Creativity Through Collaboration

Cultural exchange is our most vital bridge to building mutual understanding, and I am committed to making it accessible, impactful, and transformative for all.

My name is Les. I explore models of creativity. I engender play as part of collaborative experiments across cultures.

I studied art at Central Saint Martins and Goldsmiths, where — as an American — I was immersed in cross-cultural dialogues with others in my cohort. From those early collaborations, I learned that by working across culture, through improvisation, and through play, we could reach new cognitive and emotional spaces. We had to become creative problem-solvers — navigating the unknown without maps. Through collaboration, imagination becomes leverage, and the mind is set free. (Sonia Banks, 2025)

Found Objects & Improvised Assemblages

In my studio, I began experimenting with materials I found in skips and abandoned buildings — integrating them into kinetic assemblages, mutable collections of memory and motion. Each object carried a life, a history, even a personality — a kind of historicity (Philip K. Dick). These were talismans. Placing them in unplanned arrangements sparked unforeseen narratives. The less sense it made, the more I knew I was entering the generative territory of creativity.

Collaboration is a Kind of Dance and is Performance

When I was 14, I struggled to dance — I was afraid of the judgment, unsure of the rhythm. I grew up in Santa Barbara, where flamenco was part of our cultural landscape, and one day I stepped into it — into a stream of energy and light. That experience taught me that collaboration, like dance, is about participation, presence, and flow. As a performance artist, I came to understand performance time: nonlinear, expansive, timeless.

Art as Research — and a Way of Knowing

From a young age, I asked questions to understand myself through others. I studied Japanese aesthetics, Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, and Afro-Brazilian syncretic traditions — not to compare but to sense the spaces between. Dissonance, I learned, often holds the most fertile ground for insight and creative expansion. The bandwidth of collaboration widens with difference.

Creativity Is Messy

Art is not made for sterile rooms or academic scrutiny. It’s raw, evolving, reactive. Roberta Smith reminds us that art is not meant for perfection — it is meant for the moment. In my doctoral research, I asked not only “Where is the work of art?” but “When is the work of art?” And from there: Who is the author? What is the work? Where does it exist — in the mind, the studio, the shared field? And why do we keep making, even when we don’t know where it leads?

Bringing Our Authentic Selves

We trust certain experiences — a Monet Water Lilies (1914–26), Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) — to always deliver. But what about art that doesn’t meet our expectations? That disorients instead of soothes? As a sculptor, I turned to painting — precisely because I didn’t know how. It put me back into beginner’s mind — a place without compass, without judgment. This is what keeps me grounded as an artist: the permission to be lost.

Art as Exploration

I’ve been part of conversations at the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI), and the Explorers Club in New York — where artists, scent theorists, linguists, cave divers, and anthropologists cross-pollinate ideas. I choose projects not for output, but for the learning — for the creative unknowns we can mine together.

Why Collaboration? Why Now?

Because we are not separate. We are not isolated. We are already connected — to each other, and to the biosphere. As one temple leader in India told me: “Happiness is realizing we are one with each other and with nature.” That’s why FormLAB exists — to make visible those connections.

What I'm Working On Now

• Leading a project on the South Island of New Zealand to explore how First Nations artists across the Pacific conceptualize creativity.

• Coaching tech founders at Columbia University who are redefining the future of AI, creativity, and learning.

• Advising the Tamer Institute for Sustainability and Climate Change on how creativity can contribute to sustainable futures.

• Serving as a Board Member of the College Art Association, advancing creative designs for international arts exchange.

• Designing new models for sustainable arts education — where artists are lifelong learners and where curriculum is a living, creative ecosystem.

Exploring Human Connection through FormLAB

FormLAB explores how artists connect — not just in shared projects, but in conceptual, cultural, and emotional dimensions.

In a world that rewards competition and perfectionism, collaboration offers something different: presence. When artists collaborate, they enter what William Burroughs and Brion Gysin called The Third Mind (1978). It’s not about consensus — it’s about activating a third space where difference becomes catalyst. Where ambiguity is welcomed. Where listening is a form of making. We refer to this as ideascapes — fields of possibilities. At FormLAB, we’ve: connected Indigenous musicians with bioacoustic engineers; paired digital artists with rural weavers; and Co-created installations across cultures that could not have been made alone.

Our tools include: Lab installations in museums, pop up labs, Digital residencies, Improvisational Cross-cultural fieldwork, Play (basketball on the Great Wall of China). This isn’t just art production — it’s art discovery.

About Les

Les Joynes is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, educator, and coach working at the intersection of creativity, cultural exchange, and collaboration. He is the Founder of FormLAB and has led cross-cultural arts diplomacy and Fulbright-Hays projects in China, India, Mongolia, and Sri Lanka. Les began his creative journey at 15 through the lens of a 1956 Agfa Stilette Rangefinder camera and studied under Disney cinematographer Wolfgang Lauter. Les has exhibited at museums and galleries in the Americas, Europe and Asia and now is creating artistic research projects for New Zealand, India, Sri Lanka and Bhutan.

He has taught at Renmin and Peking Universities and currently serves as a research scholar at Columbia University, where he works with artists, educators, and tech innovators to rethink the future of creative learning. Les is also a Board Member of the College Art Association and a global advisor on sustainability and transdisciplinary research. His writing and work has featured in Art in America, Springer, Sculpture, Art Monthly, The Journal for Artistic Research, and coauthor of Artist as Explorer in Art as Adventure (Cambridge Scholars Press). He holds a BA (Hons) Fine Art from Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, M.Sc from Boston University and Vrije Universiteit Brussel, MA Fine Art from Goldsmiths, London, Masters in Fine Art from Musashino Art University, Tokyo, a Ph.D. from the Faculty of Art, Environment and Technology at Leeds Metropolitan University (UK), and a Post-Doctorate from the University of São Paulo (ECA/USP).