…imagine if everybody
is online, if anybody makes webpages, it will become overwhelming.
Who would search for grains of gold in all this shit?
1)
- Alexei Shulgin, 1997
|
When the dot-com bubble burst in
March 2000, the love affair with dot-com start-ups ended and the
realisation set in that online commerce is fragile; it exists
in a consumer capitalist world where value is based on immaterial
abstractions and speculation.2)
In 2004, O'Reilly Media, a media company specialising in computing
and internet publishing, did what many savvy businesses have done
when faced with bad publicity and lack of investment – they
rebranded. Except, instead of rebranding their own company, O'Reilly
rebranded the entire internet and called it 'Web 2.0'. This wasn't
the old, unreliable dot-com that could skyrocket and collapse
in less than a year, this was a new web that was safe for investment
again.3) This time, instead
of dot-coms laboriously creating the immaterial product or content
that users were consuming, users would create the content. The
users would invest/volunteer their time and effort in the site
which in turn would create revenue out of the user. When early
internet artist Alexei Shulgin made his 'grains of gold' comment
on the Nettime mailing list in 1997, the small community of active
online participants possessed the niche programming and computer
skills to set up their own websites. Non-programmers who were
lucky enough to already have access to the internet did not, for
the most part, have the tools to create websites or web content.
Shulgin was part of the net.art movement which included Vuk Cosic,
jodi.org, Olia Lialina, and Heath Bunting. Net.art was a consciously
avant-garde movement that celebrated the internet as a space for
democratisation of art whose members created web-based works that
played with the forms and building blocks of HTML, the dominant
coding language of the internet.4)
The underlying elitism of the net.art group is evident in Shulgin's
statement, but it is, perhaps, not surprising given its context.
The World Wide Web was quite small in 1997, and people formed
communities online that resembled villages where everyone knew
each other and maintained an intense insular dialogue. The internet
art community maintained much of their dialogue on the Nettime
mailing list where they shared and discussed projects and linked
to each other's pages. Mass participation, internet memes, militant
anonymity, algorithms and AdWords did not yet exist in the way
we experience them on the internet today.5)
In fact, at the time Shulgin's comment was posted on the Nettime
mailing list, Google's founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were
only just registering the domain name google.com for their Stanford-PhD-incubated
start-up search engine based on an entirely new paradigm of searching
– the relationships between websites.6)
Seven years later O'Reilly was rebranding the internet and ushering
in an era of mass user content creation – the mass production
of "shit" that Shulgin feared had begun.
Web 2.0 can be found everywhere
in art today, both on and offline. The Web 2.0 ideas of 'social
networking' and 'crowdsourcing' have filtered
through to the art world where artists are, whether consciously
or not, using Web 2.0 principles and forms in their work. This
is not surprising given that, historically, many science and engineering
ideas have started out as highly specialised knowledge yet have
become culturally embedded in the wake of being taken up by artists,
political activists, philosophers and social scientists. One example
of this, in the early days of computing, is how the term 'systems'
and the generalisation of 'systems theory' became
part of the fabric of 1960s culture. In his essay, "Systems
Upgrade: Conceptual Art and the Recoding of Information, Knowledge
and Technology," Michael Corris discusses the rise of system-based
thinking outside the realm of math and science in the 1960s:
Systems theory, in particular, maintained
a strong hold on the 1960s imagination. Typically associated
with the aims and objectives of the military, or corporate
management, systems theory was first promoted in a generalised
form 'capable of addressing patterns of human life'…
The concept of a 'system', which became part of the lingua
franca of the 1960s, was not destined to remain the exclusive
property of a technologically minded elite of engineers,
scientists and mathematicians. In the hands of intellectuals,
artists and political activists, it would become a key
ideological component of the 'cultural revolution'. 7) |
Systems art and many types of conceptual
art are programme-based art practices that don't necessarily make
use of literal computers but nevertheless utilise the logic and
language of systems, computing and programming. Sol LeWitt said
in 1967, "The idea becomes a machine that makes the art."
8) Despite the perhaps misleading
use of the term 'machine', LeWitt's statement gets to the heart
of programmatic thinking – the art is the output of a series
of directives. 9)
Similarly, Web 2.0's forms
can be seen in contemporary practices, both online and offline.
Although collectives and participatory art existed well before
the invention of the internet and certainly before Web 2.0, there
are a number of characteristics that distinguish participatory
art in the Web 2.0 era from the participatory and collective activities
of the past. This paper will focus particularly on the use of
'crowdsourcing' in artistic practice. Despite its
formal definition as a kind of digital sweatshop, 'crowdsourcing'
has become a buzzword that simply means seeking creative input
from the networked crowd online. Artists engaged in participatory
art practices have, whether consciously or unconsciously, harnessed
the formal characteristics of crowdsourcing for their projects
in recent years. Some of these projects have their roots in the
forms of earlier, more collaborative web practices such as 'open
source' but nevertheless venture into the changing landscape
of crowdsourcing.
Web 2.0, at least as a marketing
term, is widely accepted as having been 'born' in 2004. Digg,
Facebook and Flickr were launched in 2004, and YouTube in 2005.
A few other popular Web 2.0 projects came a few years before:
Blogger was launched in 1999, Wikipedia in 2001, and last.fm in
2002. Only now are more sophisticated voices of critique outlining
some of the many problematic aspects of the Web 2.0 revolution.
Only six years in critical theory terms is admittedly
a very short span of time, but the rate at which the web is developing
and the rate at which the way we live is altered to accommodate
these new technological tools means that in less than a decade
the cultural shifts and pitfalls are ripe for critical attention.
While most of the early commentary on Web 2.0 comes from present
and former Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and journalists, a niche
area of critique has emerged from the likes of online peer reviewed
journal First Monday, Mute Magazine, and the
Institute of Network Cultures. 10)
Artists have picked up on trends
in labour and production in society in general and these trends
can be seen in works of art that encourage participation and collaboration,
effectively outsourcing labour and production to a group of participants
and ultimately using them as a medium. By utilising the forms
and tools provided by Web 2.0, artworks are subject to some of
the same critical issues of Web 2.0 generally. Two aspects of
Web 2.0 criticism are particularly relevant to this discussion:
the increasing role of the amateur in creative production and
issues around exploitation and dehumanisation in the Web 2.0 shift.
Without acknowledgement that the problematic aspects of Web 2.0
are embedded in the form of Web 2.0, artworks utilising these
forms reproduce these issues as well. In this paper I will discuss
several works of art that are alike in form and aesthetic to Web
2.0 crowdsourcing. Taking into consideration how the critical
discussion of participatory works of art has been sidelined by
discussions of ethics, it is evident that Web 2.0 technologies
have inspired a false sense of utopia among artists who are often
using Web 2.0 forms to create something that outwardly looks like
democracy, sharing and community but is actually an artificial,
hierarchically imposed façade. Alternatively, several more
successful works that take on the forms of Web 2.0 contain ideas
and content that compliments and problematises these forms, enriching
them and creating additional layers of meaning.
WEB 2.0 AND PARTICIPATORY
ART
Origins of and issues around
participatory art
Several theorists describe the development
of participation in art today in terms of art's ties to religion
where the art object has historically served a function in communities
and religious practice. Boris Groys, in his essay for the catalogue
of the SFMOMA exhibition The Art Of Participation, argues that
the secular art object is in a vulnerable position in the modern
world, subject to arbitrarily defined aesthetic value assigned
to it by a passive public who no longer expect an art object to
deliver any practical or spiritual function.11)
He states, "For this reason many modern artists have tried
to regain common ground with their audiences by enticing viewers
out of their passive roles, bridging the comfortable aesthetic
distance that allows uninvolved viewers to judge an artwork impartially
from a secure, external perspective."12)
Likewise, Nicolas Bourriaud discusses participatory art or, as
he terms it "relational" art, as part of a "production
of relations," where "works were first situated in a
transcendent world, within which art aimed at introducing ways
of communicating with the deity."13)
Bourriaud sees the art of today as having established a different
set of relations, he explains:
After the area of relations between
humankind and deity and then between mankind and the object,
artistic practice is now focused upon the sphere of inter-human
relations… all manner of encounters and relational
inventions today represent aesthetic objects likely to
be looked at as such, with pictures and sculptures regarded
here merely as specific cases of a production of forms
with something other than a simple aesthetic consumption
in mind. 14) |
The desire to root the origins
of participatory art in devotional art is perhaps partially
due to the contrast evident in the departure of participatory
art such as Fluxus from its immediate predecessor, Greenbergian
Modernist painting, which the viewer could only assess from
a vast aesthetic distance.15)
When faced with this drastic change in tactic, the apparent
re-emergence of art involving community, on hiatus since the
secularisation of art, becomes more plausible.
If, in the process of art's secularisation,
the art object has become disconnected from religion and community,
and therefore the viewer, then participatory art, in order to
bring the viewer back into proximity in a secular world needed
a secular ideology to bind participants together; this is often
manifest in political ideologies. Groys describes the connection
between religion and participatory art today in this way:
Religious community is thus replaced
by a political movement in which artists and their audiences
both participate. That said, the practices that are relevant
to the genealogy of participatory art are chiefly those
that not only subscribed thematically to a sociopolitical
goal, but also collectivized their core structures and
means of production. 16) |
Participatory art is often based
around an active socio-political ideology or agenda. Due to
the ethical dimension to these works, critics often shy away
from defining criteria by which to judge the relevance and artistic
value of these works. Theorist Anthony Downey states, "Collaborative
art practices, in short, appear to be judged on the basis of
the ethical efficacy underwriting the artist's relationship
to his or her collaborators rather than what makes these works
interesting as art."17)
Downey draws from Claire Bishop who states that:
…the urgency of this political
task has led to a situation in which socially collaborative
practices are all perceived to be equally important artistic
gestures of resistance: there can be no failed, unsuccessful,
unresolved or boring works of socially collaborative art,
because all are equally essential to the task of strengthening
the social bond.18) |
According to Bishop, this has
led to a situation where criticism of participatory works merely
judges how successfully collaboration has been achieved, "the
degree to which they supply good or bad models of collaboration."
19)
One method by which these types
of works can be more rigorously critiqued is by interrogating
the role of the individual author in the work. Bishop argues
that ethics-based critique rates the artist highly for relinquishing
authorship, "And this may explain, to some degree, why
socially engaged art has been largely exempt from art criticism:
emphasis is shifted away from the disruptive specificity of
a given work and onto a generalized set of moral precepts."20)
Bishop goes on to describe the ways in which artists such as
Francis Alÿs, Thomas Hirschorn, and Phil Collins create
their work without sacrificing themselves and their aesthetic
and socio-political underpinnings for the sake of ethics. Bishop
states that, currently in criticism of participatory art, "…self-sacrifice
is triumphant. The artist should renounce authorial presence
in favour of allowing participants to speak through him or her.
This self-sacrifice is accompanied by the idea that art should
extract itself from the 'useless' domain of aesthetics and be
fused with social praxis."21)
By dissolving authorship, we lose aesthetic and socio-political
considerations in favour of ethics. The rehearsal of ethics
in contemporary art effectively creates a dialogue without any
meaningful content within that dialogue.
Groys, on the other hand, argues
that authorial power may actually be increased in the dissolution
of authorship within participatory art. He states:
One might also claim that the enactment
of this self-abdication, this dissolution of the self
into the masses, grants the author the possibility of
controlling the audience – whereby the viewer forfeits
his secure external position, his aesthetic distance from
the artwork, and thus becomes not just a participant but
also an integral part of the artwork. In this way participatory
art can be understood not only as a reduction, but also
as an extension, of authorial power.22) |
If, as Groys suggests, the artist/author
has the possibility of controlling the audience through making
it an integral part of the work, and if at the same time the
artist is rehearsing an abdication from not only individual
creation but also authorial responsibility, this indeed grants
the artist the ability to pull the strings in a dialogue devoid
of meaningful content. The more artists try to artificially
create situations in which the impetus and responsibility for
the project lies with the audience, the more these interaction
become a kind of re-enactment of dialogues and communities that
usually develops organically and not as a result of top down
organisation.
Rudolf Frieling, on the other hand, takes a more pragmatic viewpoint
on the subject of artistic authorship in participatory work,
asserting:
Ultimately, if artists wish to operate
within the art world, they will inevitably be perceived
as the ones responsible for the work, even if they involve
collaborators, let others take on the actual production,
utilize online networks, or – and this is our specific
focus here – court unknown participants.23) |
Due to the embedded mechanisms
of capital and value within the art world, artwork has to effectively
be attributed to a known author in order to be fully assimilated
therein. For this reason, many artists who operate anonymously
or semi-anonymously within a larger art collective create works
that are not valuated or commodified by the art world, a situation
they often welcome; but this absence from the art market often
results in these works being ignored by critics, theorists,
academics and other figures who bring attention to and canonise
artworks.
Crowdsourcing
These issues of authorship, participation
and ethics are particularly relevant in work that employs the
forms of social networking and crowdsourcing, whether that be
web-based, non-web-based or somewhere between the two. Jeff
Howe, who coined the term in Wired magazine in 2006, describes
the evolution of crowdsourcing as a means to harness cheap labour:
For the last decade or so, companies
have been looking overseas, to India or China, for cheap
labor…Technological advances in everything from
product design software to digital video cameras are breaking
down the cost barriers that once separated amateurs from
professionals…The labor isn't always free, but it
costs a lot less than paying traditional employees. It's
not outsourcing; it's crowdsourcing.24) |
Howe utilised several examples
in his original article and several follow up articles that
pointed to crowdsourcing being particularly useful in the creative
industries, as a means to circumvent professional photographers,
designers and other creatives. 25)
Daren C. Brabham is one of the
leading researchers into crowdsourcing; he states that:
Crowdsourcing works when an organization
has a problem to solve or a product to design, and the
organization opens that challenge up to an online community
with specific solution parameters… the sponsoring
organization eventually takes ownership of the ideas and
puts them to use.26) |
This seems to be the next logical
step for capitalism online. Web 2.0 sites like YouTube make
vast amounts of money through user generated content that is
provided without any recompense, but YouTube doesn't direct
its users what kind of content to make. In order for a company
to put parameters on user creativity, they only have to offer
a very small monetary reward if any reward at all, often in
the form of an open call contest, which means that only one
worker is paid for a winning design/idea.
Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher
employed crowdsourcing in their project Learning To Love
You More (2002-2009). July and Fletcher made a list of
assignments to do various tasks such as "5. Recreate an
object from someone's past" [Illus. 1], "11. Photograph
a scar and write about it" [Illus. 2], and "30. Take
a picture of strangers holding hands" [Illus. 3], and put
out an open call for people to complete the assigned tasks and
send documentation in to the Learning To Love You More website.27)
Yuri Ono collaborated with July and Fletcher and maintained
the website. In an interview with Indigest Magazine, Ono was
asked about what kind of tasks participants were willing to
do. She responded:
When we ask more from a participant,
like grow a garden, and take pictures of the garden, over
time. People just don't want to bother with that. They
don't want to spend the time to do it. We go for a happy
medium, not assignments where its really easy, but not
ones that ask for too much. Generally we like assignments
that try to involve the person in their community, or
asks them to share themselves with us.28) |
Ono seems to suggest that the
same thing that motivates someone to post a video on YouTube
is what motivates people to participate in an art project like
Learning To Love You More: self-interest. If the tasks
in July and Fletcher's project did not give their participants
the opportunity to broadcast something about themselves to others,
it's unlikely they would have been as eager to participate.
Miranda July explains that one of the intentions of the project
was to promote a means by which participants could be encouraged
to perform self-meditation, making the participation in the
project a kind of therapeutic activity. In an interview on the
project, she states, "…we started creating assignments
for the general public that are very exacting and yet intended
to lead people back to their own experience."29)
The issue inherent in July and Fletcher's mission statement
is that it does not mesh with the fact that participants are
then asked to submit documentation of their assignment to be
published on the Learning To Love You More website.30)
The notion of broadcast seems to be incidental or functional
within the structure of the project although it is effectively
the most central and necessary feature of the piece.
In the utilisation of an ostensibly
non-hierarchical model of participation, July and Fletcher seem
to be rejecting the notion that they have a point of view –
a point of view that is clearly expressed in the structuring
of their assignments. The assignments suggest a desire for people
to recognise or scrutinise the mundane, everyday objects and
events of life, to reflect on memories and mortality, and to
make things by hand. The assignments also communicate a palpable
sense of nostalgia. This point of view is well suited to using
participants because what material could be more everyday than
the stranger passing by? Using participants does not, however,
somehow break down the hierarchical structure of the piece as
a work of art. When asked by Allan McCollum in an interview,
"... You don't simply think about artists versus non-artists,
there's a whole continuum you engage that's in between. You
seem to ignore the hierarchy of various levels of expertise
that most people describe. But how do you feel about this hierarchy?"
Fletcher responds, "I recognize that the hierarchy exists,
but I also try to act like it doesn't exist because it's part
of my own morality or something. I believe that hierarchy is
wrong. And so I try to act in a way that it doesn't exist."31)
Despite the seductive creativity
of the assignments created by July and Fletcher, despite how
they capture the imagination and evoke a desire to participate,
they are still assignments performed by the general public for
July and Fletcher, under their banner and to their credit. It
is often argued that the participants in these activities are
volunteers and therefore, how could it be exploitative? The
underlying exploitation here is similar to the exploitation
that occurs on Web 2.0 sites generally.
Looking at crowdsourcing from
the point of view of corporations, one of the key ways in which
the Web 2.0 model differs from the Web 1.0 model is that Web
2.0 sites no longer produce the pages that make up their websites.
The likes of Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube all operate through
user-generated content. While ostensibly providing a service/platform
and facilitating one of the pillars of the "new" web
– sharing – these sites are also accruing vast amounts
of wealth from free labour. Web 1.0 websites employ some or
many people to create the content or products that draw users
to their sites, but Web 2.0 has only had to create and maintain
a platform from which users build the site. These user videos,
pictures and pages create more traffic on the site and bring
in more advertising revenue, and these users do so happily and
without any compensation. Andrew Keen, a former Silicon Valley
entrepreneur turned Web 2.0 critic, briefly touches upon the
situation where web corporations are exploiting the free labour
of Web 2.0 users in his book The Cult of The Amateur:
Indeed, Larry Page and Sergei [sic]
Brin, the multi-billionaire founders of Google, are the
true Web 2.0 plutocrats – they have figured out
how to magically transform other people's free content
into a multi-billion-dollar advertising machine.32) |
Although Keen doesn't expand on
this concept much more than citing a few examples of websites
that employ this tactic, the situation described could be read
as the ultimate Marxist nightmare. While Marx thought religion
was the opiate of the masses, Web 2.0 has shown itself to be
just as powerful a sedative, keeping Web 2.0 users often blissfully
entertained or occupied, unaware of the underlying exploitation
they are being subjected to on Web 2.0 sites.33)
This is essentially digital outsourcing of labour and production.
We are increasingly moving towards
a world where it is impossible to resist becoming part of the
"crowd" in all walks of life. A person who has never
watched a video on YouTube or participated in a social networking
site is an increasingly excluded person from society and our
shared global culture. It is now necessary to acquire cultural
capital through participation in Web 2.0.
Furthermore, the crowd has the
power to price out the professional in the Web 2.0 world. In
a 2009 follow up article on crowdsourcing by Jeff Howe in Wired,
he contemplates the ways in which professional designers are
being priced out by "spec" design crowdsourcing where
many do the job but only one gets paid for the chosen design.
Howe quotes design blog The Logo Factor as saying: "The
folks that run these outfits have managed to figure out a way
to get thousands of people — some skilled enough to earn
a decent living — to work for them gratis. It's an amazing
sleight-of-hand."34)
While this is happening in creative industries, it might be
argued that the comparison doesn't carry over to the art world.
But if artists like July and Fletcher are uncritically creating
work in the same form as the crowdsourcing they see in the world,
they are creating the same unethical relationship as corporations
who utilise crowdsourcing. Seen through the lens of ethics and
whether or not a good model of participation is created, it
can be asserted that Learning to Love You More is essentially
a bad model (with the best intensions) by virtue of its crowdsourced
structure. The aesthetic of Learning To Love Your More is based
on this structure of participation, and it is impossible to
consider the success of the piece without considering whether
it created the democratic, open model of participation to which
it aspires. The concept of the piece is confused in that the
aesthetic form does not communicate in the way July and Fletcher
intend it to. That is, they are attempting to create an empowering,
self-reflective activity for their participants but are instead
expressing their point of view through people, taking up the
omnipotent role described by Groys where, by dissolving themselves
into the masses, they are able to control the audience. People
are no longer participants but instead become a medium to be
moulded into whatever form the artist conceives while the artist
relinquishes responsibility over the content produced.
In a slightly different model
of participation, Ele Carpenter's project Open Source Embroidery
(2005-present) draws a parallel between open source software
development and traditional needlework crafts. Carpenter invited
participants through workshops and online social networks to
create one hexagonal piece of the 216 web safe hexadecimal code
colour quilt [Illus. 4].35)
Carpenter sees needlework, in which the back of the embroidery
shows how the pattern was constructed, as similar to open source
software/coding, where the ability to look at the 'back end'
or hidden coding structure allows developers to learn, tweak
and share the code.36) The
resultant pieces of Carpenter's open source quilt were displayed
both with their front end design [Illus. 5] and back end mechanics
[Illus. 6]. 'Open source' and 'crowdsourcing' are similar concepts
but have been distinguished by academics as essentially separate
entities. Brabham states that, "Wikis and open source software
production are not considered crowdsourcing because there is
no sponsoring organization at the top directing the labor of
individuals in the online community."37)
While Carpenter's project can be seen as a kind of idealisation
or demonstration of open sourcing in that it attempts to rekindle
the kind of open exchange, sharing and community that grows
organically in knitting circles and software development communities,
the project veers towards crowdsourcing in that Carpenter essentially
assigns Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) that are then performed
to specification, allowing for creativity within set parameters.38)
The nature of the art world places a natural hierarchy on participatory
art. This usually consists of an artist with an idea that is
put forth to some form of public for contribution. Unlike open
source software development, where participation is motivated
by entertainment and is essentially a hobby for highly skilled
amateur or professional programmers, crowdsourcing is done by
an unskilled or amateur public who are often motivated by money
or professional development.39)
While the hierarchical structure of artist initiated participatory
projects is not new to the Web 2.0 era, the tendency of assigning
tasks for the public to complete seems to echo the form and
role the public are increasingly taking up in the highly networked
world of Web 2.0.
It's easy to look at Carpenter's
project from the perspective of ethics. Carpenter herself frames
the project in terms of ethics: "The OSE [Open Source Embroidery]
workshops are aimed at people with craft of programming and/or
HTML skills to come together and explore the ethics and principles
of their practice."40)
It seems then that Carpenter is trying to create, as Clare Bishop
phrases it, a "good model" of collaboration. The best
Carpenter can do in this case, however, is attempt to recreate
a type of collaboration that is difficult if not impossible
to authentically form given the hierarchical relationship between
artist and participant. Essentially, open source says 'Do what
you want with it', crowdsource says 'Do this task or solve this
problem based on these parameters'. Open source not only invites
a higher level of creative thinking but also dispenses with
traditional ideas of authorship and copyright. Many people who
use open source see it as a more just means of distribution,
a sentiment echoed by Carpenter in her discussion of new media
and participation:
…new media didn't invent participation;
people who work with social networks on the ground already
knew how much time and genuine involvement is needed to
facilitate meaningful interaction. New media seems to
have pulled 'participation' into the culture of 'cool'
technology. But the most radical impact is the politicized
culture of digital media testing the legal and ethical
frameworks of production and distribution.41) |
Carpenter highlights an important
element of the role of digital media in society in that it has,
to a large extent, called the established hierarchy of production
and distribution into question.
From outward appearances, the
file sharers, social networkers, YouTube video remixers, meme
makers and content appropriators of the Web 2.0 world are operating
against traditional capitalism – utilising content with
a blatant disregard to copyright and ownership, creating a digital
utopia of "free". On closer inspection, these are
the forces that are tearing down the previous model of capitalism
and re-enforcing the new, more adaptable version of global capitalism
in which even global labour is free or nearly free – not
just for impoverished nations but for the richest nations as
well. Lev Manovich argues that this remixing tendency is due
to the extent to which creativity has been invaded by capitalist
media. He says:
…given that a significant percentage
of user-generated content either follows templates and
conventions established by the professional entertainment
industry or directly reuses professionally produced content…
does this mean that people's identities and imagination
are now even more firmly colonized by commercial media
than in the twentieth century?42) |
For example, if a Web 2.0 user
chose to use a new social networking service that none of their
friends or acquaintances were on, there would be no point unless
they could convince their friends to use it as well. Web 2.0
services are contingent upon social networks which in turn bind
users to a certain type of creative output and communication.
Crowdsourcing then becomes a way
for the capitalist machine to reappropriate an idea similar
to open source or wikis or digital sharing/shareware and make
it work for the production of capital. Crowdsourcing, in a way,
is the capitalist method of harnessing the digital concept of
"free". Whereas the music industry, film industry
and countless other content producers have spent years trying
to combat the growing societal belief that digital music, movies
and other digital files, as well as websites and online newspapers
should be free for users to consume and share, the rise of crowdsourcing
suggests that businesses can conversely assert that labour should
be free (or nearly free) as well. That's not to say that somehow
we are working towards a digital communism where everything
will be shared. As crowdsourcing becomes more acceptable, models
are put into place to make paying for digital content more palatable
i.e. the ease of use of iTunes, its assimilation with all Apple
products. So "free", a revolutionary idea in the digital
realm that started out with those who were operating outside
of the traditional conventions of consumer capitalism online,
is pulled away from the revolutionaries and integrated into
the larger capitalist project on the internet.
This is relevant to Carpenter's
piece in that, by appropriating the idea of open source and
utilising it in the art world context, she is unwittingly performing
an activity that is similar to the larger project of capitalist
forces online. Just as Web 2.0 entrepreneurs have appropriated
"free", Carpenter has appropriated "open source"
in the creation of something that more closely resembles crowdsourcing.
If both the participants and the quilt are the materials that
Carpenter is utilising in her curatorial project, then she is
able to mould them into a form that resembles open source software
and quilting circles but actually contains the hierarchical
formation of curator/artist-led project that clearly expresses
the artist's point of view rather than empowers amateurs.
The issue in both Carpenter's
project and July/Fletcher's project is that both clearly have
objectives and points of view that they are expressing through
their work but abdicate responsibility for the contents of their
work by using a crowdsourcing model, creating a situation where
they self-sacrifice in favour of the "noble amateur"
– Andrew Keen's term for the idealised role of the amateur
in Web 2.0. Keen is the most well-known and well publicised
figure in the critique of Web 2.0 on grounds that its promotion
of amateurism is destroying our cultural fabric. His incendiary
2007 book The Cult of The Amateur contains a passionate
argument against the online movement that he sees as ushering
in the demise of experts, trained professional and "cultural
gatekeepers"– in journalism, music, filmmaking, etc
– in lieu of Web 2.0-empowered amateur bloggers, MySpace
garage bands and YouTube webcammers.43)
While Keen's argument is incredibly problematic and largely
unsubstantiated, his declaration that the increasingly amateur
nature of cultural output in Web 2.0 is taking over from the
hierarchies of publishing, production, etc, is worth considering
in the context of art.
Andrew Keen's book is largely
filled with nostalgia. He prefers printed newspapers, for example,
merely because they have been around a long time, and he unfairly
labels all internet information as "unreliable or biased",
ignoring the longstanding tradition of political bias in printed
newspapers, especially in his native UK.44)
Despite the preponderance of unsubstantiated arguments against
Web 2.0 that can be found in Keen's book, he nonetheless hints
at one of the more intriguing intricacies of Web 2.0 'democracy'
– that the democracy is perhaps an illusion:
Wikipedia, which is almost single-handedly
killing the traditional information business, has only a
small handful of full-timers, in addition to Jimmy Wales.
It brings to mind Sir Thomas More's much-quoted remark from
his 1515 satire Utopia, where, in reaction to the Enclosure
Laws that banned the peasantry from the fields of the great
estates, he wrote that 'sheep are devouring men.' Five hundred
years later, in the Web 2.0 world, computers are consuming
journalists with the same results: Many people are losing
their livelihood, and a few lucky souls – landowning
aristocrats in More's day and executives at companies like
MySpace, YouTube, and Google in our own – are getting
very, very rich.45) |
As 'professionals' lose their
jobs and companies make more and more money off of amateur content,
Web 2.0 executives are the elite group that wins out. This is
the point at which Keen's argument that Web 2.0 is ushering
in the demise of elitism and hierarchy in favour bland amateurism
falls apart. As he himself points out, the "noble amateur"
and democracy online are a ruse that only appears to be elevating
the amateur. While traditional hierarchies were at least transparent,
the more insidious hierarchies of Web 2.0 are hidden under a
façade of democracy, masquerading as user empowerment.
In light of this, Carpenter and
July/Fletcher are actually reasserting their expert status and
power because their projects are largely the top down crowdsourcing
model of participation rather than any kind of real collaboration.
Fletcher's secret hope that his work will effect social change
may be Carpenter's secret hope as well. Although both would
probably admit that very little real attitudinal change comes
from their work, they both hold onto the social space as the
key site of interest. Carpenter states her intention as, "I
wanted to create a space where both the expert and the amateur
could come together within a critical context."46)
It's an interesting notion, placing experts and amateurs in
dialogue, but when the project is dictated from such a singular
point of view and with obvious social goals in mind, it becomes
a dictate to share and be a community when sharing and community
are things that develop organically, not from artificially imposed
dictates or parameters. One of the main aims of Carpenter's
project is to celebrate the amateur. She states:
I like the idea of folksonomy, where meta-data
classification is defined by 'folk' rather than curators.
The Internet has enabled folk and amateur communities to
network across distance. Folk culture represents a community
of interest defined by its users. The principle of openness
and interactivity on the net and the question of how to
sort and filter data has led to new social forms of taxonomy
sometimes called 'folksonomy'. Social tagging values the
'amateur' perspective, not as unprofessional, but as rooted
in everyday experience.47) |
Extrapolating from both July/Fletcher's
comments and Carpenter's comments it becomes apparent that artists
are interested in the forms they see growing online –
the open source and hobbyist communities that develop and fluctuate
online. It seems that they are attempting to create a platform
from which these activities can happen in an art context. However,
these artists are doing more than merely creating a platform,
they are recreating digital sharing/collaboration from a hierarchical
art world perspective while abdicating responsibility for the
content of their work.
In the rush to celebrate the supposedly
democratic and open principles of the internet, artists are
eager to organise "collaborative" projects in the
spirit of early internet hobbyist communities and open source
development groups. Even offline or semi-offline projects often
emulate these forms. By celebrating the amateur, these artists
simultaneously exploit the amateur and undermine their utopian
mission while elevating themselves to a saintly position of
self-sacrifice in order to empower the people. This is the unfortunate
aspect of crowdsourcing participatory work – the artists
rarely set out to exploit their participants, on the contrary,
many of these artists espouse their desire to empower their
participants. By utilising the forms of Web 2.0 uncritically,
however, these artists unwittingly mimic the problems and issues
associated with Web 2.0.
And so, a conspiracy theory: what
if Facebook was set up to collect data for market researchers
and advertisers? What if every user's profile is just a survey
that gathers demographic information as well as tastes and interests?
What if Facebook users have voluntarily linked themselves to
their peer group who have also filled in this survey? Would
this not be the greatest repository of marketing information
that ever existed? And Facebook users have willingly given Facebook's
owners/advertisers this information for free.
While the Web 2.0 conspiracy theory
is certainly a simplification of the motives and goals of both
web designer and user, the resultant situation described is
an undeniable reality: Web 2.0 sites like Facebook have amassed
some of the most robust and complex databases ever seen. Jaron
Lanier, author of You Are Not A Gadget, another critique
of Web 2.0 from a Silicon Valley pioneer, seems to agree with
the implication of the conspiracy theory, that Facebook was
never meant for the user:
…one must remember that the customers
of social networks are not the members of those networks.
The real customer is the advertiser of the future…
The whole artifice, the whole idea of fake friendship, is
just bait laid by the lords of the clouds to lure hypothetical
advertisers." |
Following this logic, Web 2.0
users have been duped into giving away valuable marketing data
by the seductive powers of media.
Not only have they been blinded to the marketing database they're
building but also to the dehumanisation that occurs when fitting
people into the strict confines of computer data.
The database has fundamentally
changed the way people experience media and life. Media theorist
Geert Lovink states, "We no longer watch films or TV; we
watch databases. Instead of well-defined programmes, we search
one list after another."48)
The confines of life in the database are evident in the lack
of nuance in networked relationships. Lanier attributes this
to the very properties of computing:
The binary character at the core of software
engineering tends to reappear at higher levels. It is far
easier to tell a program to run or not to run, for instance,
than it is to tell it to sort-of run. In the same way, it
is easier to set up a rigid representation of human relationships
on digital networks: on a typical social networking site,
either you are designated to be in a couple or you are single
(or you are in one of a few other pre-determined states
of being) – and that reduction of life is what gets
broadcast between friends all the time. What is communicated
between people eventually becomes their truth. Relationships
take on the troubles of software engineering.49) |
Lanier attempts to expose the
limitations on human expression and interaction that occur when
computer technology is used to plug humanity into databases.
Ultimately, Lanier argues, the database model of human identity
and interaction becomes the norm and the nuance of human life
outside of quantifiable data is lost.
In Postproduction, Bourriaud
writes:
In a universe of products for sale, preexisting
forms, signals already emitted, buildings already constructed,
paths marked out by their predecessors, artists no longer
consider the artistic field (and here one could add television,
cinema, or literature) a museum containing works that must
be cited or 'surpassed,' as the modernist ideology of originality
would have it, but so many storehouses filled with tools
that should be used, stockpiles of data to manipulate and
present. 50) |
If we are looking at collections
of data in artworks, Lanier would argue that the artwork is
then becoming a reduction. Bourriaud privileges "use"
or "function" in Postproduction and databases
are indeed effective ways to reduce unwieldy nuances of human
relationships into useful binaries. With data as a medium, there
are fewer accidents, elements and meanings that can't be predicted
or controlled.
|
|
Evan Roth and Ben Engebreth's crowdsourced
project White Glove Tracking (2007) [Illus. 7] is
another instance in which the forms of crowdsourcing and open
source are evident in what could possibly be a textbook example
of postproduction.51) The
piece contains two layers of participation, the original more
menial crowdsourced task of isolating the white gloved hand
of Michael Jackson in the video of his televised performance
of Billie Jean, and then the open source/crowdsourced level
where programmers possessing a higher skill set were able
to use the data collected via the crowd to programme new videos
and remixes utilising Michael Jackson's isolated white glove.
For example, one programmer used the data to make Jackson's
hand abnormally large throughout the performance [Illus. 8],
one created an effect where Jackson's hand is on fire [Illus.
9], etc.52) This can be
seen as a kind of comparison study of crowdsourcing and open
sourcing within the confines of the piece. This comparison
is interesting in that it locates the difference between crowdsourcing
and the use of open source materials. The level of calculation
in the use of each in relation to the pop culture subject
matter makes the exercise purposefully inane. The inane content
serves to highlight the distinction between the first level
and second level of participation. The labour of the first
wave of participation is unskilled but the task is quickly
achieved using a large number of people. The labour of the
second wave, by contrast, is skilled and therefore only a
small number of people are willing and able to participate.
On the other hand, the inane content of the piece works against
it as well, and it becomes an exercise in use of the technological
tools available to crowdsource. With each new technological
tool that becomes available, pioneers see the opportunities
to utilise it for the creation of art. However, many artists
create work that merely celebrates the new tool rather than
create meaningful form or content with it.
Sharing and Copyleft in Crowdsourced
Art
Several artists' works not only
utilise various forms of crowdsourcing but also simultaneously
question the existing Web 2.0 structures where the spoils of
group labour are generally accumulated by the corporation or
artist who facilitates the project, rather than shared by the
community.
Aaron Koblin has created a body of
work dealing with crowdsourcing and its problematic elements.
In his piece The Sheep Market (2006), Koblin used Amazon's
Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing tool to solicit 10,000 Turkers,
the site's online crowdsourced workforce, to draw a picture
of a sheep facing to the left for 0.02 ($USD) [Illus.
10].53) In his piece
Ten Thousand Cents (2008), made in collaboration with
Takashi Kawashima, Koblin similarly uses Mechanical Turk
again, paying 0.01 ($USD) to 10,000 people to draw a tiny
section of the $100 bill [Illus. 11]. The resultant prints
[Illus. 12] are being sold for $100. Koblin not only utilises
but also challenges the crowdsourcing model. Similar to
Santiago Sierra, there's an obvious gesture towards the
exploitative nature of his materials that serve to highlight
the inherent problem. Koblin even references Sierra in
his 2006 UCLA thesis paper.54)
It is clear from Koblin's thesis that he's approaching
crowdsourcing and the Mechanical Turk workforce from the
angle that it allows companies to underpay labourers to
the point of exploitation. Unlike Sierra, however, there
is an unwillingness on Koblin's part to stoke controversy
and personally profit from the venture. Therefore, he
is giving the proceeds from the sale of his $100 prints
to the charity One Laptop Per Child.55) |
|
Despite the project's acknowledgement
of the issues around crowdsourcing and Koblin's willingness
to take ownership over his project, there's something that rings
hollow about Koblin's crowdsourcing work perhaps because there
is no point of view beyond the utilisation of the technology
for the purposes of critique. Although Koblin cleverly acknowledges
the hypocrisy in creating a "collaborative" project
in which the artist takes the credit for the larger vision,
he does so without having any relevant or interesting content
beneath the utilisation of crowdsourcing. The medium of crowdsourcing
is used as an end in itself and so becomes like a demonstration
of that technology, although it does contain the added acknowledgement
of its exploitative nature. When Koblin requests that users
draw a section of the $100 or a picture of a sheep, the message
around the exploitation of workers through crowdsourced capitalism
comes through heavy-handedly. The repetition of the exercise
in these two iterations likewise feels overdone.
Another artist who has used crowdsourcing
models to critique the crowdsourcing drive operates under
the pseudonym ".-_-." He calls .re_potemkin
(2008), his most recent project, a "copyleft crowdsourcing
free/open source cinema" project. In .re_potemkin,
.-_-. asked art and design students at Yildiz Technical
University to re-create Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 silent
film The Battleship Potemkin shot by shot, each working
on different parts of the film [Illus. 13].56)
Unlike Aaron Koblin's work, .re_potemkin is not a literal
example of crowdsourcing since it is not the product of
an open call but rather the collaboration of a closed
student community. In Koblin's work there is a kind of
self-contained aesthetic where the work is the form is
the work i.e. the work is crowdsourced and it is about
crowdsourcing. The only layer of contemplation in Koblin's
work is in the publishing of statistics on how much money
each of his participants is making per hour or by selling
the product of their labour for a significant mark-up
(albeit with proceeds going to charity). .re_potemkin,
on the other hand, takes on a far broader scope in the
choice of signifiers it borrows. Rather than sheep and
money – two very strong and un-nuanced signifiers
for Koblin's anti-capitalist point of view – .re_potemkin
utilises Battleship Potemkin, a film that took propaganda
to another level through its use of highly emotive filmmaking
techniques. The choice of this film calls the ideological
optimism and utopian outlook of Web 2.0 into question.
As Rob Myers writes on Furtherfield.org: |
|
The 'commons based peer production' of
free software and free culture is not, to use Jaron Lanier's
phrase, 'Digital Maoism'. But the comparison is a useful
one even if it is not correct. Utopianism was exploited
by the Soviets as it is exploited by the vectorialist media
barons of Web 2.0. .re_potemkin gives us side-by-side examples
of communism and crowdsourcing to consider this comparison
for ourselves. 57) |
Going deeper than comparing communism
and crowdsourcing, however, .-_-. directly confronts the aesthetics
produced by two different economic ideologies. If The Battleship
Potemkin is indicative of the creative output of early
Communist Russia, then the 'crowdsourced' version contains the
remixing, DIY postproduction impulse inherent in the Web 2.0
world. The operative aesthetic order of today is the rehashing,
remaking, remixing that this project conjures.58)
Lanier's concept of "digital
Maoism," as mentioned by Myers, is closely related to Web
2.0 amateurism and has its anchoring in the 'democratic' or
'levelling' nature of this technology. Lanier describes how
Maoism celebrated the peasants and punished the intellectuals
while suppressing any hierarchy that did not coincide with the
internal hierarchy of the Communist Party and equates this situation
with Web 2.0 today:
In the same way, digital Maoism doesn't
reject all hierarchy. Instead, it overwhelmingly rewards
the one preferred hierarchy of digital metaness, in which
a mashup is more important than the sources who were mashed…
If you have seized a very high niche in the aggregation
of human expression… then you can become superpowerful.59) |
Copyright is not only nearly impossible
to enforce in the realm of Web 2.0, but our networked society
is increasingly seeing copyright as immoral or unjust. The digital
is assumed to have been born free – therefore the individual
creating an original piece of work who goes against the online
laws of nature is seen as greedy, selfish, conservative, etc.
As Lanier notes, the remixed and remashed dominate Web 2.0 sites,
but will this eventually lead to the demise of original content?
Lanier foresees a new kind of dark age where people are endlessly
regurgitating old content without any new or original art, music,
design or film. He states, "It's as if culture froze just
before it became digitally open, and all we can do now is mine
the past like salvagers picking over a garbage dump."60)
While this may be an overly alarmist sentiment – that
the internet effectively stalled culture – Lanier rightly
addresses the possibility of a dark side to 'postproduction'.
His point of view is in direct
contrast to the optimism espoused by Nicolas Bourriaud in his
book Postproduction. From Bourriaud's perspective, postproduction
signals a move beyond the modernist tabula rasa and the idea
of a finished or discrete work of art.61)
Bourriaud proclaims:
In this new form of culture, which one
might call a culture of use or a culture of activity, the
artwork functions as the temporary terminal of a network
of interconnected elements… The artwork is no longer
an end point but a simple moment in an infinite chain of
contributors… In generating behaviours and potential
reuses, art challenges passive culture, composed of merchandise
and consumers. It makes the forms and cultural objects of
our daily lives function. 62) |
Judging by his language, Bourriaud
sees postproduction not as a dark age but instead a moment of
revolt where artists can now break away from the confines of
a progressive art history where each new generation must somehow
surpass the previous generation. In many ways, he is correct
in that the art world today doesn't recognise or reward "progress".
However, professional artists are not the only ones engaging
in this type of creative process – everyone/anyone can
and is partaking in remix cultural creation.
Joseph Beuys said around 1979,
perhaps ironically, that "everyone is an artist."
But not everyone in the 70s had access to the tools, the galleries,
the information, and the institutions that make one a professional
artist. Perhaps Alexei Shulgin foresaw the significant change
that the web would bring when he made his "grains of gold"
comment – the internet and Web 2.0 tools at the very least
facilitate the potential for amateurs/non-professionals to easily
create and publish their creative output for the first time
to a large global audience without any need for the approval
of gallerists, curators, museums or art schools. These Web 2.0
tools tend to facilitate forms of postproduction as opposed
to original production essentially making everyone the kind
of artist Bourriaud describes; everyone is carving a pathway
through the refuse of civilization – typically in their
own self-image.
Guy Debord's concept of the spectacle
is still alive and well, though now it is not "a pseudo-world
apart, solely as an object of contemplation," but a pseudo-world
that consists solely of isolated self-broadcast.63)
Everyone is busy furiously representing themselves online and
are very rapidly creating an image of life and an artificial
world divorced from reality. The Twitter feed and the Facebook
status update are indicative of the suspension of life in lieu
of representing life. The constant stream of posts announcing
brief inanities such as "I am at the supermarket"
or "Just had my hair cut" has allowed nearly everyone
to represent themselves to an abstract public while maintaining
an isolated state. In his 1967 text, Debord writes:
Lewis Mumford, in The City in History,
points out that with the advent of long-distance mass communication,
the isolation of the population has become a much more effective
means of control. But the general trend towards isolation,
which is the essential reality of urbanism, must also embody
a controlled reintegration of the workers based on the planned
needs of production and consumption. Such an integration
into the system must recapture isolated individuals as individuals
isolated together. Factories and cultural centers, holiday
camps and housing developments – all are expressly
oriented to a pseudo-community of this kind. These imperatives
pursue the isolated individual right into the family cell,
where the generalized use of receivers of the spectacle's
message ensures that his isolation is filled with the dominant
images – images that indeed that indeed attain their
full force only by virtue of this isolation. 64) |
One might also add to Debord's
list of pseudo-communities Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr.
The technology of Web 2.0 has facilitated a broadcast culture
that furthers individual isolation. Increasingly Web 2.0 users
are communicating passively, broadcasting to a general or abstract
audience of online friends in a concise 140 character Twitter
message or Facebook feed. Web 2.0 sites facilitate this frantic
self-representation that people have come to feel is both useful
and necessary and so these users are blissfully unconscious
to both the dissolution of the complexities of human life that
can not be distilled into a multiple choice survey, and the
exploitation of valuable personal information for the benefit
of advertisers.
Underneath the façade of
user empowerment and self-expression facilitated by Web 2.0,
the utopian ideal of "free" online has mutated into
the acceptability of free labour, as previously noted. In the
online world, long established copyright and ownership laws
tied to physical nations and nation-state governments are often
unpoliceable but, in a free market/neo-liberal sphere such as
the internet, so too are labour, exploitation, and taxation
laws difficult to regulate or police. The result is that a Web
2.0 world is increasingly stratified between those who own all
the online "industries" and "resources"
and those who must participate by utilising a small number of
online products, tied together through social networking.
.re_potemkin confronts
this reality in both its form – the remixed, the remade,
the crowdsourced – and its potent signifier The Battleship
Potemkin, which is itself the innovative creative output of
a utopian ideology. By very carefully utilising an open license
and open source/non-proprietary video codecs that allows free
distribution and use of the piece, .-_-. questions the accepted
practice where Web 2.0 corporations own the content published
or created using their products. Myers notes:
With crowdsourced intangible goods the
best way of rewarding people who donate their labour to
produce those goods is simply to give the resulting product
to them under a licence that allows them to use it freely.
Non-profit projects such as GNU and Wikipedia do this very
successfully, but corporations are always tempted to try
and privilege their "ownership" of other people's
work. Where crowdsourced labour is exploited without fair
compensation this [is] called sharecropping.65) |
While placing ownership back into
the hands of the workers avoids the sharecropping aspect of
crowdsourcing, .-_-.'s piece also invites a meditation on the
status of open source/licensing on the internet today.66)
Although the practice of open source has existed since the invention
of computers, the term was only coined in 1998 in response to
the browser Netscape releasing their source-code to the programming
community.67) Although open
source operating systems like Linux have been around for twenty
years, their popularity has remained relatively low, despite
them being free, because the concept of open source seems to
appeal most to those with programming or hacking nous. Open
licensing and open source are often an unwieldy world that non-technical
people rarely venture into. The idea of sharing resources and
the benefits of labour freely, in a similar manner to communism,
is ostensibly a fair and equitable way to operate, but in the
context of open source or crowdsource, it only seems to be popular
when labourers have equal tasks or equal skills, or have formed
a tight-knit community. By soliciting work from a student population
rather than the internet at large, .re_potemkin questions
the boundaries and conditions under which people are willing
to work for free.
|
The investigation of shared licensing,
in a post-GNU license world, can be seen in work that
is operating on a non-digital level as well.68)
In Rebecca Lennon's piece I Could Never Live Like
You Do (2010) [Illus. 14], she draws inspiration
from a North Korean photograph of thousands of people
standing in a well-organised, colourful formation. Lennon
staged a similar performance over four hours with thirty
participants where each of the participants was asked
to wear clothing of a certain colour (orange, white or
brown) and asked to hold up a matching sheet of paper.
The participants are called 'shareholders' and Lennon
has given each of them part ownership of her piece. The
contracts between the shareholders and Lennon are displayed
in the installation to show that they are all part owners
of the piece. While other artists who have made participatory
works certainly pay participants in certain circumstance,
notably Santiago Sierra in his work which highlights exploitation
of various groups of people in often quite shocking ways,
Lennon addresses the idea of ownership and sharing in
a manner which is inevitably touched by the issues of
ownership in the digital realm. |
Like .re_potemkin, this
piece rewards free labour by allowing the participants to share
the work. In this case it's unlikely that any of the shareholders
were motivated to participate because of the financial rewards
they may receive via the sale of the piece. The more likely
scenario is that they were drawn in from the point of view of
interest in the art world and as members of that world at least
to some extent. In this way, the piece utilises crowdsourcing
but garners participants through a similar motivation to open
sourcing. An example of an academic project that operates in
a similar way is Galaxy Zoo, a crowdsourced project started
in 2007.69) Galaxy Zoo asks
astronomy hobbyists on the internet to go through thousands
of images taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and identify
galaxies based on a set of criteria given by academic astronomers,
thereby significantly decreasing the workload of the trained
professionals and allowing them to publish results far more
quickly. The task is simply tagging pictures based on given
galaxy shape specification, something that companies regularly
pay people on Mechanical Turk to do. In the case of the NASA
project or Lennon's piece it can hardly be argued that the tedious
tasks the participants are asked to perform are done because
they are re 'fun' (something that may motivate participants
in Carpenter's and July/Fletcher's projects, for instance).
It can be argued, then, that people
are willing to look for galaxies or participate in an art project
because they feel it somehow benefits the greater good or is
a valuable contribution to society. In this case, the gesture
of giving participants shares in the piece is a symbolic gesture.
Overtly, it's an egalitarian gesture. However, the choice of
North Korean source material, a place where brutal authoritarian
rule flies under the banner of communism, and the recreation
of a task that is so menial it requires a strong centralised
imperative, suggests that there is a necessary cynicism underlying
Lennon's gesture. The element of sharing is a token. The internet
resurrected a utopian dream of a society where free and open
sharing of creativity facilitated by technology supersedes the
dominant capitalism of the non-digital world.70)
The open source movement in its many manifestations is the reminder
of that dream. While people still participate in collaborative
projects for altruistic reasons, they are increasingly doing
so within a capitalist crowdsourcing framework rather than the
open source collective framework. Lennon's piece has the properties
of crowdsourcing while self-consciously leaning towards more
egalitarian models of sharing, some of which were resurrected
in the 1990s via things like 'open source' or GNU licensing.
Older forms of collaboration are increasingly being subsumed
by technology-led capitalist models of collaboration such as
crowdsourcing, and participatory art practices are increasingly
reflecting this change.
CONCLUSION
As collaboration and participation
in art begins to look like crowdsourcing, it becomes more and
more useful to think about this type of work within the critical
discussion that surrounds Web 2.0 generally. The celebration
of the amateur filters through mass media discussion into artistic
practice, but the utopian democracy on the web does not deliver
what it appears to promise. Exploitation often follows in the
wake of corporations who create "user-empowering"
platforms. The potential of dehumanisation, via the reductive
form of the computer database, exists alongside the creative
potential of exploring these databases. The most interesting
works of art within this realm today are not those that merely
call attention to these issues but also utilise the data or
detritus of previous generations constructively and in a way
that truly reflects contemporary life.
|
NOTES
1) Tilman Baumgaertel, "Interview with Alexei Shulgin,"
4 Nov. 1997, 1 Sep. 2010 http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9711/msg00005.html
2) Jorn Madslien, "Dotcom bubble burst: 10 years on,"
BBC News 9 Mar. 2010, 1 Sep. 2010 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8558257.stm
3) Tim O'Reilly, "What is Web 2.0? Design Patterns and Business
Models for the Next Generation of Software," O'Reilly 30
Sep. 2005. 1 Sep. 2010 http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html
4) Using frames, hyperlinks, etc, the artists participating in
the net.art movement of the early to mid 90s were experimenting
with non-hierarchical structures on the web. See Rachel Greene,
Internet Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004). See Dieter
Daniels and Gunther Reisinger, eds., Net Pioneers 1.0: Contextualizing
Early Net-Based Art (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010).
5) Karl Hodge, "It's all in the memes: Is the internet spreading
a virus through our heads?" The Guardian 10 Aug. 2000. 1
Sep. 2010 http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2000/aug/10/technology
Also, Jean Burgess, "'All your chocolate rain are belong
to us'?: Viral video, Youtube and the dynamics of participatory
culture," Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube, eds.
Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer (Amsterdam: Institute of Network
Cultures, 2008) 101-9.
6) "WHOIS – google.com," 15 Sep. 1997, 1 Sep.
2010 http://whois.dnsstuff.com/tools/whois.ch?ip=google.com.
Also, Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin, et al., The PageRank Citation
Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web, Technical Report (Stanford
University InfoLab, 1999) 1 Sep. 2010 http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422
7) Michael Corris, "Systems Upgrade: conceptual Art and the
Recoding of Information, Knowledge and Technology," Mute
Magazine: Culture and Politics After the Net 1:22 (December
2001): 37-8
8) Sol Le Witt, "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art," Artforum
5:10 (Summer 1967): 19-83
9) The use of the word "machine" is misleading in that
it conjures up images of the late Industrial Age or Machine Age,
whereas systems and programming are more tied to the immaterial
digital world ushered in by computing and later the Information
Age
10) "First Monday: Peer-Reviewed Journal on the Internet:
Volume 13, Number 3 – 3 March 2008," 1 Sep. 2010 http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/issue/view/263/showToc
, "Mute Magazine: Culture and Politics After the Net,"
1 Sep. 2010 http://www.metamute.org.
"Institute of Network Cultures," http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/portal
11) The Art Of Participation: 1950 to Now ran from 08
Nov 2008 – 08 Jan 2009 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art. See Boris Groys, "A Genealogy of Participatory Art,"
The Art of Participation, eds. Rudolf Frieling and Boris Groys
(London: Thames and Hudson, 2008) 20-21
12) Groys 21
13) Nicolas Bourriaud, "Relational Aesthetics: Art Of The
1990s," Right About Now: Art & Theory Since the 1990s,
eds. Margriet Schavemaker and Mischa Rakier (Amsterdam: Valiz
Publishers, 2007) 47
14) Bourriaud, "Relational Aesthetics: Art Of The 1990s"
48
15) Stephen C Foster, "Clement Greenberg: Formalism in the
40s and 50s," Art Journal 35:1 (1975): 20-24
16) Groys 21
17) Anthony Downey, "An Ethics of Engagement: Collaborative
Art Practices and the Return of the Ethnographer," Third
Text, 23: 5 (2009): 595
18) Claire Bishop, "The Social Turn: Collaboration and its
Discontents," Right About Now: Art & Theory Since the
1990s, eds. Margriet Schavemaker and Mischa Rakier (Amsterdam:
Valiz Publishers, 2007) 61
19) ibid 61
20) ibid 64
21) ibid 67
22) Groys 23
23) Rudolf Frieling. "Toward Participation in Art,"
The Art of Participation, eds. Rudolf Frieling and Boris
Groys (London: Thames and Hudson, 2008) 35
24) Jeff Howe, "The Rise of Crowdsourcing," Wired June
2006, 1 Sep. 2010. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html?pg=1&topic=crowds&topic_set
25) Jeff Howe, "Is Crowdsourcing Evil? The Design Community
Weighs In," Wired 10 Mar. 2009, 1 Sep. 2010 http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/03/is-crowdsourcin/comment-page-2
26) Daren Brabham, "Crowdsourcing," 25 Jun. 2010, 1
Sep. 2010 http://www.darenbrabham.com
27) "Learning To Love You More," 1 Sep. 2010 http://www.learningtoloveyoumore.com/index.php
28) Dustin Luke Nelson, "InDigest InDialogue: Yuri Ono,"
1 Sep. 2010 http://www.indigestmag.com/ono1.htm
29) Dave Welch, "Powell's Books Author Interviews: Miranda
July Belongs Here," 18 May 2007, 1 Sep. 2010 http://www.powells.com/authors/mirandajuly.html
30) "Learning To Love You More: Hello,"1 Sep. 2010 http://www.learningtoloveyoumore.com/hello/index.php
31) Allen McCollum,, "Harrell Fletcher," Harrell Fletcher:
Where I Lived, and What I Lived For. Brittany, France: Domaine
De Kerguehennec, 2009. 1 Sep. 2010 http://homepage.mac.com/allanmcnyc/harrellfletcher/mccollum_interview.html
32) Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur (London: Nicholas Brealey
Publishing, 2007) 136
33) Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's 'Philosophy of Right', trans.
Joseph O'Malley (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Press Syndicate of
the University of Cambridge, 1977) 131. 1 Sep. 2010 http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=uxg4AAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=opium&f=false
34) Qtd. by Howe in "Is Crowdsourcing Evil?" –
Steve Douglas, "Design is a 'Snooty' Business: Forbes,"
1 Sep. 2010 http://www.thelogofactory.com/logo_blog/index.php/design-snooty-business-forbes
35) Computer colours are encoded with a 6 character hexadecimal
code (a base 16 system utilising the characters 0-9 and A-F);
in the early days of the internet, most computers had 8-bit graphic
cards which could not display the full range of colours the vast
majority of computers today can display. Web standards, originally
developed by the World Wide Web Consortium ["The World Wide
Web Consortium," 1 Sep. 2010 http://www.w3.org"http://www.w3.org]
dictate that the web designer should aim "to deliver the
greatest benefits to the greatest number of web users" ["The
Web Standards Project," 1 Sep. 2010 http://www.webstandards.org/about/mission/].
The "web safe" colours were 216 colours that could be
viewed by computer users with 8-bit graphics on their machines.
While web safe colours is generally acknowledged to be unnecessary
now, a great number of web developers feel some nostalgia for
the original web palette [Lynda Weinman, "No Dithering Colors
in Browsers," 2004, 1 Sep. 2010 http://www.lynda.com/resources/webpalette.aspx].
36) 'Open source' is essentially exactly what it says it is: the
source computer code from which programmes and websites originate
is open for anyone to have a look at and alter in any way they
choose. 'Back end' is a term in computing for the unseen coding
which allows the programme or web page to run. The 'front end'
is the user interface that can be accessed via web browser or
running and application
37) Brabham, "Crowdsourcing"
38) HITs are tasks which a computer algorithm has a relatively
hard time completing while a human often finds quite straightforward.
Crowdsourcing initiatives like Amazon's Mechnical Turk ["Amazon
Mechanical Turk," 1 Sep. 2010 https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome]
pays pennies for people to perform HITs such as creating a video,
writing a review or tagging photos
39) Daren C. Brabham, "Moving the crowd at iStockphoto: The
composition of the crowd and motivations for participation in
a crowdsourcing application," First Monday 13:6 (2 June 2008),
1 Sep. 2010 http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2159/1969
40) Ceci Moss, "Interview with Ele Carpenter," 1 Oct.
2009, 1 Sep. 2010 http://rhizome.org/editorial/2975
41) Moss, "Interview with Ele Carpenter"
42) Lev Manovich, "Art after Web 2.0," The Art of
Participation, eds. Rudolf Frieling and Boris Groys (London:
Thames and Hudson, 2008) 71
43) Keen 9
44) Keen 124
45) Keen 131
46) Moss, "Interview with Ele Carpenter"
47) ibid
48) Geert Lovink, "The Art of Watching Databases: Introduction
to The Video Vortex Reader," Video Vortex Reader: Responses
to YouTube, eds. Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer (Amsterdam:
Institute of Network Cultures, 2008) 9.
49) Jaron Lanier, You Are Not A Gadget (London: Allen
Lane, 2010) 71
50) Bourriaud, Postproduction 17
51) Evan Roth, "Evan Roth," 1 Sep. 2010 http://evan-roth.com
52) Evan Roth, "White Glove Tracking," 1 Sep. 2010 http://whiteglovetracking.com
53) "Amazon Mechanical Turk," 1 Sep. 2010 https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome
54) Aaron Koblin, "The Sheep Market: Two Cents Worth,"
MA thesis, UCLA, 2006. 1 Sep. 2010 http://www.aaronkoblin.com/work/thesheepmarket/TheSheepMarket.doc
55) Aaron Koblin, "Ten Thousand Cents: Purchase Prints,"
1 Sep. 2010 http://www.tenthousandcents.com/top.html#purchase_prints
56) ".re_potemkin: >> a copyleft crowdsourcing free/open
source cinema project_" 1 Sep. 2010 http://re-potemkin.httpdot.net
57) Rob Myers, ".re_potemkin," 5 Jun. 2010, 1 Sep. 2010
http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=400
58) Nicholas Bourriaud, Postproduction (New York: Lukas &
Sternberg, 2002)
59) Lanier 79
60) Lanier 131
61) Bourriaud, Postproduction 17, 19
62) Bourriaud, Postproduction 19-20
63) Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith
(New York: Zone Books, 1994) 12
64) Debord 122
65) Myers, ".re_potemkin"
66) Nicholas Carr, "Sharecropping the Long Tail," 19
Dec. 2006, 1 Sep. 2010 http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/12/sharecropping_t.php
67) "Open Source Initiative," 1 Sep. 2010 http://www.opensource.org/history
68) GNU license is a type of online licensing developed for free,
open source software which protects the software developer while
allowing for open source and free distribution ["The GNU
General Public License," 1 Sep. 2010 http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html]
69) "Galaxy Zoo: Hubble," 1 Sep. 2010
http://www.galaxyzoo.org
70) Richard Barbrook, "The Holy Fools," The Hypermedia
Research Centre, 1 Sep. 2010 http://www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk/theory-holyfools-print.html
|
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Amanda Wasielewski is an American artist
and writer living and working in Amsterdam. She is currently
in residence at De Ateliers. Wasielewski studied at Goldsmiths
College from 2005-2006, returned to the US the following
year to finish her BA in Art History and Art Theory and
Practice at Northwestern University [Evanston, IL, USA]
and graduated in June 2007. In September 2010, she completed
her MA in Fine Art Media at University College London,
Slade School of Art. Most of Wasielewski's recent work
revolves around the connections between technology and
community in relation to an increasingly globalized world.
Her website is www.amandawasielewski.com |
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