Creative practices have made a standing contribution to mobilities research. We write this article as a collective of 25 scholars and practitioners to make a provocation: to further position creative mobilities research as a fundamental contribution and component in this field. The article explores how creative forms of research-whether in the form of artworks, exhibitions, performances, collaborations, and morehas been a foundational part of shaping the new mobilities paradigm, and continues to influence its methodological, epistemological, and ontological concerns. We tour through the interwoven history of art and mobilities research, outlining five central contributions that creativity brings. Through short vignettes of each author's creative practice, we discuss how creativity has been key to the evolution and emergence of how mobilities research has expanded to global audiences of scholars, practitioners, and communities. The article concludes by highlighting the potency of the arts for lively and transdisciplinary pathways for future mobilities research in the uncertainties that lay ahead.

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In my current practice-based PhD, my video art and printmaking both informs and is informed by the research. My research on creative communities online is tied to visual image practice within the virtual world of Second Life; however, I also bridge outside of the virtual space to reconsider the dynamics between realities and technologies. This approach rejects “digital exceptionalism” by playing with how the digital, analog and digitized have become defined, and by reworking their historic meanings across time.  My video art practice is experimental rather than based on narrative or a simple record. The latter is what “machinima,” the name given to videos made within games worlds, has mainly become. My work uses found collaboration, where people make work available for reuse without knowing who might use it, or for what purpose. This is different from conventional collaboration, planned by a group of people with shared vision. Found collaboration uses material that crosses both time and space, deliberately playing with challenges, trying to make new connections, giving old ideas a new significance, and exploring non-realistic glitch and error.  “Found collaboration” depends on the spaces outside of copyright, in particular Creative Commons and public domain. Creative Commons allows the work to have designated conditions for reuse, with an obligation for users to credit and apply similar conditions to the new work that has been made; ethical rather than commercial concerns prevail. Public domain allows free use of material, though the extension of copyright for commercial reasons has restricted its breadth.

All images in the illustrations are copyright of Tess Baxter, sometimes under the pseudonym of Tizzy Canucci. The overlaid archive images within them are in the public domain; Illustrations 1-6, The City (Steiner and van Dyke) and Illustration 7, The Great Northern Sea Route (Frolenko). Illustrations 2 and 7 have been published as Creative Commons BY-NC-SA (Creative Commons).

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