Collisions, Co-opting and Collaboration: Reflections on the workings of an interdisciplinary collaborative project—inConversation

This paper will analyse the collaborative processes amongst some of the 14 groups of creative higher degree by research candidates (from the School of Communications and Arts and the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts), arts practitioners and researchers from different art forms and discipline backgrounds exhibited at Edith Cowan University’s Spectrum Project Space. Collaboration in the creative context is broadly understood as a group or team working together to develop a concept. Whist the working methods of each team of researchers differed appropriate to the relationship between the participants, themes for analysis include; collisions, co-opting and collaboration. A critical lens regarding the structures and motivations of these very themes will be applied to gain an understanding of how they shape the practices of individual researchers and the artefacts they created. Collaboration is not a neat process, often the complex processes and vying voices of the participants bump up against each other in order to create a shared vocabulary across disciplinary specific boundaries. In this case the teams were asked to create non-traditional practice-led artefacts for a curated exhibition title inConversation. The intent of this curation was to inform broader discussion regarding the challenges of interdisciplinary collaboration and ways to engage researchers and artists to explore their discipline boundaries and connectivity