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(Q&A) Your Assignment: Art

Leah DeVun Email 07.09.07

Editor's Note: This story is reprinted from Assignment Zero, an experiment in open-source, pro-am journalism produced in collaboration with Wired News. This week, we'll be republishing a selection of Assignment Zero stories on the topic of "crowdsourcing." All in all, Assignment Zero produced 80 stories, essays and interviews about crowdsourcing; we'll reprint 12 of the best. The stories appear here exactly as Assignment Zero produced them. They have not been edited for facts or style.

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Looking at how crowds produce and present art

Leah DeVun interviews Andrea Grover via telephone, May 10, 2007

Andrea Grover is a curator of crowdsourced art and the founding director of the "Aurora Picture Show," a Houston-based cinema dedicated to short, artist-made films and new media projects. Grover curated the show Phantom Captain: Art and Crowdsourcing at Apex Art in New York in fall of 2006. The show gathered together many of the best-known practitioners of crowdsourced art, including Peter Edmunds (Swarmsketch), Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July (Learning to Love You More), and Davy Rothbart (Found Magazine).

Leah DeVun: You were an early advocate of crowdsourcing in the area of fine art. How did you first get involved in crowdsourcing?

Andrea Grover: Part of my interest in this is related to creating non-commodity-based artwork. I have a lot of personal affection for work from the mid-1960s and early 1970s, happenings and actions such as Gordon Matta-Clark’s Food in New York, which was in a sense a crowdsourced work -- an artist-run establishment where everything, from the cooking to the eating, was a part of the artwork. I also have a lot of fondness for early video collectives like Top Value Television, Videofreex, and Raindance. Video cameras and editing equipment were so cost-prohibitive that the only way to make a work was to do it collectively. So my interests in what’s happening now are to some extent born out of the socially-driven, collaborative works from that period. I first found the term “crowdsourcing” in Jeff Howe’s article in Wired in 2006. I think it gave people language to talk about something that they were seeing but didn’t really have a word for. I think one of the original terms people were using was “relational art” – in other words, crowdsourcing is a new term to describe something that already existed before the term was in common use, but the word gave people something to organize around, and it gave some shape to newer trends.

Q: You put together a group of artists using crowdsourcing for the show “Phantom Captain: Art and Crowdsourcing” at Apex Art last year. What can you tell me about the show and how you selected the artists in it?

A: I think all of the artists had this genuine interest in involving the general public in the production of the work and then sharing ownership of the work with the public, with the exception of Aaron Koblin, whose “Sheep Market” was a comment on the unwitting participation of people in corporate crowdsourcing and the lack of creative jobs available to the crowd. His particular contribution was more of a prank, while the others were more interest in exploring whether the crowd could create a greater work than the individual.

Q: Koblin sold drawings of sheep made for “Sheep Market,” which caused some controversy among those who had participated but didn’t feel adequately compensated. What was the idea behind that?

A: Koblin wasn’t trying to profit off the work because there was no profit to be made after the investment he put in it. It was a comment on the manipulation of the workforce, and what people are willing to do for very little money. Participants could only draw 3 sheep for a wage of 2 cents each, so the maximum compensation was 6 cents per person, which amounted to an hourly wage of about 69 cents an hour. And yet he received something like 10,000 drawings in the course of 40 days. What was it about that particular assignment that people found so appealing? Other intellectual tasks on [Amazon’s] Mechanical Turk don’t get a response. Why are creative tasks more successful? In my opinion, it’s because people aren’t asked in their daily lives to be creative and to work towards a larger goal.

Q: You said that the artists involved in “Phantom Captain” were exploring whether the crowd could make a greater piece of art than an individual. What was the conclusion? Is the crowd is better than the individual?

A: I think we’ve shown in other fields, such as in science and technology, that the crowd is more intelligent than the individual.

Q: But it seems as if the editor has a lot to do with the success of the product – a free-for-all work like Wikipainting often seems less successful than those that are carefully crafted and restricted by the editor, such as Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July’s “Learning to Love You More.” [LTLYM]

A: The way that the assignment is composed really makes a difference. But LTLYM isn’t editing, in the sense that it isn’t rejecting contributions, or at least very few. It’s the way the assignment is conceived at the beginning that leads to the good results. The community of people that is attracted to a project and interested in being a part of it also determines the result. With respect to “Sheep Market,” a lot of people weren’t aware that they were participating in an artwork, yet they spent a lot of time drawing the sheep and most of those people went along with the task as assigned without trying to subvert it.

Q: How did Koblin solicit participants?

A: He used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, a Website that uses humans to do things that people do better than computers. It’s mostly used by corporations for tasks like taking surveys, transcribing things, or sorting things. But now that Koblin used it for “Sheep Market,” it’s being used for other purposes. Other people are using Ebay to create artwork, such as John Freyer’s “All My Life for Sale,” which used Ebay to catalog and sell everything in his house, down to the Vidalia onion in his refrigerator. Then he followed his belongings to their new owners in their new locations and then wrote a book about it.

Q: You also recently curated “Never Been to Houston,” [NBTH] a crowdsourced work at the Lawndale Art Center in Houston.

A: That was in cooperation with Jon Rubin, who is an artist and professor at Carnegie Mellon and who’s also worked with Harrell Fletcher on some of his early projects. We were invited to curate something at the gallery and we wanted to make the best use of a small space for six weeks. Jon and I had never actually met and our correspondence had been all via the Internet, and we came up with a concept to do a show about never meeting. The idea was that we would invite artists from all over the world to submit to a photo-sharing site on a daily basis for the course of the exhibit. They were to take pictures within their own hometowns of what they thought Houston looked like based on Internet research, since none of them had ever been to Houston. We ended up with twenty international artists uploading a minimum of three photographs per week, and we ended up with an archive of about 500 photographs. We had a large rear screen projection display of 6 ft by 8ft and a bright video projector that projected images that were streamed live from the Internet, so people who visited the gallery were excited because they didn’t have to see the same exhibit over and over again because the show evolved everyday. What we hadn’t anticipated was that a nice, tight-knit community formed by sharing this piece of web real estate. Each photograph that was uploaded – not intentionally – led to the next person reacting to that photo. The theme of pools came up and then we had a bunch of consecutive photos of pools, for instance.

Q: I saw one with a cowboy outfit.

A: That was sort of what we expected people to do – cowboys, skyscrapers, oil rigs. Things like that. But there was a more genuine, sympathetic response, a sense of "we’re all trapped in this global system and it’s affecting all of us." There was a collective – not despair, because many of the images were downright festive – but a longing for difference. We’re planning to do another exhibit called “Never Been to Tehran” because we had a very good relationship with one of the artists who participated in NBTH, Amirali Ghasemi. We’ve asked everyone who was involved in the first project to also do this second version, which will be exhibited in galleries in their own home cities using the same photo-sharing site. There’s also an economy of means to this sort of project. One of the benefits of crowdsourcing is that this show cost almost nothing to execute. It cost the price of a Picasso Web Photo-Sharing site, which was something like $24 a year. And no one was interested in being paid for the time that they contributed to the process. The artists were much more interested in the experiment.

Q: Do you think that crowdsourcing removes an economic barrier that might prevent people from participating in art?

A: For sure. Crowdsourcing was originally based on economics. The whole impetus for corporations to use it was to save money in the beginning. Internet real estate is essentially free.

Q: You said that a tight-knit community formed unexpectedly among the artists participating in NBTH. Do you think that the community that grows out of a web-based project differs much from those that grow out of face-to-face collaborations?

A: I think that people reveal more when they’re not face-to-face. There’s a certain security in not being physically present. The way that love affairs unfold very explicitly and lyrically through letter writing, it’s the same way when people feel more secure being a little bit anonymous. They’re more apt to reveal something about themselves. I know these message boards online where people have highly personal conversations that they would be fearful to have in person.

Q: Even over email, for instance, when someone “flames” someone else, they tend to say things that they would never say in person. In terms of civility there’s a difference, and maybe in terms of intimacy, too.

A: Two artists in NBTH started collaborating inside the bounds of the project, responding to each other’s posts. One would post something and the other would post in response. Lindsay Perth, who was in Scotland, posted photos with this cowboy peppered throughout her photographs, and then another artist James Charlton, who was in New Zealand, posted a lost cowboy hat that was the hat that Lindsay’s protagonist was wearing. That started happening a lot, where an element from one artist’s photograph would suddenly start appearing in another artist’s photograph.

Q: You described this exhibit as a crowdsourced project in the press release, and I just want to clarify what exactly makes it crowdsourced art. You selected the artists who participated so it wasn’t completely open to just anyone, like Drawball, or Swarmsketch or other crowdsourced art online that anyone can contribute to. How did NBTH differ from a traditional curated art exhibition, which also brings together various artists and shows their work together in one space?

A: This work wouldn’t have been created if there hadn’t been an entity that assigned a task for the artists to carry out. Usually, when you curate a show you’re bringing together already-existing work, or maybe the work has been made for an exhibit in conjunction with a particular theme, but in crowdsourcing you’re leaving the outcome up to the participants. I can’t say Jon and I really curated this show. We came up with the concept for it, but it was really self-curated by the artists who participated. We didn’t remove any photos that were submitted, we didn’t arrange them in any order. We left a lot up to chance and trusted that people would work together.

Q: What happens when they don’t work together so well?

A: I’ve seen crowdsourcing go awry when the wrong people start using the tools, and then it turns into a teenage mudslinging fest. There was one project I considered for the Apex show that was called justcurio.us.com. Justcurio.us was a great concept: you just post a question and then the crowd answers it. You can ask any question in the world, for example, you can ask people to solve a particular equation, or maybe something more on an emotional level. So it sounds like a great idea, but then people started posting questions like “What size bra do you wear?” or “Are you wearing any panties?” and it turned into this pornographic and really base kind of site. I don’t know why it went in that direction and got used for such childish purposes. People had the option to email the Webmaster and report that the content was objectionable, as you can with a lot of websites, but I think that people got so sick of it…maybe just asking a question is too simple. Maybe there has to be more complexity.

Q: Or maybe more restriction. Swarmsketch had problems too, right? Before [the creator] Peter Edmunds put some parameters on the project and restricted how much each person could do, it devolved into a kind of chaos where people couldn’t agree enough to create anything coherent.

A: An individual’s contribution to Swarmsketch is literally like a string of 5 or 10 pixels. It’s tiny. But then you have the opportunity to vote on other marks. I don’t now how [Edmunds] came up with that balance of individual and group contribution, but it works really well. A lot of the images are very compelling, and they’re not straightforward illustrations. They’re very evocative.

Q: You seem to be saying that people need a very specific task, an assignment, for this to work. Part of what makes something crowdsourcing is that someone comes up with a task.

A: Right. Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher work on those assignments for hours to craft the language and get the right phrasing and parameters, and we did the same with NBTH. If you don’t anticipate every divergence and set up the lines very clearly at the beginning it’ll go all over the place and you’ll end up with a shapeless form, which is what happened when the British web developer Kevan Davis asked people to draw TVs and faces in an earlier experiment that predates Swarmsketch. The crowd could draw fonts and other non-abstract items, but it had a hard time with works that required an interpretation of some sort. People are always going to diverge from the task, so you have to keep the assignment somewhat narrow in order to end up with something successful.

Q: What do you think it says that there all these people out there that they go looking for assignments and will do them? They don’t get paid…

A: Desperation! [Laughs.] That’s a good question. I participated in LTLYM because I wanted to be a part of that community. Jon Rubin says that these things are about the individual and not about the collective, and that everyone’s really making a portrait of themselves. In this sea of content, it’s a way to make a small mark. And there’s some strength in numbers. I remember that one of my best friends growing up had a father who was very proud that he worked on the crew that constructed the Verrazano Bridge. Even though he didn’t build the bridge himself, he was a part of the group that was responsible. He spent several months of labor on it, and because of that he felt he had some ownership over the bridge. It’s the same thing with SETI [the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, a software program that uses the computer power of volunteers on the Internet]: it doesn’t cost much, it doesn’t take up much of your free time. You just let this program run in the background of your computer and it continually searches for variances in radio waves, and you may be able to say someday that “I was part of the team that found the first extraterrestrial.”

Q: This seems more about the individual having a part in a larger accomplishment, rather than about making a connection. You can belong to a community like MySpace and have a connection without creating a tangible product.

A: People want to do something creative, and they’re more likely to do it if someone gives them a specific assignment. When someone gives you an assignment, it’s less daunting than going into a studio and making something from nothing. It’s satisfying on a number of levels: it’s like the office pool for the lottery ticket. There’s a social element, and then there’s also the chance at being a millionaire! There’s a potential of being a part of something great and if it doesn’t happen, you’ve only lost the ten minutes you put into it. It’s a low investment, with the possibility of a high return – it’s very American! You think: "I put down the one brick that ended up building the Verrazano Bridge." It operates on a micro- and macro-level. There’s a social aspect. Now I have a friend to visit in Croatia because of working on NBTH. And the macro: someday this might be a book and I will be a part of a larger, successful project.

Q: But do people get credit for being involved in crowdsourced work? Or are they just doing the work for better-known artists?

A: For one of the works that Harrell Fletcher did for the Aurora Picture Show [APS] that was exhibited at the Whitney [Museum in New York], the names of everyone who contributed were included in the exhibit. There’s a sincere effort to credit everyone in most cases. The intention is generous, I think, though obviously people who continually organize crowdsourced projects are going to have their names more prominently attached to those projects just because people start to associate that work with them. And everyone is a willing participant – no one’s twisting their arms to get their labor.

Q: Have you been able to do crowdsourced film projects at the Aurora Picture Show?

A: We’ve always been committed to creating active audiences, and that’s how I became connected to the artists involved in “Phantom Captain,” since nearly all of them created programs for APS. Mark Allen from LA’s Machine Projects collaborated with us to create the “Video Gong Show.” Mark devised a system that allowed audience members to instantaneously vote on films that audience members made and brought with them to the show that very night. The viewers voted and whenever more than 50% disapproved of the video being shown (a bar measuring their level of disapproval went across the top of the screen) a gong would go off and the video would be automatically ejected. The audience made the videos and they got to decide the course of the show. We also worked with Harrell Fletcher on “Loving Laura More,” LTLYM Assignment 14 [to write your life story in a day], which led to another assignment to shoot a scene from Laura Lark’s life, and we had audience members read from Laura Lark’s life. Davy Rothbart [of Found Magazine] has been to APS several times and we had audience members arrive with found videos from thrift stores and garage sales, and those became the content for a found video show at APS.

Q: It sounds like it’s a way of involving a lot of people and de-professionalizing art venues.

A: The root of the word “amateur” is “to love.” It’s about having a passion for something, about being driven by your affection for something rather than by other motives.

Q: Are you satisfied with the number of people involved in crowdsourcing now? How would you get more people involved, and would that be a desirable outcome?

A: So much of the work is web-based, so there is a digital divide. We had trouble finding people in developing nations to participate in NBTH. I’d be more satisfied if we could involve people that don’t now have access to technology. But there was a pretty impressive number of people who were involved with “Sheep Market.”

Q: Are there other directions that crowdsourcing could go in that haven’t yet been exploited?

A: It’s already gone to television with Current TV. What’s bigger than television? The big screen – a Hollywood movie that’s crowdsourced! Shu Lea Cheng was working on a crowdsourced movie made with cell phones, with participants shooting scenes from a script while they were at Sundance. As the technology to make movies or create audio work becomes smaller, cheaper, better, and more accessible you’ll see more and more examples of this sort. Howard Rheingold writes in Smartmobs that in terms of technology, innovation is going to come from the untrained. Crowdsourcing is all over the place now, but hopefully the trend won’t be completely co-opted by corporations. T-Mobile, I think, had a contest: make a new commercial and if it’s selected it’ll air and you’ll hit the jackpot –

Q: Is that a problem? How is that different from what you’ve already described?

A: It doesn’t work on that micro, community level. It’s only about celebrity and to make an advertisement, a commodity-driven exercise. It results in a very different type of work. My point of view is very idealistic. The kind of world I’d like to imagine isn’t driven solely by the market.

5/14/07
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