable events, the project will need to be flexible in ways that go beyond Price’s original vision:

• considering London doesn’t have a need for an additional stadium the upcoming Olympic stadium will need to be mobile
• also they’ve planned to house the international media in a shopping mall

Merijn Oudenampsen on Open-Source Architecture
The second presentation by Merijn Oudenampsen explored the possibility of formulating a positive urban agenda by revisiting the utopian urbanism of the 1960s and 1970s, and combining those with the current agenda of the open-source movement. He explained that in the late 60s, the urban space was where the struggle against authority took place (e.g. the civil-rights riots in Prague, in Saigon during the Tet Offensive, as well as in Paris and the United States). “In the 60s there were two logics emerging”, explained Oudenampsen, “one of a functionalism and one of an open-source urbanism attacking this previous functionalism that was part of modernist architecture.”

Oudenampsen contrasted the English pop art architecture group Archigram with the Dutch architect Constant Nieuwenhuys. He criticized Archigram’s centralized planning agency and their ideas about a “new economy of individual lifestyle consumption that remained couched in the language and concerns of functionalism.” Nieuwenhuys’ New Babylon project, on the other hand, was a metaphor for open-source urbanism “inhabited by a creative, nomadic mass, that would be able to spontaneously reconfigure every aspect of their environment.” It was this new avant-garde of creativity that Nieuwenhuys believed would take over the world.

Currently Archigram’s philosophy of close-source urbanism has manifested itself in companies like Microsoft. For example:

• software architects hide behind the central role
• impenetrable jargon obscures meaning
• public opinion is being swayed by bad information
• information is withheld in ‘commercial secrets’

So after looking for Nieuwenhuys’ influence on modern society, Oudenampsen emphasized, “The only fertile domain of utopian politics today seems to exist in the digital world, in the open-source movement”. He cited examples of Pekka Himanen’s Hackers Ethic, as well as Howard Dean’s internet-propelled campaign (which lead  to the term ‘open-source politics’). Oudenampsen then began his discussion on open-source architecture with a quote by Brian Carrol:

“the computer industry has borrowed terminology from the discipline of architecture to describe structural and conceptual workings of electronic machines and its designer: computer architecture and software architects. Now, what if architecture borrowed popular terminology from the discipline of computer science?”

Oudenampsen seemed optimistic about the potential for the creative city, but gave us some clear and shocking examples of open-source architecture impostors. First he told the MyCreativity group about an article he had recently read in a 2006 edition of Dutch Real Estate Magazine. In the article a few real-estate entrepreneurs said, “the concept of the creative city is on the rise, sometimes planned, sometimes organic, but up till now always thanks to the real estate developers.” The article talked about how they use artists to spice up the values of real estate and say “the thing not to do is to publicly announce you’re going to haul in an artist, instead give them the feeling they thought of it themselves”- to which Geert Lovink quietly laughed, “evil, evil”.

Oudenampsen followed up with some additional examples of pseudo-open-source architecture in what he referred to as “Urbanism Web 2.0”. He included the sites Buurtleven.nl and FixMyStreet in England, but most accurately illustrated the problem with the Wij Bouwen Een Wijk example. The site wijbouweneenwijk.nl (similarly to the architects in the Dutch Real Estate Magazine article) allows the community to feel like they are in control because they can post and comment on new residential designs, but in reality it is the central powers that have the final word on which ideas get approval. “Open-source is not just about having the Internet – it’s about how you deal with knowledge”, he said. Many people say these projects are revolutionary, but they’re NOT very revolutionary – they are normal and they are just pacifying the public. If we are to establish true open-source architecture “we can’t just provide the emperor with a new set of clothes”, said Oudenampsen, “but we need an emperor that is openly exhibitionistic.”

Micheal La Fond and Reflections of Berlin
Micheal La Fond looked at the “incredible challenges” that have faced the city of Berlin. In his talk he emphasized issues of culture and communication more than technology by asking: how do the people of Berlin live together? Work together? Organize themselves and share their stories? He believed that the people of the city need more rights and should be allowed to design and manage their immediate environments. “We need to engage people, and show them what is possible”, said La Fond.

Considering the current economic crisis, La Fond told the story of GLS, UNVELT, and Trias – three Germany banks “that are fundamentally built on another idea”. He explained,

“They say we’re not interested in speculation and profits…we’re interested in changing ownership structures. And these banks are doing well right now, they’re not taking a beating at all. They don’t have the bad credit that they’ve sold somebody else, they’re working on small projects that have a good foundation and they’re pretty healthy right now.”

MyCreativity will meet again during the next two days of Winter Camp and present their findings on Day 4.