Long abstract:

Creative producers have an emergent role in creative industries and interdisciplinary research – but have had limited attention beyond a handful of sectors. The Ars Electronica Creative Producer Program (2021) saw collective critical reflection during a 6-week program with 22 diverse global practitioners. Undertaking research by practice, the findings were formed through thematic analysis, deliberation, and collective reflection - ultimately leading to a delineation of the role of creative producer as a boundary worker from the process of creative producing as an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary (ITD) practice.

The Manifesto that resulted from the program provides a tool for interrogating creative producing's role in transformative knowledge production. It shows that this ITD practice is underpinned by the concept of situated knowledges (Haraway, 1997). I use this, and non-essentialist feminist theories in STS, to contextualise and interrogate creative producing as an ITD practice which takes 1) a relational orientation to knowledge production, that is underpinned by 2) a reflexive orientation, and is 3) driven by a care-full orientation.

Looking at this in field of art-science, this nuanced understanding of creative producing reveals how this ITD practice creates transformative knowledge by attending to the way that “meaning is continually produced, contested and negotiated through social practices and power relations” (Hunter 1996) with specific methods “realised through experience” by boundary workers (Pinxit-Gregg, 2021). Through examples I show how this approach has the potential to unpick the 'problematic' of epistemic hierarchies and cultures between art and science (Salter 2021) to mediate societal transformation.