Supercritical Creativity

Creative works are treated as a form of property in as much as they are subject to intellectual property laws (IPRs), like copyright. Owning IPRs can therefore be very lucrative and owning the copyrights a key part of what constructs a market in creative works. But creative processes differ from those embedded in a factory or machine (which in certain sense can be considered condensed physical labour) in that it is the processes or outputs of creative thought itself that is being transferred into the IPRs. The thinking actions of the creative actor (and sometimes the tacit knowledge of the workers whose skills are being encoded) are abstracted into the IPR (sometimes through the absorption of the tacit knowledge of experts) and then encoded (stabilized) within the IPR. This is what Hardt and Negri (2000) named “immaterial labour’”, pointing to the way in which contemporary capital increasingly requires that our intellectual labour is alienated in postmodern capitalism. This points to the attempts by owners and managers to move creativity from a craftman-­?like approach to an industrial processing model of creative processes by using Taylorist techniques, like time-­?and-­?motion studies, peer review, “creative” libraries, modularity, and so forth. This has certainly transformed the practice of commercial graphic design into something approaching a Fordist way of producing creative outputs. In contrast, I want to explore some examples of attempts to develop commons-­based creativity in a number of different case studies focusing on the use of innovative creative practices through the use of different licensing approaches.