Virtual Spaces of Creativity

 A workshop by Lydia Jørgensen
 Convened by Boukje Cnossen and Nicolas Bencherki
 July 8, 2021, from 6pm to 7pm - an online, free event

Why this Workshop?

The 2021 SCO Workshop is a collaborative exploration on creativity in virtual space. While addressing creativity in virtual space (re)articulates the atmospheric relation between space, creativity, and embodiment, we suggest that it also requires us to (re)think aesthetic methods and ways of participation. Overall, we ask how can we be creative in virtual space?

Many artists have engaged in creating new virtual/digital art forms and spatial experiences based on a reshaping of new technologies. Their projects seek to modulate new aesthetic experiences, often with a kind of collaborative touch, that invites the viewer to engage with or immerse themselves into the artwork. Through their works they draw us out of the fixed framework of everyday life and provide space for new experiences and insights and thus have a liberating function. These works present surprising and unexpected ways to engage with virtual space and provide for new insights, which potentially offer new and critical orientations on society.

More about Lydia Jørgensen

Lydia is researching affective atmosphere, creativity, and space by taking an interdisciplinary view on contemporary work practices, organization and social phenomena. She has, among others, investigated the intertwinement of organization and technology by considering how the technological mediation of atmospheres is constituted in sensory and affective spatial arrangements. Lydia’s research contributes to research within organizational studies that addresses the aesthetic, affective and spatial way of thinking about organization. This further includes working with performative and art-based methods as ways to study and critically think organization.

Lydia currently holds a postdoc at the Department of Sociology and Cultural Organization at Leuphana University and is affiliated with the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, CBS.

What is the SCO Workshop

Since 2015, the Space, Creativity and Organizing workshop brings together researchers interested in ways of developing an understanding of space more adequate to the challenge of contemporary organization. It proposes hands-on and experimental activities in the margins of the European Group for Organizational Studies’ annual colloquium to provoke and engage academics to consider alternative methods in which to think and practice space in organization. In 2015, we occupied the cooperative workspace of the Stone Soup organization in Athens to explore the of site-specific creative possibilities of spaces normally used by independent technology professionals. In 2016, we took over an art gallery, the ‘Voyage Pittoresque Factory’ in Naples, to investigate affect’s emergence in the interaction of bodies, technologies and space. In 2017, we took a literary turn and discussed Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 at the Overgaden Institute for Contemporary Art in Copenhagen. In 2018, it is the Estonian museum of architecture in Tallinn that hosted the workshop, as we discovered together the role of smell and scent in organizational life. In Edinburg, in 2019, choreographer Anastasia Kostner invited the audience to explore alternative epistemologies through our senses. Unfortunately, the 2020 edition had to be cancelled due to the covid-19 pandemic.