Page 23 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2014

AC/E digital culture ANNUAL REPORT 2014Art too has seen in the facility for network collaboration offered by the Internet a way of creating works in which the public’s contribution is the main element of the experience. The public’s artistic participation may take a great variety of forms, one that is closer to traditional passive reception, or one that is more nuclear, intervening in the design and production of the work itself. It is not accidental that Net Art began to take up the technology right from the early days of the Internet, exploring the limits of multimedia and of interactive and hypertextual language.The fusion of participative culture with technology has enabled the creation of major artistic works based on crowdsourcing, as Aaron Koblin has shown throughout his career, becoming an indisputable leader in the production of visual and audio projects with thousands of on‐line contributions. Notable amongst Koblin’s crowdsourcing projects is the animated wood in Exquisite Forest, a videoclip of Johnny Cash with thousands of drawn stills, the composition with 10,000 sheep in The Sheep Market, the $100 bill made from 10,000 drawings and the song for 2,000 voices in The Bicycle Built for Two Thousand. Precisely in many of these works, which have even been exhibited in major museums, Koblin has used the services of Mechanical Turk from Amazon, a platform designed explicitly to commission tasks from a massive public and manage their micropayments for doing them.Other works of this kind are the virtual choir for which the musician Eric Whitacre has been composing with thousands of on‐line singers (which has been through several editions), the platform SwarmSketch, which each week proposes a sketch to be drawn collectively, the Trailer Mash portal, which invites users to create new trailers for well‐ known films, or the PostSecret Web site, which for years has been publishing physical postcards in which the senders share a secret anonymously.In the field of re‐mix or mashup, so typical of digital culture, major artists have capitalised on the interest of their fans to share their creativity with them. Probably the best known of these was George LucasAC/Ein the project Star Wars Uncut, but there are other directors such as Lars Von Trier in the film Gesamt, Tim Burton and his collective story created on Twitter, Radiohead offering tracks from their songs to be remixed and Plan B by Carlos Jean in Spain, which collected 4,000 contributions and managed to put a collaborative song at Number One in the Top Forty.1Its essential feature is the participation of users and amateurs who can intervene in both the design and the production of the workPractices of thissort necessarilyinvolve asubstantialchange in thenotions ofcreativity,authorship andaesthetic meaning which canonically have been a mark of art during recent centuries. Each collective work possesses unique differences. A work that accepts all contributions on equal terms is not the same as one in which there is a selection by the principle coordinator. Neither is a work in which all the participants are aware throughout the process the same as one in which contributions are diluted in the end result. In this regard, the researcher Ioana Literat (2012) proposes an analysis of crowdsourcing participation projects in art in terms of several parameters: the importance attributed in each project to the medium (visual, acoustic or literary), the more or less directive, controlling role of the artist who brings the action about, the transparent or opaque nature of the overall result as perceived by participants, the degree of dialogic or independent interrelation between the contributions, the synthetic or multiple dimension of the final product and possible recompense for contributions.Nonetheless, not all crowdsourcing projects are initiated by artists. Cultural institutions have also seen in these dynamics a means to mobilise interested members of the public and generate greater participation in the causes they pursue. The Horizon 2013 report, devoted specifically to museums’ relationship with technology, cited crowdsourcing, together with BYOD (bring your ownWHERE WE ARE HEADING: DIGITAL TRENDS IN THE WORLD OF CULTURETHEME 2: CROWDSOURCING: SHARED CULTURE CURRENT PAGE...23