Organizing copresence in physical and virtual creative spaces: A comparison of two songwriting camps

Our study aims to explore the role of copresence, understood as a sense of mutual awareness that can and needs to be organized in both physical and virtual settings, in collaborative creative processes. We present insights from a comparative analysis of two ethnographies conduced in temporary spaces designed for creative collaboration, an online platform for collaborative songwriting and a songwriting camp for professional popular music songwriters. Our findings shift attention away from the spatial properties of these settings towards practices of generating and directing nimbus - a form of perceptibility - and focus as a basis for creative interaction. They also shed light on the role of lingering as a background practice that needs to be specifically facilitated by more than just the provision of an infrastructure for meeting and hanging out. Our analysis reveals that instead of seeing the physical world as a model for the design of virtual spaces, we can gain important insights about how moments of collective creativity occur in phyiscal spaces by analyzing how such interactions are fostered in virtual settings.