The Elevation Station @ 1.38pm

by Ruth Barker, 13 Jun 2009

Hello,
so things are heating up now after the lunchtime lull. We have some more visitors, and the central platform of the station is looking more substantial. I haven’t talked much yet about what the work actually is, so maybe now would be a good time.

The Elevation Station will be a kind of watchtower, constructed collaboratively by the GANGHUT team. It will be embellished by banners and signage, also collaboratively devised. Just now, the group intends that the tower will stay here for three months, sitting in some ways as an element of their DAC show, which opens on July 4th.

How collaborations function is always a difficult thing to make explicit. You risk, in some ways, a diffusion of the glue if its components are made public. I’ll risk saying however that so far GANGHUT seems less like a hive mind and more a small village democracy. The group’s members are quick to devolve some responsibility, and to relinquish their ownership of all decisions. Problems are solved through negotiation, compromise, competition. There’s a strong sense of playful experiment to the enterprise, and I get the sense that priorities are fluid and evolving. This is collaboration as choice, as possibility, as process.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

More later,
R