Jean Burgess (2010) Chapter 2 - Vernacular Creativity, Cultural Studies and Cultural Citizenship in Vernacular Creativity and New Media. p. 28-39
As Lubbock implies, ‘art’ is what the art world says it is—it is constituted as a category via the symbolic boundary-work of concrete institutions. But the contexts of folk art, as well as what I choose to call ‘vernacular creativity’ are not so clearly defined—the domain of vernacular creativity is the everyday, the mundane, and the in-between. (p. 29)
The most familiar meaning of the term ‘vernacular’ is that of vernacular speech, thought, or expression, usually applied to the ‘native’ speech of a populace as against the official language....The term is now used primarily to distinguish ‘everyday’ from institutional or official modes of expression within the same language. (p. 30)
Beyond linguistic expression, there is vernacular architecture—an ‘architecture of the people’—characterised by buildings that are customarily owned - or community-built, or whose style represents ‘low’ or ‘folk’ culture rather than institutionalised or ‘high’ architecture. (p. 30)
Like the folklore scholar Roger D. Abrahams (2005), who uses the concept of ‘vernacular culture’ to develop a poetics of everyday talk and performance that cuts across both ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, it is the ordinary everydayness of the vernacular that makes it a powerful concept for the purposes of the present study. (p. 31)
The term ‘vernacular’ literally means the ordinary and ubiquitous but it also refers to qualities specific to particular regions or cultures. Its attachment to the word ‘photography’ allows historians like myself to argue for the need to devise a way of representing photography’s history that can incorporate all its many manifestations and functions. A vernacular history of photography will have to be able to deal with the kind of hybrid objects I describe above, but also with, for example, photographies from outside Europe and the U.S. It may mean having to adopt non-traditional voices and narrative structures. It will certainly mean abandoning art history’s evaluation system (based on masterpieces and masters, originality and innovation, and so on). In short, the term ‘vernacular photography’ is intended as a provocation and a challenge.
(Batchen, 2002)
As with vernacular photography, speech or architecture, vernacular creativity is ordinary. Vernacular creativity, in being ordinary, is not elite or institutionalised; nor is it extraordinary or spectacular, but rather is identified on the basis of its commonness. (p. 32)
While the domain of vernacular creativity is everyday life and not the institutions of ‘official culture’ or 33 the production end of the creative industries, at the same time it often operates with reference to the values, aesthetics and techniques of established creative professions and art worlds (Howard, 2005). (p. 33)
Our feelings are engaged, sympathies awoken, bodies moved and our taken-for-granted ways of thinking are transferred as they are stimulated by a specific form, artefact or product from a quite particular time and place.
(Negus & Pickering, 2004: 161)
According to this framework then, there is no reason that the originating location of epiphanic moments of ‘exceptional’ creativity could not be the equally particular realm of everyday cultural practice; of ‘ordinary’ creativity. (p. 38)
Charles Leadbeater (2004) The Pro-Am Revolution - Demos, Chapters 1 and 4 p. 9-18 and 39-44
Chapter 1. Pro-Am Power
Pro-Ams
Pro-Ams are innovative, committed and networked amateurs working to professional standards. Examples of successful Pro-Ams are:
- Linux
- The SIMs (game developers)
- Rap music artist e.g. Tupac Shakur
Pro-Am power is not confined to the high-tech, developed world. It also works in some of the poorest communities. Many of the social and medical advances of the twentieth century – especially in health, social work, finance and education – have relied on providing people with access to professional expertise: teachers deliver education, doctors cure disease. (p. 11)
When Pro-Ams are networked together, they can have a huge impact on politics and culture, economics and development. Pro-Ams can achieve things that until recently only large, professional organisations could achieve. (p. 12)
The Pro-Ams are knowledgeable, educated, committed and networked, by new technology. The twentieth century was shaped by large hierarchical organisations with professionals at the top. Pro- Ams are creating new, distributed organisational models that will be innovative, adaptive and low-cost. An outstanding example of how Pro-Ams are transforming a field is astronomy. (p. 13)
Open Source Astronomy
In 1987, Pro-Ams were responsible for confirming a key theory about how the universe works:
On the night of 23 February 1987, light reached Earth from a star that had exploded on the edge of the Tarantula nebula 168,000 years earlier. The supernova was enormous and was the first to be witnessed by the naked eye since 1604. In the Chilean Andes, Ian Shelton, an avid amateur astronomer who was on the verge of turning professional, took a photograph with a 10” telescope. Shelton went down in history as the man who discovered supernova 1987A.
That night two other dedicated amateur astronomers were at work. Albert Jones, a veteran with more than half a million observations to his credit, had taken a good look at the Tarantula nebula earlier but had seen nothing unusual. Robert McNaught, another Pro-Am, photographed the explosion at 10.30 UT in Australia.
Together these amateurs played a vital role in confirming a theory that explains what happens when a star explodes. Astrophysicists theorised that when a star explodes most of its energy is released as neutrinos, low-mass, subatomic particles which fly through planets as if they are not there. When a star explodes the neutrinos should exit at high speed and arrive on earth two hours before the light.
On the night of 23 February, a large storm of neutrinos from Shelton’s supernova was detected by labs in the US and Japan at 7.35 UT. According to the theory, the first light should have arrived at 9.35 UT. Jones checked his meticulous records and confirmed that when he was looking at Tarantula at 9.30 UT he had not seen any sign of an explosion. That meant the neutrinos had already arrived yet the light had not, just as the theory predicted. When McNaught’s photograph from Australia was taken at 10.30 UT, the light of the explosion was visible.
A key theory explaining how the universe works had been confirmed thanks to amateurs in New Zealand and Australia, a former amateur turning professional in Chile and professional physicists in the US and Japan. These were the joint authors of the discovery made by a loosely connected Pro-Am team.
There are limits to what Pro-Ams can achieve. Amateurs do not produce new theories of astrophysics. Sometimes amateurs do not know how to make sense of the data they have acquired. Yet the future of astronomy, and perhaps after it biology and other sciences, will be as a Pro-Am activity, with dedicated amateurs and professionals working in tandem, motivated by the same sense of excitement about exploring the universe. (p. 16)
Chapter 1. The Pro-Am Ethic
