Announcement: Transversal Creativity Writing Project
One of my major writing projects this year will be a project about the contribution that arts workers make to multidisciplinary projects.
Between now and October 2023, I will be interviewing people who work with inter- or transdisciplinary project teams that include arts workers and / or techniques with a view to finding out why and how the arts are incorporated into their work, and the opportunities and challenges that inclusion of the arts brings to their processes.
My goal is to produce an e-zine with articles based on 6 or so interviews with people working in the community, business, academic, STEM, or creative sectors. I am hoping to publish this in October of this year. Between now and then, as I interview people, I intend to publish short blogs on my website that highlight some interesting points that surface during each interview. Next week, for example, I will be blogging about a fascinating conversation I recently had with Monika Jiang from The House of Beautiful Business. I have written about The House’s approach to using the arts as part of its work before; you can read that here.
Transversal?
This writing project will be examining arts practice as a transversal skill.
The word ‘transverse’ means ‘to cut across’ and is a word borrowed from geometry; it originally referred to lines that cut across other lines or shapes.
Transverse Line by Wassily Kandinsky (1923)
When used in science or other STEM diagrams it can refer to something that is ‘cut across’, like a cross-section in a medical illustration. More broadly, the word can be used to describe something that cuts across or transfers onto something else, for example, transversal skills are skills such as organisational skills or critical thinking that can be transferred across jobs and sectors.
Just as a cross-section can allow us to see and analyse the construction and functioning of things, so too am I hoping that this writing project will allow me to explore how the arts functions as a thing that cuts across and into a multidisciplinary project.
This fascinates me. I started off working in the arts industry, initially as a performer and choreographer and then later as an arts manager. I have long felt that artists have much to contribute to complex multidisciplinary projects; I have also long witnessed the arts not being taken seriously enough by the broader community, dismissed as being too flighty or ‘recreational’ or fanciful to contribute anything to the work of ‘serious’ thinkers from other disciplines.
But complex issues need creative thinking. And artists bring not only that but a different tolerance or approach to risk-taking, learning from failure, sitting with ambiguity, or dealing with complexity compared to people from other disciplines. In other words, the artistic brain can cut across other ways of thinking to bring fresh perspectives. I want to find examples of this and to celebrate them, while writing realistically about the challenges and benefits of absorbing arts practice into a multidisciplinary setting.
A work in progress.
Of course, as with all of my creative projects, the one aspect that brings me out in a sweat and causes me to jerk awake at night with my heart racing is deciding what to call the damned thing! But that will eventually come. In the meanwhile, I hope that you will enjoy the short blogs I post about the interviews I do, and then enjoy the e-zine that will feature longer and more detailed articles about what I have found.
Stay tuned!
Update:
I have started writing short blogs about the interviews I have been doing:
The House of Beautiful Business - Growing through experience.
Different ways of knowing (Centre for Unusual Collaborations)
How we show up together (Paulina Larocca)
Cosmovisual (Olive Moynihan and Lamine Sonko)
Real collaboration, real time (Australian Network for Art & Technology)
Further update:
It’s finished! Curious? Then come along to the free online event I am facilitating to talk about what I heard during my research. It’s on at 6pm, 28 February 2024 AEDT. I’d love to see you there.
And, of course, I would also love it if you bought the book! You can do so HERE!
