FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Entertainment

Creativity Bytes: A Brief Guide To Crowdsourced Art

Read this and sound like an expert. Well, sort of.

Here’s a quick reference guide that will seek to explain the trends, terms, and movements of the brave new media world of art and technology. So you can skim, digest, and be a pseudo-expert next time you’re cornered at a Speed Show exhibition in your local cybercafe. Because, hey, life is short and art long. This week: Crowdsourced art.

So, what is crowdsourced art?
A collaborative process where an artwork is created by outsourcing its formation to willing participants using networked communication. A task is set and a series of instructions issued, which often results in people rebelling against them—this desire to disrupt is part of the creative ontology of a crowdsourced art work.

Advertisement

Where did it come from?
The idea of collaboration in art has been around probably since art objects were first created in human prehistory. All artistic mediums have some degree of collaboration: writers need editors, plays and films utilize improvisation from actors, and paintings and sculptures are generally part of a larger cultural dialogue between contemporaries and peers. Crowdsourcing’s genesis can be seen in artistic exploration games like Andre Breton’s Exquisite Corpse, as well as in group art, which was popular in the communal environs of the 1960s and 1970s. But as far as the modern form of crowdsourced art goes, using the web as its framework, it was being explored before the ubiquity of social media allowed for ease of participation.

In 1999 Louis Paschoud, Peter Holberton, and Ally Cane launched YouDraw, a project that sought to commemorate the population of Earth hitting 6 billion by gathering 500,000 drawings of human figures, collated from contributions posted to the project’s website and assembled into an installation showing the scale of the human population. In 2002 Kevan Davis launched The Smaller Picture, a hive-mind bitmap alphabet. In 2004 Slate writer Clive Thompson wrote an article on mob created art titled “Art Mobs: Can an online crowd create a poem, a novel, or a painting?” discussing Kevan Davis’ project and the rise of online collaboration. In 2005 using Amazon's Mechanical Turk artist Aaron Koblin created a Human Intelligence Task (HIT) where workers were paid $0.02 each to draw a sheep facing to the left—eventually resulting in web-based artwork The Sheep Market featuring 10,000 of the drawings. Another drawing-based participatory site launched in 2005: SwarmSketch from Peter Edmunds where a randomly chosen popular online search term becomes the subject of a collective drawing each week. But the term “crowdsourcing” itself wasn’t introduced until the following year, in a 2006 Wired article by Jeff Howe called “The Rise of Crowdsourcing”—the term was an amalgamation of the words outsourcing and crowd. Later that same year, Andrea Grover curated the first exhibition to explore crowdsourced art Phantom Captain: Art and Crowdsourcing.

Advertisement

This week you're really digging…
Aaron Koblin and Daniel Massey’s Bicycle Built for Two Thousand consisting of 2,088 voices culled from participants on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk who were asked to listen to a sound clip and record themselves repeating it. Evan Roth and Ben Engebreth’s White Glove Tracking project, which asked people to track Michael Jackson’s glove in 10,060 frames of his celebrated performance of Billy Jean at Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, and Forever on March 25, 1983. The online community created a data set that featured 125,000 gloves, which were used in generative visualizations. Also, The Johnny Cash Project from Chris Milk, Aaron Koblin, Rick Rubin, and the Cash Estate. Participants are given three frames of a video for Cash’s unreleased track “Ain’t No Grave” and asked to draw over it using custom tools—the work then becomes an ever-evolving collective experiment, a portrait of the artist as a crowdsourced animation.

Nano talk
Mechanical Turk is the place to go to crowdsource your latest hive-art project. Don’t call it lazy, call it harvesting the creative power of the collective. We’ve had public art for centuries. Now it’s time for the art public.

Describe yourself as…
A digitally tentacled art hydra.

Keywords
Crowd, hive, source, collective, collaborate, mass, many, network.

Difficulty level
Crowdsource control.

Age range
The multi.

Tagline
Two’s company, three’s a crowd source.

To recap: 10,000 strangers bonding over squiggled sheep.

Next week: The video mash-up