User:Nicole Hametner/Creative Industries

CQ7 Ability Test (Michaela Lakova & Nicole Hametner)

Artist statement:
In the field of entertainment the production is often outsourced to cheap labour, whereas the creative part of the designer is honored. While reflecting on mechanism of the creative industry, two sides emerged with a strong ambiguity. This is why we want to question the definition of the creative part on the one hand and the role of the worker on the other hand. An interactive video installation provides a survey where the spectator can run through 10 questions with 4 proposed answers. As foundation serve different examples of job interviews for companies in the creative industry. The result expresses in percentage to what extend the respondent fits into the profile of either the creative or the worker. He then receives his test result as a badge to present afterwards in the exhibition space, with the aim to initiate a discussion about his achieved level and to reflect about the meaning of the two categories, where they distinguish from each other and where they might at the end not differ at all.

This work was made in the context of the thematic project Creative Industries. For the connecting link between the individual works in the final collective show, the group decided to create a start up event, where each of the participants presents its project as a business proposal. For this reason we had to adapt our initial artist statement into a creative business idea and transformed it into a new company statement:

Discover your potential and be part of the creative workforce of tomorrow!
CQ7 Creative Ability Test allows job hunters to check their potential to work in the creative industry. We use big data and predictive analytics to improve workforce quality, productivity and profitability, by connecting qualified employees with employers. We are an independent research group of data analysts using profiling technology. With the CQ7 Creative Ability Test we offer a survey that allows individual job hunters to check their potential to work in the creative industry. The respondent cannot fail or pass the test, the result rather represents his potential expressed in a numerical form of his achieved level. It is then the company that decides to what degree creativity is demanded for their working procedures. In addition to this individual outcome, the collected data are used for statistic evaluation, which serves as guideline for companies working in the field. We use big data and predictive analytics to improve workforce quality, productivity and profitability, by connecting qualified employees with employers. During the event we offer a free trial version in form of an interactive installation to allow the audience to be part of the procedure. The respondent receives his test result as a badge to present afterwards in the exhibition space, with the aim to initiate a discussion about his achieved level. Our staff members are present during the day and provide assistance for the participants as well as for any further questions from the public.

The creative business ideas were introduced the evening before the start up camp during a Pecha Kucha event. The format of this presentation was simple: the participants had two and a half minutes with 10 slides 15 seconds each to present their product. www.startupcampl.nl

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1) Attempt of a formula

This is a primary attempt to break down my method in single components, what might allow a clearer overview of the entire process.
Already the trigger for a new work is difficult to define, because everything links automatically to the prior body of work, where several interests and points of research over the years have built a background that serves as constant reference, on which a specific situation then leads to the concrete creation of work. Also the intention varies through the development and can not be clearly extracted from it, by which I want to say that all has to be considered as a complex structure, in which each part influences mutually the others. Basically the decision to work on something more intensely is based on intuition, fed by all different kinds of inputs, that end up in a deeper research of a subject. Then the combination of several aspects allows slowly perceive the body of work as an abstract idea and consequently guides to formal questions, which are then executed to create the actual outcome. Everything depends on the inspiration that initiated the project as well as the inspiration emitted during the working process. This division of steps cannot be seen strictly in a fixed order, sometimes visual aspects interfere while conceptualizing a work and then deviate the whole in a slightly different direction. But mainly the intention-research-combination-formal-execution string helps to recognize certain patterns in my methodology. Personally I feel, that what makes an artwork attractive is not to see behind every detail and that a complete transparence might diminish the works independence, what is in my opinion as important as the input from the artist.

Having a closer look at the method for my work Schwarzes Licht from 2010 allows detecting a pattern that can be applied to former works of mine. My interest lies in themes of perception, psychoanalysis and the night, which holds an important place, as a subject as well as an essential condition for the main part of my works. The next example might reveal how I approach a subject and how several abstract ideas lead to an artistic outcome. In 2010 I was invited to create a work for a gallery with the restriction to include somehow the environment around the exhibition space, situated close by to a bridge. On the one side lies a botanical garden and on the other side a center for drug addicted people. This occurrence links together with former works, contact with drug addicts and my interest to photograph plants. In addition Freud's Theme of the Three Caskets served as a main input. (I delved into Freud earlier while doing a work about the representation of fear) His analysis of man choosing subconsciously his own dead leads to a core idea of the sublime, repulsion and attraction. Furthermore the three fates come up in Freud's essay and close with the name of the third of them the circle, to Atropa a deadly nightshade. This combination finally constructs the framework, for which I tried to create a visual outcome, which can be seen as a metaphorical representation of the whole subject. After the abstract idea was formed, formal questions raised, in how to juxtapose the drug addicts with the nightshades from the botanic garden. In addition to that I wanted to use the big window front of the gallery to include the circle of day and night. I can not say on which point the wish to use the white gallery space only with white sheets of paper came up, but it melted together with the idea of applying silkscreen with fluorescent liquid that only appears under black light tubes. The interaction from the artificial light with the natural during the day then moved the process to the center and underlined the whole idea of appearance and disappearance, day and night, attraction and repulsion, beauty and disease, life and death. Different strings have leaded here together and built up a construction that refers to abstract ideas while using elements of the contemporary environment, a construction that is made on personal choices, guided by intuition and certain spatial restrictions.