how about some collaborations from audio+film members here? "Is this a Test" ...the audio-visual live event at the Roxy Arthouse is happening on June 26th. "Celebrating the collaborative synergy of music and moving image..." If you have music videos, live audio-visual performance, music films, film musics, or are a musician/band with visuals as a large element to your live show, get in touch with us!

colliderscope xx

Interesting article about the fourth annual If You Could exhibition. This one's If You Could Collaborate. http://bit.ly/CRarticle

Great exhibition on the theme of collaboration in the form of partnerships coming up at Sorcha Dallas – Gilbert and George, local duo Joanne Tatham and Tom O'Sullivan to Rita Donagh and Richard Hamilton...

http://www.thisiscentralstation.com/events/love.aspx

http://alittlepieceofmind.org/
A quilt project from Glasgow based design agency Marque. Not sure if this is strictly collaboration or more a curation of names and faces, but hey it's being auctioned for homelesseness charidees... Being exhibited in London, New York then back to Glasgow

Through collaboration, I've found myself working not only as a designer and maker of my own designs, but as a maker of other people's designs, a designer of projects made by others, a tutor to students designing furniture for me to make, a design consultant to other makers, a manufacturer paying royalties to other designers...

Increasingly I find that there is no 'good' design outside of context, and the degree of appropriateness of a design to the clients' needs is the most important element of context. When I first began designing and making furniture I was essentially working to two briefs - the needs of the client and my own agenda, which I tried to shoehorn in whenever possible. Years of designing, making and I now realize, collaborating later I am much happier to embrace the needs of the context and only apply my own agenda if if offers real value. The ultimate expression of this is when issues other than visual beauty are given priority because they are more appropriate. In the 'connecting plates' project (5mins 0secs in the video above), strength, precision and economy took precedence over beauty very successfully.

Conventionally, a commission entails a transfer of responsibility from one person to another, with an assumed transfer of 'ownership'. However, the best working relationships entail a client retaining a sense of 'ownership' in the design process, increasing the value of the end result to all concerned. In fact, I have never worked on a project where I have had complete freedom, and as a designer I would be lost if I did. Even the act of a client presenting a brief or a problem is a participation of sorts, and hence all commissions are in fact collaborations to some degree.

Thoughts?