Manifesto Of The Day

Start a weblog. Place a downloadable image on it in a common format
(SVG, PNG, Gimp, PhotoShop) placed under the Creative Commons
Atrribution-Sharealike license. Let people modify and re-upload the
image using the comments mechanism (censor uploads that don't preview,
offer help if people get this wrong). Collaborative art.

After a while upload a new image as a new topic and begin the process
again. Use elements from the previous work or make a call for new
images. Encourage an accompanying discourse (or at least discussion).
Take the work somewhere. Make shared objectives.

Art & Language's 1970s Indexes provide a good historical
counter-example to the whimsy of Exquisite Corpses and Mail Art for
collaborative artwork. The net can be studio and gallery
simultaneously. Work can be done this way. More, it should be done this
way. This is culturally urgent. The relations of production,
distribution and consumption as well as the creation and extraction of
value must be changed.

Comments

, Ivan Pope

Rob,
At the end of the eighties and the early nineties before the web came along
there were artists working collaboratively via FTP and email.
One of the main ways of working was with images that were passed around and
modified. It was a bit laborious then, but it did work. No lovely instant
web based gratification, but lots of offline coding and decoding.
The main organiser of all this was OTIS (The Operative Term Is Stimulate).
The Exquisite Corpse was an everyday reality, sort of. Even then it was
clear that the networks were going to change everything. Still working on it
though.
Maybe you were there?
A bit of a Google will give you the history of OTIS and likeminded things.

I wrote because your email brought back memories of a brief and largely lost
history of art on the web.
Cheers,
Ivan

Subject: RHIZOME_RAW: Manifesto Of The Day


> Start a weblog. Place a downloadable image on it in a common format
> (SVG, PNG, Gimp, PhotoShop) placed under the Creative Commons
> Atrribution-Sharealike license. Let people modify and re-upload the
> image using the comments mechanism (censor uploads that don't preview,
> offer help if people get this wrong). Collaborative art.
>
> After a while upload a new image as a new topic and begin the process
> again. Use elements from the previous work or make a call for new
> images. Encourage an accompanying discourse (or at least discussion).
> Take the work somewhere. Make shared objectives.
>
> Art & Language's 1970s Indexes provide a good historical
> counter-example to the whimsy of Exquisite Corpses and Mail Art for
> collaborative artwork. The net can be studio and gallery
> simultaneously. Work can be done this way. More, it should be done this
> way. This is culturally urgent. The relations of production,
> distribution and consumption as well as the creation and extraction of
> value must be changed.
>
> +
> -> post: [email protected]
> -> questions: [email protected]
> -> subscribe/unsubscribe: http://rhizome.org/preferences/subscribe.rhiz
> -> give: http://rhizome.org/support
> -> visit: on Fridays the Rhizome.org web site is open to non-members
> +
> Subscribers to Rhizome are subject to the terms set out in the
> Membership Agreement available online at http://rhizome.org/info/29.php
>

, Rob Myers

On Thursday, November 27, 2003, at 09:46AM, Ivan Pope <[email protected]> wrote:

>At the end of the eighties and the early nineties before the web came along
>there were artists working collaboratively via FTP and email.

As long a it's not Gopher I don't mind. :-)

>One of the main ways of working was with images that were passed around and
>modified. It was a bit laborious then, but it did work. No lovely instant
>web based gratification, but lots of offline coding and decoding.

I think automated site updating and open file formats will make this easier now. Imagine a Flash-based Wiki; download the file, modify it or add a link to your new file, upload. I do like the weblog idea (MPEG or midi files would work as well for sound and video, and coding projects could use Java or Flash). Is anyone interested?

>The main organiser of all this was OTIS (The Operative Term Is Stimulate).
>The Exquisite Corpse was an everyday reality, sort of. Even then it was
>clear that the networks were going to change everything. Still working on it
>though.
>Maybe you were there?

I wish. :-) My work first appeared online in the lab at Fuse '94 and I'm first mentioned in an art context online in a posting from SoDA on this list in 1997. I used to be on Rhizome around 1996, but I can't find any archives that far back on this site?

>A bit of a Google will give you the history of OTIS and likeminded things.

Thanks, I'd definitely like to find out about that.

Does anyone have any other reccomendations for precedents?

>I wrote because your email brought back memories of a brief and largely lost
>history of art on the web.

We need to know the history of art to build on it rather than aimlessly repeat it (like most yBA's).

- Rob.

, Richard Chung

It's funny, I use this kind of "distributed
creativity" to enforce discipline in the
classroom.

I teach digital filmmaking to young kids in
Vancouver (9-12 yrs at one of the world's
largest kids' arts schools, http://
www.artsumbrella.org - no government
funding!). When I find it hard to get them
to behave, I make them sit down and do the
old "storytelling in the round" game, where
each person says a sentence in the story.
They are each free to go off wildly (and
naughtily - using the word "drugs," "gay,"
etc), but the harmonizing effect of the
linear waveform (each kid contributes a point
on the wave) usually ends up being a
satisfying, constructive experience.

This is, of course, with me as the organizing
(autocratic) force, not to mention their
programmed left-right linearity. Then again,
the software tends to be the organizing force
in these situations; I have a sneaking
suspicion (science fiction novel forthcoming)
that representative democracy could easily be
replaced by Government 1.0 software, seeming
impartial and perfect but run by background
technocrats. I'm sorry, your welfare has been
denied because your request was invalid.
Scarily, the next US election is being run by
Windows NT voting machines (I wouldn't even
trust OS X).

On the other hand, you've reminded me of the
time I created a joke series of animations
called "Love Boat: The Next Generation" on
Caligari (CAD) on my Amiga (sorry, I'm being
retro chic), plus script (http://
www.armedrabble.org/lbtng.doc ) and posted
them on various
bulletin boards in Ottawa. Within six months
there was a LB:TNG skit on "Saturday Night
Live" that conformed fairly well to my idea.
Viral power or ripoff, or coincidence, or
parallel behaviour? Or distributed creativty
which happens to be exploitative?

If anyone has them animations in some
insanely efficient and complete archive of
BBS activity in early-90's Ontario… eh?
eh? Got 'em?

, Rob Myers

On 28 Nov 2003, at 04:13, [email protected] wrote:

> It's funny, I use this kind of "distributed
> creativity" to enforce discipline in the
> classroom.

This is one of the claimed advantages of wikis: social pressure and
rewards (rather than monetary rewards, or punishment) will encourage
collaboration (sociable behaviour).

Open Source projects take more social skills than proprietary coding.

I worked for a company that had a community dot com as one of its other
projects. The admins lacked the social skills to deal with
over-enthusiastic members who believed they added value to the
community by donating hours of their free time to it, treating them as
a threat to be disciplined, and chasing them onto a private mailing
list to do so. God only knows how they'd have dealt with a real crisis
rather than a self-induced one.

- Rob.

, Richard Chung

Rob Myers &lt;[email protected]&gt; wrote:
&gt; I worked for a company that had a community
&gt;dot com as one of its other projects. The
&gt;admins lacked the social skills to deal with
&gt;over-enthusiastic members who believed they
&gt;added value to the community by donating
&gt;hours of their free time to it, treating
&gt;them as a threat to be disciplined,

Yes, I was on the board of a government-
funded, but also revenue-generating, non
profit film co-op in Vancouver that purported
to be a community-representative org but was
actually a "special interest" itself. The
idea that volunteers could be of use to the
co-op, i.e. that the community could
contribute to the community, was treated as a
sort of leftist psychosis.

The most common argument was that it would
take longer to "train" the volunteers than
they would save by performing free labour,
and that they would no doubt screw everything
up and it would have to be re-done by paid
staff. Better just to avoid volunteers.

Of course, it depends whether your
organization's objectives are to let the
community grow and evolve, or whether the
organization (in status quo) is itself the
circular objective of the organization.

The most telling moment - when I left, in
fact - was when a certain Salon program got a
funding grant. After the funding ran out, the
org decided this job couldn't be done without
funding (although it had been for two years
before the funding).

, Richard Chung

Flick Harrison wrote:
> The most common argument was that it would
> take longer to "train" the volunteers than
> they would save by performing free labour,
> and that they would no doubt screw everything
> up and it would have to be re-done by paid
> staff. Better just to avoid volunteers.

Yale law professor Yochai Benkler sank this myth pretty convincingly in an article entitled "Coase's Penguin, or, Linux and The Nature of the Firm" (<A Href="http://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.html" target="\_blank">http://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.html</A>).

Benkler sees commons-based productivity as extending well outside of free software and open source paradigms. While they is not exactly creative laborers, distributed volunteers have been responsible for remarkable achievements in such tedious but important tasks as proofreading online books (<A Href="http://promo.net/pg/Proof\_Article\_Nov2002.html" target="\_blank">http://promo.net/pg/Proof\_Article\_Nov2002.html</A>), writing encyclopedias (<A Href="http://wikipedia.com" target="\_blank">http://wikipedia.com</A>), or identifying Martian craters (<A Href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1108119.stm" target="\_blank">http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1108119.stm</A>).

Benkler quotes the NASA site as claiming "that the automatically computed consensus of a large number of clickworkers is virtually indistinguishable from the inputs of a geologist with years of experience in identifying Mars craters."

jon