Release no.10: Introducing Collaboration Cookbook
An online collection of recipes for creative projects, with a companion printed edition
When we see creative work that moves us, we often ask: how’d they do that? How did they make that piece, idea, or experience reach us in deep and meaningful ways?
When it comes to collaborative creative projects, this is even more true. When they work, they work. We can feel the energy sparks between contributors as the sum becomes greater than the parts.
How does that happen? What’s the recipe for making and being part of something like that ourselves?
Metalabel’s tenth release explores this space by introducing a new open resource for collaboration: instructions for collaborative projects as told by the people that made them.
Introducing Collaboration Cookbook
Collaboration Cookbook is an online collection of recipes for creative projects featuring contributions from some of the most interesting and notable creative people and projects active today. Recipes include:
Artist Mindy Seu’s recipe for making The Cyberfeminism Index, a catalog of radical techno-critical activism.
Artist Joshua Citarella’s recipe for building Do Not Research, an online community and publishing platform for writing, visual art, and internet culture.
Activist Charlie Waterhouse’s recipe for creating a rebellion based on his experience as a key part of the environmental activists Extinction Rebellion.
Each “recipe” has been simplified to its most basic elements: a set of ingredients and basic instructions.
A living cookbook
This release is itself an active, ongoing collaboration.
We seeded the Cookbook with ten recipes exploring areas as wide as music, online communities, and food, but that’s just the start. This Cookbook is built to grow.
Collaboration Cookbook includes a Contribute page where anyone can add their own recipe for a collaborative creative project that will then be added to the overall resource. We’ll send you a limited edition physical copy of Collaboration Cookbook — available only to contributors! – as a thank you.
Collaboration begets collaboration
This project itself is a product of collaboration.
It all started this summer, when we began interviewing people we admire about projects they’ve made. Those conversations became an IRL workshop at the Idyllwild Arts High School in California during the arts and culture festival FWB Fest, where dozens of people came together to collaborate and experiment with making collage-based artwork.
Two months later, we’re pleased to release this experiment and resource to the wider creative community. We look forward to reading your contributions.