What is a Collaborator?

What if creativity began not with the individual, but with the field of relations?

A collaborator is not simply a person who joins a team, nor a discrete actor who brings their skills to a table already set. Instead, a collaborator is an emergent participant in a dynamic, ongoing process of co-creation—a node in a web of relations, shaped by and shaping the collaborative event itself. To be a collaborator is to be made by collaboration, as much as to make through it.

A collaborator is any agent—human, non-human, material, conceptual, environmental, or technological—that participates in the emergence of a novel assemblage. Collaboration is not a secondary act added to pre-existing individuals; it is the primary mode of being from which individuals, ideas, and outcomes emerge. The collaborator is both a product and a producer of the collaborative process, inseparable from the relations and processes that constitute the event.

A collaborator, as a node in an emergent ecosystem, is ultimately created by the relations.

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See also: Emergence, Ecology, Configurations, Organization