Mediating The Upper Ground and Underground: Towards Sustainable Indonesian Creative Industries

Abstraksi

The term of creative industries in Indonesia is widely adopted by various parties in this country. The official definition of Indonesian creative industries and its classification predominantly follows the DCMS United Kingdom. Creative industries in Indonesia cover the cultural industries and innovative creative industries. These industries have different characteristics in term of the way creative process works and geographical locations. The innovative creative industries represent a group of industries which exploit new technology and intellectual property to develop service and product. These industries dominantly are located in big cities which relatively close to universities, their high technology literate human resources supplier. Innovative creative industries relatively a new comer in Indonesian economic. Then, the other industries, cultural industries which covers handicraft, fashions, culinary, and art, have been rooted and developed since a long time ago as part of the local tradition. Traditional creative industries predominantly rely on the communal knowledge which has been developed since various decade ago. Although creative industries cover cultural industries and innovative creative industries which have different characteristics, however we perceive that those industries are rooted into similar creativity situation. Therefore, we propose to depict and analyze the situated creativity using anatomy of creative city framework. This framework provides in-depth understanding the way creative process works which can help to develop a policy guidance for driving the creative process and its relation to the market. The theoretical framework defines three different layers of creativity situation as underground, middle ground and upper ground; we discuss each layers and its specific characteristics, and provide new contextualized ideas of the way creative process and the market intertwined each other’s. The underground represents the exploration process in which individuals and their communities share their common deep interest to explore various ideas, life style and identity which defines their trajectory of creativity evolution processes. This underground serves roles as “a fertile soil” of creativity processes which might not directly link to the upper ground layers. In-depth and meaningful interactions amongst its members contribute the development of creative process. The upper ground layers focus on the exploitation process which contribute to integrate dispersed knowledge and its product to the market. Then, the middle ground represents the link between the upper ground and middle ground layers. In order to illustration the point of view, Yogyakarta, a cultural city, has been selected as a case study. We analyze the qualitative data which consist of interview and FGD with the local government and local creative industries. Research shows that the underground layer is constituted by local artists and cultural communities which is rooted and enriched by the local culture. Interactions amongst them enables the creative process has been evolved since several decades. The community knowledge provides them with an open innovation which enrich the creative process. At the upper ground level, industrial approach helps them to enhance and enrich their capability to deal with the economic demand. The tension between exploration and exploitation side can be mediated by the middle ground layer which require the local government to involve in.