The Temporalities of Collaboration

Paper delivered at ‘What is the Contemporary?’ conference, St Andrews University. 1 September 2014 Amongst the most prevalent manifestations of contemporary participatory art practice are projects in which audience members are invited to interact and modify an installation over the course of the exhibition. In such works collaboration does not derive from shared or collective experience, as is the case in examples of what Grant Kester has termed ‘dialogical aesthetics’, but from a cumulative or diachronic co-operation, in which participants act in isolation from one another, intervening as temporally atomised individuals, whose actions only manifest themselves as collective upon retrospective viewing. Two particularly apt examples are Oda Projesi’s ongoing project Tongue (2009-) – in which the public is encouraged to submit their own neologisms to an ever-expanding lexicon – and Cyprien Gaillard’s The Recovery of Discovery (2011) – a pyramid of 72 000 bottles of Efes Pilsner gradually dismantled and consumed over two months. Despite the disparity between the modes of collaboration entailed by these works and examples of dialogical aesthetics, both are commonly spoken of through a rhetoric of community. In this paper I explore the modes of community espoused by each, with specific attention paid to the significance placed on temporality. Conceptions of community formulated in the nineteenth century by the likes of Ferdinand Tönnies, and which held sway for much of the twentieth century, are predicated on the existence of some shared temporality between members. It is this form of community which works of dialogical aesthetics appeal to. The growth of online communities, on the other hand, has disturbed this presupposition. While the latencies, lags and delays that characterise online interactivity preclude the possibility for a common temporality to exist via the internet, this has not prevented web-based communities from flourishing. For example, the construction and modification of Wikipedia entries by the ‘Wikipedia community’ consists of a series of temporally isolated interventions into the content of the page by individuals. In this sense a great deal of structural commonality can be discerned between Wikipedia and the practices of the likes of Oda Projesi and Cyprien Gaillard. Through an elaboration of this commonality, I wish to point to two seemingly opposed models of community, via an examination of their differing artistic manifestations – one dependant upon diachronicity and one on synchronicity.