ELMCIP
URL = http://www.elmcip.net
Description
"Developing a Network-Based Creative Community: Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice (ELMCIP) is a three-year (June 2010-June 2013) collaborative research project funded by HERA, the Humanities in the European Research Area framework, sponsored by EU FP7 and the national research councils of the countries participating in the framework. The project has involved researchers from seven institutions in six European nations, who together have produced seven events including seminars, workshops and the Remediating the Social conference and exhibition, documented by this volume.
The ELMCIP project has responded specifically to the ‘Humanities as a Source of Creativity and Innovation’ theme, of the original call, in producing research that examines how ‘the processes and conditions of human creativity will add new understandings of the value systems of the humanities and the practices and conditions of the creative, performing and visual arts, and a much better understanding of how these values and processes might contribute to cultural, social and economic innovation.’ Aspects of the call for projects addressed by ELMCIP have included research into the relation between technological innovation and artistic creativity, examining models of practice for developing and supporting creativity, considering the relationship between artists and writers who produce creative work and the communities that study them, and in particular how creative communities are functioning differently in a globally networked, technologically mediated environment than previously."
As a starting point, we asserted that creativity is not best understood as a manifestation
of genius or inspiration within any particular individual, but instead as the collective, performative practices of communities. Considering the work of anthropologist James Leach,
we understand creativity as an activity of exchange that enables people and communities. In studying and working to further develop the international community of electronic
literature, we have thus focused less on particular individual artists and individual works,
and more on the conditions and environment in which creativity takes place.
ELMCIP has studied the electronic literature community as exemplary of contemporary network-based creative practices, but we have not feigned disinterested objectivity in the endeavor. Although the work has included an ethnographic study of three different networked creative communities, conducted by Penny Travlou, for the most part our work has been focused on developing and expanding upon the efforts of an existing creative community, developing research infrastructure as well as opportunities for scholars, creative writers, and artists to gather and exchange ideas and publish new work that has advanced the field, especially as it has manifested itself within the European research area." (http://www.elmcip.net/sites/default/files/files/attachments/story/remediating_the_social_full.pdf)