In Exhausting a Crowd (2015), Kyle McDonald invites online audiences to annotate a 12-hour video recording of a public place with their own observations of the scene. Inspired by Georges Perec's 1974 experimental literary work An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, McDonald opens up a process of close observation to a broad public, crowdsourcing the discovery and preservation of moments that might otherwise go unnoticed.
A cairn is a human-made pile of stones, often accreted over the course of centuries. Since prehistoric times, these collaboratively produced structures have served as landmarks, trail markers, and memorials
From wasp nests to Wikipedia, principles of emergence explain how the cumulative contributions of thousands of independent agents can produce sophisticated forms. On the Internet, the art of orchestrating large groups of people is called “crowdsourcing,” and the technologies for such information husbandry offer rich opportunities to explore cybernetic concepts like feedback, autopoiesis, and the nuances of collective behavior.
During the workshop we will examine the technologies of Collective Memory, from its generative nature to the ways of spreading and evolving. We will produce works that generate, remix, sample, simulate, manipulate, or hack Collective Memory using Creative Crowdsourcing and techniques of recomposing data such as Scrapism and Sampling; both on and off the screen.
The workshop comes with the experimentation of alternative ways of being together – in the organisation of shared labor as an Open Access, distributed framework, as well as the Harawayan more-than-human collaborative methods.
The simplest crowdsourcing rulesets can yield a startling glimpse of the consciousness of the global hive-mind, as in Kevan Davis's Typophile: The Smaller Picture (2002), or the epic Place experiment on Reddit (2017). It should surprise no one that crowdsourcing may also channel our darkest impulses, as happened with Microsoft's Tay, an AI chatbot that developed offensive speech patterns through conversations with the crowd.
Collectively created artifacts vary considerably. At one extreme are phenomena, like desire paths or the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, that arise as the inadvertent byproducts of myriad human actions. “Memory quilts” and traditional folk songs thread together deliberate contributions from many individuals, but are typically structured according to fixed, widely understood cultural idioms (grids, rhyme schemes, etc.). Other collectively authored artifacts aggregate independent contributions through an undirected process of accumulation; examples of such works include cairns, gum walls, “love padlock” bridges, Yayoi Kusama's Obliteration Room installation, and, on the Internet, graffiti walls like Drawball and SwarmSketch.
Internet artists have enlisted online participants to collaboratively tend gardens, write poetry, produce drawings, interpret imagery, annotate video, and contribute to historical archives. In the genre of the crowdsourced meta-artwork, the creator defines browser-based interactions that scope a user's creative influence—and then distributes artistic agency to a large, open, and often rapidly evolving group. Success depends on carefully balancing constraints (such as limiting available “ink,” or whether or not users are permitted to alter another's contribution) and incentives (such as the opportunity to engage creatively with a favorite song, or participate in a novel creative activity or political action).
[http://whiteglovetracking.com/downloads/wgt_data_v1.txt](White Glove Tracking Dataset)