ct_collective (cassette tape collective)
The CT collective is a deliciously cool and joyously simple model for distributed collaboration. Here the concept of chain tapes that used to be the primary means of distributed collaboration for audio types in the pre-DASE era where the only e-mail was delivered by trunk is extended in a very non tech way to the collaborative development of audio projects based on specified themes. Using a maling list and a web-site the project has published upwards of 25 full length albums that are all freely available from the site. Anyone can join the collective. Anyone can download. Projects include tracks based solely on sampling of an MRI machine, or of paper……yep just paper….. The site also includes 4 albums that were made when the collective still collaborated via post and cassette tape.
A good indication that perhaps the best collaborative models are the simplest.
July 7, 2007 at 2:13 pm
That’s really interesting Mat - I guess what I find most interesting are two things. First up, the choice to do things like this - we have the choice to move back to simplicity these days, to re-energise older parts of the media ecologies - this is where the “media” evolution idea doesn’t necessarily make sense - there isn’t necessarily a fittest way to survive. Second, however, and probably more interestingly, is the return to a complex matter - that is, something (a tape recording) in which the material form itself has a density and complexity resists the ability to do too many things with it at once … and that might be part of the attraction.
July 10, 2007 at 12:14 am
Yep..i really love the whole dynamic of a simple interaction that emerges thanks to the incipiencies/constraints/affordances of an older materiality folding into a place where those constraints are effectively…deterritorialized There are obviously lots of ways the old model is given new legs here as well - but without (yet) sacrificing the simplicity that the original medium demanded. I’ve talked alot about web2.0 and so on…..but I think it is likely a collective like this would be fractured and complicated…would lose its coherence…with the addition of those ’social network’ divergences.
In fact there is a bigger point here about the value of *coherence* in distributed, generative forms. I think Web2.0 as a design phenomena can be critiqued in a most interesting way from the perspective of ‘generative coherence’ or ‘dynamic coherence’ - rather than from the tedious ‘capital v. community’, ‘public v. corporate’, ‘open/closed’, ‘read only/read write’ stuff that I read near everyday now.