Curated by Steve Dietz for the Open Source Lounge (organized with Jenny Marketou), Medi@terra 2000, Athens, Nov. 3-11, 2000
Outsourcing Creativity? Audience as Artist
Technological innovation can not be independent of rethinking social roles and reconsideration of our models. New technologies present an opportunity for change whether we plan for it or not.
Medi@terra 2000 prospectus
If game patches and other hacks are like parasites that attach to the larger Internet/entertainment industry and transform them in the process, many net artists are experimenting with open-ended, yet structured works that invite the user-audience-visitor-interfacer-mingler-surfer-browser to create their own art -- and institutions, in a sense -- transforming traditional roles in the process. Outsourcing Creativity? presents projects by 7 such artists, who are creating, in essence, software, which enables its user to have some mesure of creative control.
The avant-garde becomes software. This statement should be understood in two ways. On the one hand, software codifies and naturalizes the techniques of the old avant-garde. On the other hand, software's new techniques of working with media represent the new avant-garde of the meta-media society.
In his important essay Avant-garde as Software, media theorist Lev Manovich argues that the concerns of the new media avant-garde have shifted from (fixed) representation to "new ways of accessing and manipulating information." It is about process, and the way this process is instantiated is in what might be called "algorithmic interactivty." In other words, software, which, as often as not, allows the user to do the manipulating and dynamically access a result, the specifics of which are not known in advance, although the process by which it is arrived at is highly codified by the programmer-artist.
Software, of course, has a wide variety of meanings from, arguably, the protocols underlying the World Wide Web to HTML tools such as HomeSite to Web browsers such as Netscape. Artists' interventions range equally widely. Amy Alexander'sMulticultural Recycler or Mark Napier'sShredder use -- or misuse -- WWW network protocols to dynamically collage web pages different from the intent of their original creators and unknowable in advance by either the artist or the user of the work. The artist group Mongrel created the National Heritage Photoshop plug-in to magnify issues of identity and race and representation, while their Linker tool is intended for the self-creation of multimedia hypertext by so-called naive users. Netomat by Maciej Wisniewski and I/O/D'sWebstalker are both alternative Web browsers that raise the possibility of a different world view by providing a different way to view the World Wide Web.
So we must abandon the traditional conception of an art world populated by stable, enduring, finished works and replace it with one that recognizes continual mutation and proliferation of variants - much as with oral epic poetry. Notions of individual authorial responsibility for image content, authorial determination of meaning, and authorial prestige are correspondingly diminished. William Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye
Paralleling this new media avant-garde work in software has been a 40 year, if not longer, history of the "death of the author." Hypertextual narratives are the most obvious products of this history, where every reading "authors" a different version of the story. At the other end of the spectrum, with projects such as Douglas Davis's early The World's First Collaborative Sentence, the authorship is subsumed in a collective process. There is no single author of the text. And with Lisa Jevbratt'sA Stillman Project for the Walker Art Center, the notion of intentionality is subverted, and authorship is transmogrified into a mapping of collective navigation (what is read). In essence, the software-author reads the user.
The artists in Outsourcing Creativity? do not give up the possibility of a "result" that is aesthetically pleasing, intellectually challenging, and emotionally stimulating. Nor do they renounce the idea of authorship, collaborative or otherwise. They simply shift their focus. They use the computability of the medium to fix parameters, which allow the results to be unfixed. They reach out through the network to create their own context - their own space - for their work. And they require the participation of someone else to activate the mute code of their art. Whether, in the end, this attitude and process constitutes "outsourcing control" or controlling one's art outside of traditional roles is not as important as recognizing the change and being open to the opportunities it presents.
calc (omi, Luks Brunner, Teresa Alonso, Malex Spiegel and Roger Luechinger) and Johannes Gees (International) Communimage http://www.communimage.ch/ Installation photo
Conceptually, communimage is very simple. Anyone can upload an image to any blank spot contiguous to the communal image-site. Depending upon one's magnification of viewing, one sees either the "forest" or the "trees" of the dynamically growing image. But like a Chuck Close painting, as one zooms in, revealing ever greater detail, it quickly becomes apparent that this is not a monocultured woods. The tension between heterogeneous details and the desire to decipher a more homogenous "communimage" is strangely compelling.
An interesting twist with this project is that every time a participant uploads an image, she adds keywords, which will eventually allow viewers to use the capabilities of the underlying database software to acces and manipulate the information - to algorithmically recompose" the image.
OPEN signifies that this artwork encourages the participation of visitors, and it aligns the software underlying the work with the open source movement.
STUDIO signifies Andy Deck's studio, in New York City, where the software is written and the server sits.
Andy Deck's Open Studio is, perhaps, the most tool-like of all the projects in Outsourcing Creativity? Basically, it allows users to draw online. A few features, however, push it toward Manovich's new media avant-garde rather than simply distributing old media avant-garde strategies in a java applet.
Open Studio is collaborative. Any number of people can be drawing in the same "space" at the same time. This undermines the notion of sole authorship so central to modernist notions of art. And while you can save an Open Studio drawing, it is really about the accumulating layers of remote interactions - "conversational drawings." When they are "replayed" from the archive, the drawing actions, while accurate, are randomly ordered, emphasizing the creation process as fluid and undermining modernist priviliging of a fixed object.
With its built-in chat function, Open Studio is an "excuse" for communication, as much as it is a tool for creation - "communications art." Point to point communication, that is.
Open Studio also has an archive function, which allows the viewer to replay a set of saved files. This is more than couch-potato mode, however. According to Deck, it is a kind of automated curation that cuts out the "expert" institutional voice as mediator. As he writes in In Search of Meaningful Events: Curatorial Algorithms and Malleable Aesthetics:
If Internet art overturns the paradigm of broadcast and allows reciprocal communication between transmitter and receiver, what becomes of curation? Is the curator then a moderator? An artist? A programmer? Malleable aesthetics provoke such questions.
Process not product. Made not consumed. Communication not enlightenment. Collaboration not genius. The final element of this new media avant-garde software is that it is open source. Unlike the proprietary code of Adobe Photoshop (tm), if one does not like the world view Open Studio software instantiates, reprogram it. This is an increasingly important avenue of freedom of expression - the basis of intellectual diversity - in a world where everything from everyday phrases to new life forms are trademarked, registered, and copyrighted corporate property.
John Klima (US) glasbead http://www.glasbead.com Installation photo glasbead is a multi-user sound program, which as many as twenty people can log onto at once and virtually jam, even uploading their own sounds into the mesmerizing application. Looking something like a space-age Emerald City, glasbead has a relatively simple set of rules:
The entire structure can be spun by flinging the ball at the core. Each stem can be flung individually around this core. The bell stems each have a sample file attached (right mouse click). When a hammer stem comes in contact with a bell stem, the sample plays. the pitch of the sample can be adjusted by spinning its ring (near the core).
The interface allows anyone to create sound almost immediately, but like most musical instruments, it rewards practice and experienced players can coax amazing soundscapes from glasbead.
Marc Lafia (US) ambientmachine http://www.ambientworld.com ambientmachine is like an open source film studio and archive. Beginning with a few different sequences, users can construct their own "movies" online and then save them to the site for other to incorporate as building blocks. Future versions will allow the uploading of new files as well.
But perhaps what is most remarkable about ambientmachine is not its recall of a kind of video exquisite corpse, but the exquisite tools that allow you to resize, speed up or slow down, change the transparency, and add a soundtrack. In addition, by overlaying various clips, the participant-creator can experiment not only with linear sequencing but the ability to create a kind of syncopated moving picture, which can be truly remarkable.
Victoria Vesna (US) Bodies(c) INCorporated http://www.bodiesinc.ucla.edu Installation photo
Vesna's Bodies(c) INCorporated allows users to create their own avatars, designing their data bodies using different-meaning textures as well as information about sexuality, "handling instructions" and other parameters.
Bodies(c) INCorporated is modeled on a corporate structure and highlights issues of ownership and embodiment in a virtual environment, but it is also an example of an artist-designed project, like Ken Goldberg'sTelegarden or Jane Prophet'sTechnosphere, in which the community of participants create demands for new capabilities, such as the ability to "delete" one's body or add custom body parts and textures, which the artist in turn programs into the software/environment.
Marek Walczak and Martin Wattenberg The Global Online Wunderkammer http://wunderkammer.walkerart.org Installation photo
The media historian Friedrich Kittler gave a talk in Barcelona in the mid-90s, entitled Museums on the Digital Frontier. In it, he raised some important issues about whether the database, generically speaking, might not be a way to get back to the idea of the "wonder chamber," before the specialization of the modern museum.
At the end of this talk, Kittler says:
What looms ahead or rather what has to be done is the reprise of the wonder chambers. Johann Valentin Andrea, the founder of the Rosicrucians, once advocated an archive that would include not only artworks, tools, and instruments, but also their technical drawings. Under today's high-tech conditions we have no choice but to start such an archive or endorse millions of anonymous ways of dying.
In the online world, it is possible to combat the museological isolation of the object with the hyperlink. Artworks, tools, instruments, and their technical drawings can be restored to virtual contiguity. Context with a click.
But if there is anything that museums and institutions in general hold onto in the vertigo of Internet uncertainty, it is our role as a filter and vetter for and of authoritative information. This is not necessarily bad, but nor is it unequivocably good.
What if audience point of view was more than an empty bulletin board, like so many that exist on institutional sites as vestigal attempts at community and bi-lateral discourse? What if, like Muntadas'sFile Room, users could add their own information into the museum's databases about its objects? A kind of open source art history? It is not an ultimate answer. There is no single answer. But it is an avenue for parallel processing.
The Global Online Wunderkammer, allows participants to "collect" any "object" they like from the Internet, and add it to the virtual WonderWalker, with a personal commentary about the selection, and, what it should be linked with - its context. No doubt this will lead to what disturbed Thomas Greenwood about the cabinet of curiosities in 1884:
The orderly soul of the Museum student will quake at the sight of a Chinese lady's boot encircled by a necklace made of shark's teeth, or a helmet of one of Cromwell's soldier's grouped with some Roman remans.
