COLLABORATIVE NETWORKS

Collaborative initiatives invite users to work together pursuing a common goal. The participants of this projects, create a network that allows them to communicate and establish a series of links or connections that characterize the morphology of this collaborative network.The objective of this research is to analyze the different networks that are generated in order to create hibrid visual projects through crowd-sourced techniques. This common goal will only be achieved if a large amount of users/contributors create a set of links, rules and protocols and base their thought in acting locally and thinking globally.

Each crowd-sourced project is characterized by a particular morphology to which we are going to approach, based on three reference levels. First, the scale of centralization determines who accepts, rejects or modifies the users’ contributions. This scale is directly related with the autonomy level that a participant reaches when producing their own contribution. Second, the level of agency determines the predefinition of the task that the user performs. This scale determines how strict are the rules imposed to the creator and therefore the user’s freedom to create his own contribution. The third element that will determine the nature and morphology of a collaborative networks is the level of synergy. This one, is connected with the interaction degree among users. So, the strength and typology and characteristics of the links that are created between different nodes of these networks.

In order to have an active experience on collaborative and crowd-sourced initiatives, several drawing-based experiments are developed with the XPUB community. The levels of agency, synergy, and centralization are going to be modified trying to understand which are the contributors behavior consequences when transforming the nature of their network. Moreover, the visual result, will reflect this morphology modifications, allowing us to experiment different association and links through which to create a collaborative visual element.

Crowd-sourced networks have been created for large and ambitious projects, especially in the last 10 years, when Internet communication is more than globalized. In this research, 7 web-based collaborative projects will be analyzed and mapped. The comparative analysis of these crowd-sourced mass projects allow us to have a comparative and global vision. Through projects such as The Exquisite Forest, Reddit Place or The Sheep Market, we will determine the network morphology created around it and how the graphic result shows a reflection of the structure and links between users behind it.

When the visual collaborative objective is reached, it can be understood as a graphic representation of the complex network that exists behind them. The users / contributors / creators that are part of it leave their visual imprint that will become part of the essence of that crowd-sourded creation. Furthermore, communities and sub-communities that have been created to encourage more prominent elements will also have a literal translation into the global visualization. Can we understand collaborative projects as an X-ray of the creators networks that are formed behind them?

COLLABORATIVE NETWORKS IN ART PRODUCTIONS

Crowdsourcing is creating something that’s greater than the sum of its parts. This collaboration is been used to come up with new business ideas, solutions to social problems, funding new products , mapping environmental disasters, identifying potholes that need to be repaired and even getting someone to wait in line for your new iPhone. This system enlist a multitude of humans to help solve a wide variety of problems. The crowd-sourcing principle confirms that a collective creation can produce better (and cheaper) results than an individual. Whether crowdsourced art grows into a prevalent method of expression, or, as one critic worries, becomes a form of “digital serfdom,” when millions of individuals from around the world contribute to a work, the work can be as diverse as the individual contributors.

Collaboration and community building are not only driving forces in everyday life. They also have emerged as important topics and practices in contemporary art, as Grant Kester illustrates in his publications. Addressing communities and collaborative modes of production in different cultural and social contexts claims to be art. Crowdsourced art is about inclusiveness, turning formerly passive audiences into active creators and empowering people who aren’t normally part of the art world

The meta-narrative of globalization has brought into view many different manifestations and experiences that emphasise the “co.” How to deal with this diverse and complex phenomenon? This apparently inconsiderable prefix not only designates loopholes in canonical settings in art theory and practice, but also reveals a multitude of coexisting art notions and art practices. Collaboration and community building in the arts lead to all kinds of results, situated between physical structures, social networks, and ephemeral events. We can say that a crowdsourcing system enlists a crowd of users to explicitly collaborate to build a long-lasting artifact that is beneficial to the whole community.

Can collaboration over art reveal the inherent similarities between cultures and people? People all over the world are dealing with the same things, just in different ways.How to recruit and retain users? What contributions can users make? How to combine user contributions to solve the target problem? How to evaluate users and their contributions?

CROWDSOURCING AND COLLABORATION FOR VISUAL PURPOSES, NEW?

Collaborative art is not an entirely new concept but has become easier than ever with the advent of digital technologyCollaborative art emerged in the late 1950s and presented a radical paradigm shift from the artist as creator and fully separate from the audience, with the output of his creation to be displayed in museums and galleries, to a form of art more integrated into the public space and with participation from citizens in its creation.An offshoot of social practice, crowdsourced art has roots in the communal idealism of the late 1950s and ’60s, when Fluxus artists such as Allan Kaprow started staging Happenings and other interactive performances with the public. Fluxus member Yoko Ono was (and still is) a major progenitor of collaborating with the crowd. While those works were participatory, they weren’t exactly crowdsourced.

The visual arts in Western contexts seem to be an exceptional case even though medieval European artists worked in collectives such as the “Bauhütte” (masons‘ lodge) and guilds, without (claiming) any individual authorship.Creating a social sphere through art became pivotal in Joseph Beuys‘s concept and practice of “social sculpture” (soziale Plastik). Beuys‘s work is a popular source of building a community through art and of regaining social and political power for the arts.

Net art emerged in the 1990s when artists found that the internet was a useful tool to promote their art uninhibited by political, social or cultural constraints.Over the past decade, numerous such systems have appeared on the World-Wide Web. Prime examples include Wikipedia, Linux, Yahoo! Answers, Mechanical Turk-based systems, and much effort is being directed toward developing many more. Even the word crowdsource, coined by Jeff Howe in Wired magazine in 2006, has techy origins

FROM PAPER TO WEB-BASED COLLABORATIVE PROCESSES

This crowd-sourced creativity online is putting a new twist on traditional ideas of artistic ownership, online communication and art production. Computer-mediated collaboration has become an important issue due to several trends that change how we go about organizational and academic work. The increased use of computer media for daily communication leads to more online activity even with local colleagues. Communication via computer media is also complemented by multiple forms of data repository, including databases, digital libraries, and information stored and disseminated via the web.

Moreover, it might just be the quintessential art form for our hyper-engaged era of social media and smart app Our access to the Internet, knowledge-networks and each other is increasing at an astonishing rate. We’re connected through our cell phones, computers, cars & soon-to-be watches. We’re all at the same party and have reached a tipping point of online connectivity. In fact, 2.4 Billion People use the Internet everyday.( Hyperconnectivity)

Because crowdsourced art can require huge numbers of people, Internet artists have become some of its most prolific practitioners Both the algorithmic nature of the Internet and its potential to amass distant collaborators allow artists to execute very big ideas. Using Instagram and Twitter, Ono has collected photos of smiling faces from every continent except Antarctica for her ongoing #smilesfilm campaign. It’s good to remember that the internet can be used for collaborative projects beyond just Wikipedia or flash mobs.

ROLES IN DIGITAL COLLABORATIVE NETWORKS

In crowdsourced art, viewers are also often the makers: clearly the value for those actually involved in the making is increased through enhanced meaning attributed to the piece. In many works, audience is used as raw material, we need an audience to see and react to the given work, we need their reactions for the work to exist,” the Mattes said. “Duchamp once said, ‘It is the viewer who makes the work,’ and we took that very literally.We have seeked to analyze projects wherein audiences become artists by participating in the creation of a piece of art by making one or more creative contributions. The labor isn’t always free, but it costs a lot less than paying traditional employees. It’s not outsourcing; it’s crowdsourcing.

There are three distinct roles in crowdsourced digital art projects:

Project Initiator: The artist, group, or institution that creates the process and defines the product.
Participant: An individual that makes an intentional contribution to a crowdsourced digital art process.
Audience: An individual that observes a crowdsourced digital art process, or observes or engages with a project’s product.
Contributor: A participant that makes an intentional digital contribution to a crowdsourced digital art process as defined by the processes system or structure established by the project initiator. The most basic and foundational building block of crowd-sourced digital art projects.

Everyone who participates in a crowdsourced project should take this common roles:

Collective Responsibility: Internet participants share a responsibility towards the system as a whole.
Evolution and Consensus: Effective security relies on agile evolutionary steps based on the expertise of a broad set of stakeholders.
Think Globally, Act Locally: It is through voluntary bottom-up self-organization that the most impactful solutions are likely to reached.

NETWORK MORPHOLOGY: CENTRALIZATION, AGENCY AND SYNERGY

When a collaborative visual project is created, it generates a complex network of users/creators/contributors who will become an active and fundamental part of it. All this complex interconnected world that is created has different morphologies depending on the specific characteristics of the network that is generated around it. In order to determine the qualities of this set of links it is important to attend to three fundamental aspects represented by the concepts of centralization, agency and synergy.

First the centralization scale determines who is going to select or modify the contributions or which filters are they going to overtake. We understand that a collaborative network is more centralized the more manipulation are allowed. Second, the agency level determines which are the rules imposed to the users, this concept is directly related to the freedom that a certain user has when making his contribution. A collaborative network acquires its highest point in the agency scale when stricter rules are imposed. Finally, we will analyze the interaction and communication between users. The networks generated when starting a collaborative project, can be tremendously extensive and the level of interaction among the users that compose it can be very diversed. This level of communication will determine the nature of the links that will be created and therefore the position of a certain collaborative network on the synergy scale.

SCALE OF CENTRALIZATION

• BORGES LIBRARY
  
  Their 135,000-character puzzle (actually two, one for the original Spanish and another in English translation) contains every word Borges ever wrote. It can be reached via the web, where participants can find and “circle” words, using a keyboard
  
• THE MILLION DOLLAR HOMEPAGE
  
  The home page consisted of a million pixels arranged in a 1000 × 1000 pixel grid; the image-based links on it were sold for $1 per pixel in 10 × 10 blocks. The purchasers of these pixel blocks provided tiny images to be displayed on them, a URL to which the images were linked, and a slogan to be displayed when hovering a cursor over the link.
  
• LET’S DRAW A NETWORK
  
  You can participate in this collective drawing experiment if you consider yourself a node of the Xpub Federated Network and you have at least one link or connection with some different node of the Federation.

  
  
• REDDIT PLACE
  
  Over a million redditors placed 16.5 million tiles to transform a simple, white, 1000×1000-pixel canvas into a surprisingly beautiful clash of communities, nations, ideologies, and fandoms. Because each user could only place one tile every five minutes, any single individual would have struggled to create a meaningful image on their own. However, through community collaboration, users quickly produced complex creations, surpassing all of our expectations about how this project would turn out once the 72 hours were up.
  
• THE EXQUISITE FOREST
  
  This Exquisite Forest is an online collaborative animation project. From 2012 - 2014, visitors to this site could use an online drawing tool to create a short animation. Other visitors could then build off of that animation, resulting in branching, ever-evolving narratives resembling trees.
  
• QUICK, DRAW A NETWORK!
  
  Contributions are selected by the project iniciator who collect and evaluate them.

  
  
• INTERACTIVE DIARIES
  
  How are you auditioning artists?
  We’ve looked for artists who share our vision. We had to narrow our vision to make sure everyone is on the right track; so we’re going to focus on “normal life”, whatever that means to each artist: public transportation, going to school, shopping, etc.
  
• TEN THOUSAND CENTS
  
  How did you get all 10000 drawings?
  We posted tasks on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk site. Anonymously, 10000 artists worked on drawing pieces of a $100 bill. and we paid one cent per piece (total $100).
  
• THE SHEEP MARKET
  
  

SCALE OF AGENCY

• TEN THOUSAND CENTS
  
  
• GOOGLE QUICK, DRAW!
  
  
• THE SHEEP MARKET
  
  
• QUICK, DRAW A NETWORK!
  

  
• INTERACTIVE DIARIES
  
  How will it work?
  The sound artists will be recording the ambience of their home town, before uploading it to our engineers, who will create a universal soundtrack.
  The photographers will be taking photos sequentially with each other in one album, so the photos will be talking to each other.
  For the drawing, the artists will all log into the same program, and draw on the same canvas without talking.
  
• THE MILLION DOLLAR HOMEPAGE
  
  La página web consiste de un millón de píxeles arreglados en una cuadrícula de 1000×1000 píxeles; los enlaces a base de imágenes encontrados en ésta eran vendidos a un dólar por píxel en bloques de 10×10. Los compradores de estos bloques de píxeles facilitaban imágenes pequeñas para ser mostradas en ellos, una URL al cual las imágenes estaban enlazadas, y un eslogan que se mostraría cuando se sostiene el puntero sobre el enlace.
  
• BORGES LIBRARY
  
  The two artists also noticed that some people will circle random letters “just to fuck with the application.” And they’re okay with this usage: those artificial words are no more or less valid than the others
  
• LET`S DRAW A NETWORK
  
  (2mins) You have two minutes to draw your node / your server / yourself (use a black marker) in the paper that you chose.
  Put all the pieces of paper together following the numbered mapping structure.
  (10mins) You have 10 minutes to draw the links or connections that you have with the rest of the nodes/servers in your Network. The links can be drawn or described whatever you want so feel free to use any type of marker or color that you consider to express different levels of strength or character.

  
  
• THE EXQUISITE FOREST
  
  Each user can start a tree and impose his rules.
  
• INTERNETOPIA
  
  Nobody knows what the final poster will look like until all requests are in and Ben has finished the drawing... exciting, Isn’t it?
  
• REDDIT PLACE
  
  There is an empty canvas. You may place a tile upon it, but you must wait to place another.Individually you can create something.Together you can create something more..
  

SCALE OF SYNERGY

• TEN THOUSAND CENTS
  
  Thousands of individuals working in isolation from one another painted a tiny part of the bill without knowledge of the overall task.
  
• THE SHEEP MARKET
  
  Think of this as an example of how to quickly, easily, and inexpensively get 10,000 people to do something for you. Today it is sheep, but it could just as easily be choices of color combinations for car interiors, evaluation of some logos for your business, selection of most important features when choosing a vacation spot, and so forth.
  
• QUICK, DRAW A NETWORK
  
  The contributors don’t have contact with the other contributors when they are drawing their concepts.

  
  
• BORGES LIBRARY
  
  
• GOOGLE QUICK, DRAW!
  
  The player starts with an object to draw (for example it may say “Draw a chair in under 20 seconds”). Then the player has twenty seconds to draw that object. Based on what they draw, the AI guesses what they are drawing. When the drawing is close enough to the item they were given to draw, it will say something like “I know, it’s a chair!” and the player will be moved on to the next round. There are six rounds in a game of Quick, Draw! and at the end the game shows what other people have drawn in the categories the player didn’t draw successfully.
  
• INTERACTIVE DIARIES
  
  The artists won’t be able to communicate with one another? Not initially. The diary is purely visual. The communication comes through the art.
  
• INTERNETOPIA
  
  
• THE EXQUISITE FOREST
  
  The online component allows paticipants to create short animations that build off one another as they explore a specific theme. The result is a collection of branching narratives resembling the trees of a forest.
  
• REDDIT PLACE
  
  This year we came up with Place, a collaborative canvas on which a single user could only place a single tile every five minutes. This limitation de-emphasized the importance of the individual and necessitated the collaboration of many users in order to achieve complex creations. Each tile placed was relayed to observers in real-time.
  
  Part of the success of Place was due to the expectation that it would be largely self-policed. We thought that for every one person that wanted to do something negative, there would be thousands that wanted to overwrite that with something positive—and we were right. It turns out collaborating to make something bad is far harder than collaborating to make something good.
  
• LET’S DRAW A NETWORK
  

  
  

XPUB XPERIMENTS

QUICK, DRAW A NETWORK

LET'S DRAW A NETWORK

HELP ME! DRAW A NETWORK

COLLABORATIVE PRACTICES REFERENCES

THE EXQUISITE FOREST

THE SHEEP MARKET

THE MILLION DOLLAR HOMEPAGE

INTERACTIVE DIARIES

BORGES LIBRARY

REDDIT PLACE

TEN THOUSAND CENTS

READINGS

THE FUTURE OF CROWDSOURCING

COLLABORATIVE ART PRACTICE AS HCI RESEARCH

COMPUTER-MEDIATED COLLABORATIVE PRACTICES

COLLABORATION ONLINE: THE EXAMPLE OF DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING

THE INTERNET AND COLLABORATIVE ART: AN INTERVIEW WITH INTERACTIVE DIARIES

CROWDSOURCED ART: WHEN THE MASSES PLAY NICE

CENTRALIZATION AND AGENCY IN DIGITALLY CROWDSOURCED ARTS PROJECTS

CROWDSOURCING SYSTEMS ON THE WORLD-WIDE WEB

DISTRIBUTED CREATIVITY MODELS: THE CROWDSOURCING

STRANGERS GATHER ON WEB TO MAKE COLLECTIVE ART

“CO-ART”: REMARKS ON COLLABORATION, COMMUNITY BUILDING, AND ADDRESSING THE PUBLIC IN CONTEMPORARY ART PROJECTS

FROM DRAWINGS ON A BOARD TO INTERACTIVE APPS – CROWDSOURCED ART

ALL TOGETHER NOW: ARTISTS AND CROWDSOURCING