Hidden value in remixed and convergent media in the applied arts and design

Abstract

Photography, design and music have been irreversibly affected by the digital revolution. Creative practitioners and organisations face great challenges as posed by globalisation, crowd-sourced content, stock libraries, locative media, the sharing economy and the creative commons. In terms of creative industry and social capital, the rise of new media, the siren servers Google and Facebook (Lanier 2013), and the seemingly endless cycles of creative destruction are often perceived as culpable for the degradation of their economic value.

How can this be conceptually reverse-engineered to add value through professional creative practices that embrace those very parameters?

This paper evaluates of an integrated advertising campaign, Keep It Local, that employs disruptive parameters as a model for adding creative value. The paper is founded on industrial, interdisciplinary practice-led research and the theoretical discourse of new media (Manovich 2001), convergent culture (Jenkins 2014), remix culture (Navas 2012), the sharing economy (Gobble 2017), and photography. If measured by traditionally accepted understandings of value, such as economic impact and audience engagement, the campaign could be determined as either a success or failure. However, as a model that re-frames shared value in art and design research and aesthetics, it offers insights into unconventional modes of professional creative practice that serve to expand the discourse in these fields and affect approaches to education in the creative arts.