Category: θεωρία


Helping Zimbabweans to ‘Steppe in Sync’

Filed under: Zimbabwe, South-South, Post-Soviet, θεωρία, Creative Industries, Africa and branding, Steppes, Syncing Steppes, Fair Trade, Cultural Diplomacy — Leave a comment
May 27, 2012
a version of this interview is to appear in the 5th edition of the Film Biz Africa magazine

Steppes in Sync is a creative platform that connects Zimbabweans involved with creative industries with investors across the globe.

Film Biz Africa magazine was privileged to interview Andy Kozlov, Ukrainian creativity maven behind Steppes in Sync, who says:

Film Biz Africa is a Nairobi-based bi-monthly publication about the business side of African film

I have  always been interested in the role of cultural industries in sustainable development. While studying for my BA degree in history,  I got fascinated by people’s use of creative tools to inspire development in unstable economic environments like Africa and in parts of Europe like my home country, Ukraine. (See How culture contributes to development: an UNESCO indicator suite)
Film Biz Africa: Tell us about Steppes in Sync, what inspired you to start this initiative and how has the response been so far?
Andy Kozlov:The idea of Steppes in Sync came to me at the end of 2010 during the preparations for my second trip to Zimbabwe. Initially, Steppes in Sync was a personal blog where I would publish original or reposted material about topics like South-South cooperation, development communication, and African film and literature.
 As the blog’s content grew, I managed to get occasional contributions from others – among them Tendai Huchu, a Scotland-based Zimbabwean author of novel The Hairdresser of Harare, as well as Malian film-maker Intagrist El Ansari, who worked on Yann Arthus-Bertrand‘s projects such as 6 Billion Others and the highly-acclaimed film Home.
 As for the people’s response to the Steppes in Sync initiative so far, we are still at the research phase but, as of recently, we nurtured promising collaborations with creative minds from countries like Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa, apart from our countries of focus – Ukraine and Zimbabwe. I have become an official representative of an African film distribution company, Afriwood, in the Russian-speaking markets. (See Afriwood to participate in 2012 Ukrainian Content Market)

The front page of the Bulawayo-based arts festival, Intwasa, web site

Steppes in Sync and a group of friends in the creative sector of Zimbabwe are currently  working on establishing the Zimbabwe Creative Content Agency, the goal of which is to  promote Zimbabwean talent abroad and strengthen information flow within the creative community there. We have discovered that despite the availability of various funding and publicity opportunities, Zimbabwean talent remains in the shadow, partly because there is fierce (and often blind) competition within the community. For example we are now in talks with the Bulawayo-based arts festival Intwasain southern part of Zimbabwe to manage their public image and attract more visitors from outside Zimbabwe. (See Navigating African cities through our own unique and diverse mental maps)

Film Biz Africa: Who does Steppes in Sync target in particular? Knowing that online media in Africa, particularly in the rural areas, are still in the bud, how do you intend to reach out to the creative talent on the continent? 

Andy Kozlov: The question of internet penetration in Africa is a good one that no-one really has an answer to.  Kenya, for example set the pace of mobile banking for the whole continent.  In the creative field, the South African pay TV Channel M-Net  recently launched the African Film Library availing to the public their 100-plus online library of films downloadable for a fee. They plan to expand it to 700 titles in the near future.

As for us, at present we are still experimenting – something emerging-market actors do, given the incredible lack of reliable data for Africa and often failing communication channels. But one thing we see coming up on the horizon is an increasing interest of Africans in what is going on in other parts of their continent. Cultural industries like film and television are no exception.

Film Biz Africa: Judging by the fact that Steppes in Sync connects international business and development experts to creative talent across the globe, which creative industry would you say has the greatest potential and why? 

Andy Kozlov: In a sense, making cute pots or wooden and soapstone statues can hardly be compared to highly-expensive TV or film productions. The former is usually a work of an individual artist. The latter requires collaboration of a team of people, each one of them with a set of specific creative skills. If you judge by the items that recently went under the hammer at Christie’s in New York, the returns from a single painting can fund roughly over 5,000 Nollywood-produced films. (See Copyright wars II: What “pirates” of Hollywood (read “American film-making pioneers”) share with Nollywood marketers)

One thing is for sure, in the world  that is undergoing a huge technological  transformation, an average video like Kony 2012 can go viral in an instant and an expensive theater production somewhere in South Africa can go flop taking downhill  all the aspirations and promising careers of the actors and producers. No doubt for example, IT and web-supported cultural industries is the happening place for Africa. Look at Samsung. This Korean company is implementing a program in a host of countries in Western Africa as well as in Kenya to introduce  to the market TVs with an in-built satellite receiver. Something like this never took place anywhere else in the world. Christoph Limmer, senior director of marketing development and marketing, Africa, at SES (telecommunications company that helps broadcasters deliver almost 6,000 TV channels to over 245 million homes worldwide) put it this way commenting on the partnership with Samsung:

Our cooperation will not only help to improve access to digital content for African consumers but it will also encourage African broadcasters to launch more content. In servicing more than 40 African countries, we are well aware of the huge demand for more and higher quality TV services. The opportunity lies in providing an increasingly sophisticated African viewership with a significantly increased number of TV channels – a first for many African countries. (See 16 million eyes of ZBC viewers could add on several millions more, SinS book review. Africa Rising: how 900 million African consumers offer more than you think, Ukrainian Media Content Market 2012 scheduled for September, Turkey’s ‘soap power’, The World’s most inventive and pro-active television comes to town  and I want My TV in Afghanistan!)

Companies like Samsung have developed a nose for where the potential is. (See Africa-Asia prospects II: more solid research on Africa needed to inform Sino-African relations)

Film Biz Africa: What are your visions for Steppes in Sync?

Andy Kozlov: Steppes in Sync is first of all a platform for collaboration, and dissemination of creative-arts related information. There is a high demand for this in Africa and former Soviet nations. So, I can see us growing in the near future. African cultural market is by and large untapped. Africans are willing to learn. And it is important to collaborate with them, to teach them how to share ideas in a way that will contribute to their personal development and the development of their communities. We are certainly learning from Africa, too. So there is a lot of work to be done.

Film Biz Africa is a Nairobi-based bi-monthly publication about the business side of African film. Chiaka Esther Desmond edits the magazine.

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The most-used creativity test in the world

Filed under: Far East, θεωρία, Steppes, Syncing Steppes — 1 Comment
March 17, 2012

Dr. Ellis Paul Torrance developed the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT) in 1966 and the test has been updated five times, in 1974, 1984, 1990, 1998, and 2008. The TTCT appears in almost 40 different languages. Educators and corporate entities use and reference the TTCT more than any other creativity test in the world.

Creative is not synonymous with artistic, and the TTCT measures creativity on many other levels than artistic ability. Western people tend to think of creativity as artistic ability, whereas Eastern people tend to think of creativity as scientific ability. Eastern people think of artistic ability as a separate construct from creativity. Since the TTCT is not just a measure of artistic ability, it leads to the question of what does the TTCT measure? The TTCT measures the creative mind more broadly; it measures creative potential in many diverse areas such as art, literature, science, mathematics, architecture, engineering, business, leadership, and interpersonal relationships.

As noted above, the TTCT does not produce a single measure of creativity. Instead the TTCT measures the following subscales of creative potential: Fluency, Originality, 13 Checklists of Creative Strengths, Elaboration, Abstractness of Titles, and Resistance to Premature Closure. The above subscales can be grouped together into three main concepts of creative potential:

1) Lateral/Innovative Thinking factor (Fluency & Originality): Fluency measures an ability to produce a number of relevant ideas. Originality measures an ability to produce a number of statistically infrequent ideas and shows how unique and unusual the ideas are.

2) Vertical/Adaptive Thinking factor (Elaboration & Abstractness of Titles): Elaboration measures an ability to develop and elaborate upon ideas and detailed and reflective thinking, but it also indicates motivation to be creative. Abstractness of Titles measures an ability to produce the thinking processes of synthesis and organization, and further, it measures an ability to capture the essence of the information involved and to know what is important. This is based on the idea that creativity requires an abstraction of thought. Abstractness of Titles is also related to verbal intelligence.

3) Creative Personality factor (Resistance to Premature Closure & 13 Checklists of Creative Strengths): Resistance to Premature Closure measures intellectual curiosity as well as open-mindedness. Open-mindedness predicts both IQ and creativity, and it is also found to be the most influential factor on intelligence. Finally, for the Creativity Personality factor, 13 Creative Strengths include creative personality traits, such as being emotionally expressive (Emotional Expressiveness), energetic (Movement or Action), talkative or verbally expressive (Storytelling Articulateness, or Expressiveness of Titles), humorous (Humor), imaginative (Fantasy), unconventional (Extending or Breaking Boundaries), lively or passionate (Richness of Imagery), perceptive (Colorfulness of Imagery), connecting seemingly irrelevant things together (Synthesis of Incomplete Figures), synthesizing (Synthesis of Lines or Circles), and seeing things from a different angle (Unusual Visualization or Internal Visualization).

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Video Games Are Mapping Your World II: the world according to Playstation

Filed under: Africa and branding, Creative Industries, Far East, Geosemiotics, θεωρία, Post-Soviet, Steppes, Syncing Steppes — Leave a comment
March 16, 2012

It’s been almost a year since our founder, Andy Kozlov, talked about how Video Games Are Mapping Your World I. We decided to come back to the topic when we stumbled upon an old copy of PC Format. Their team did an awesome job mapping the world the way Sony makes PS gamers see it.

Reprinted with additions from a South African edition of PC Format (September 2011 issue)

Five continents, 96 games – this is the world according to Playstation

You’d be forgiven for thinking most games are set in New York City [See Navigating African cities through our own unique and diverse mental maps for more on NYC locations: fake vs real]. Check the stats, and you will be surprised. Developers have based their games in pretty much every corner of the globe, from Malibu to outback Australia, from Siberia to Cape Town.

But what’s most interesting is how games potray different regions [Steppes in SinS toponomy], often in terms of crass stereotypes.

We selected games on PSone, PS2 and PS3 set in the most populated areas of the world.

Look..

24% of games set in South America feature cowboys

71% of games set in Africa are violent

50% of games set in the UK deal with the paranormal

US American games by theme: 35% Sci-Fi, 30% war, 35% crime

14% of games set in Australia feature koala bears

57% of African games feature widlife – No wonder with all those safari tourism promos.

80% of Canadian games feature snow

66% of Far-Eastern heroes are law breakers

16 % of games set in the Middle East feature rappers

57% of games set in Europe are war games, with 57% of European games being set in the past – Old Ma’ Europe. Perhaps even larger percent of films and TV series in post-independence Ukraine is war-themed.

40% of UK games are set in London. What a surprise!

85% of games set in Africa have jungle settings. Another surprise!

57% of games set in Australia are sports games

Games set in Africa: Afrika (unnamed location), Far Cry 2 (Central Africa), Resident Evil 5 (Unnamed), Army of Two (Somalia), Little Big Planet (Unnamed), Sega Rally (Unnamed), Tomb Raider Legend (Ghana).

Sony came up with the games set even in Antarctica.

It is stunning how video games reflect the perceptions engraved into public mental maps of the world by other media: novels, TV series and movies. Just think of Scarface, Frankenstein or Wild Wild West.

As digestivo, let us offer you an overview done by Play Mag – “Marriage according Playstation.”

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How culture contributes to development: an UNESCO indicator suite

Filed under: Creative Industries, θεωρία — Leave a comment
February 5, 2012

The UNESCO Culture for Development Indicator Suite (CDIS) is a pioneering research and advocacy initiative that aims to establish a set of indicators highlighting how culture contributes to development at national level fostering economic growth, and helping individuals and communities to expand their life choices and adapt to change.

Culture is a dynamic and innovative economic force at the national level as well as globally, helping to generate employment, revenues and incomes, and thus directly boosting economic growth and producing social externalities.

In 2007, these sectors accounted for an estimated 3.4% of global GDP and were worth nearly US$1.6 trillion, almost double international tourism receipts for the same year. Between 2000 and 2005 trade goods and services from the creative industries grew on average by 8.7% annually.

Moreover, the cultural and creative sectors are risk takers, investing in new talents and
new aesthetics, fostering creativity and innovation as well as ensuring cultural diversity
and choice for consumers, and produce multiple synergies and positive spill‐over effects in
areas such as stimulation of research, product and service innovation.

Translating a culture for development agenda into a programme for action will require prioritization and operationalization at the national level and its integration in donor strategies at the international level.

At the national level, this entails encouraging governments, ministries and public agencies to include culture in national development plans and related strategies while at the international level, convincing development actors to ensure that culture’s potential for development (both
transversally and as an economic sector of activity) is addressed in country papers, and policies.

In 2000, when world leaders committed to achieving the eight Millennium Development
Goals by 2015, culture was not included – despite the considerable build up of interest
and advocacy efforts during the 1990s.

Ten years later, important opportunities to revisit development approaches and to strengthen the case for culture’s value in development processes are emerging. 2010 has witnessed a number of
high‐level international conferences dedicated to culture and development (e.g. the
European Union International Seminar on Culture and Development in Girona (May 2010)
held under the Spanish Presidency).

Although the Human Development Index (HDI) (one of the most influential and widely used indices to measure human development across countries) has highlighted the efficacy of aggregate
indices and inter‐country comparisons for advocacy and putting pressure on governments
to address gaps in education, health and other social areas, this approach has proven to
be more problematic when applied to culture, which by dint of its diversity and complexity
is impossible to compare.

Financed by the Spanish Agency of International Cooperation for Development, the CDIS project runs from 2009 to 2012 and combines research, implementation test phases in up to 20 countries from all regions and expert meetings in order to ensure the pertinence and credibility of the Suite.

An important caveat is that the Indicator Suite will not provide the “definitive” picture of
culture at the country level nor will it produce policy guidelines or recommendations: this
is not its objective. Instead, its purpose is to bring the value of culture in development
processes to the foreground of national debate and discourses. In other words, although it
responds to the challenge of explaining the “how”, the UNESCO Indicator Suite on Culture
for Development recognizes that this is only the first step in a much longer process of
integrating culture in national development strategies.

In the first Human Development Report (1990), the HDI originator Mahbub al‐Haq famously

Mahbub-ul-Haq, the HDI originator, gave 5 year plan to South Korea which helped South Korea to progress rapidly

proclaimed that, “people are the wealth of nations”. Twenty years later, the UNESCO Culture for Development Indicator Suite hopes to demonstrate how and why culture effectively and sustainably enriches and adds value to this wealth. 2010 has witnessed great strides in the international recognition of culture’s value in development processes. The Culture for
Development Suite aims to add to the growing global momentum of the agenda, and to
contribute to pushing culture out of the shadows of other development issues so that it is
recognized as a development priority in its own right.

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