Internet & Collaboration

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Internet & Collaboration

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Internet & Collaboration - by Lenara Verle - Conducted by: Shanghai Art Museum & Art World Magazine

Internet & Collaboration

What makes the Internet such a great

medium for collaboration? What are some of

the most intriguing and successful examples

of collaboration practices nowadays in the

arts and other interdisciplinary fields? What

tendencies are shaping the future of

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Communication Media

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Communication Media

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Communication Media

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Communication Media

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Video Collaboration

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Video Collaboration

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Video Collaboration

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Text Collaboration

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Text Collaboration

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Gridcosm

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Gridcosm

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Thank You!

[email protected]

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text notes for the slides

1. Internet & Collaboration, by Lenara Verle. October 23, 2007

Conducted by: Shanghai Art Museum and Art World Magazine

2. Internet & Collaboration

What makes the Internet such a great medium for collaboration? What are some of the most intriguing and successful examples of collaboration practices nowadays in the arts and other interdisciplinary fields? What tendencies are shaping the future of collaboration on the Internet?

3. Communication Media - Telephone: one to one, two-way

First let’s start with some very basic concepts of communication media.

A form of interaction mediated by media is the phone. Normally one person talks to another person (one to one) and both can transmit (speak) and receive (listen) information.

4. Communication Media - TV: one to many, one-way

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5. Communication Media - Internet: many to many, two-way

The Internet brings the possibility of joining many forms of communication, including many people communicating to many people. It is a meta-medium that has inside it several possible models of communication.

6. Communication Media - Phone + TV + Internet

The concepts of communication media are not attached necessarilly to a physical device, today the same device can be used as a phone, TV and Internet browser.

7. The future of Internet?

The Internet started with text-based applications, and its creators thought that FTP , the transfer of computer files, was going to be the great application of the Internet. Instead, e-mail, which was just created as an afterthought, rapidly became Internet’s “killer application”. People were interested in using this medium to communicate to each other, not to speed the transfer of files.

The web 1.0 was about the publication of content, everybody could make their own web page and post it “out there” for other to see. (some) pages were open for comments, but normally in a separate section of the site (guestbooks are an early example)

Web 2.0 is about the mash-up of content. The user interferes and/or arranges content supplied by him or by others. Social networks (connected and searchable personal pages) are on the rise and technologies for collaboration like Wiki, Ajax and others.

Webs 3.0 and 4.0 are still to come. We don’t really know what they will bring, like when the creators though FTP was going to be the great thing. Some possibilities that are already shaping up are the Web OS, applications running not on Windows Mac or Linux, but on the Browser. Better ways of indexing and searching than what we have now (Google only indexes a fraction of what is online) and also displaying and contextualizing those results.

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8. Collaboration

Collaboration in the arts and other fields have been going on for a long time. The idea of authorship in art is something that comes and goes… In the renaissance we saw a big emphasis put on the artist signature. Da Vinci and Michelangelo had assistants but their signatures are nowhere to be seen. In some previous times, the signature was not so important and the team that was making the art piece worked together but did not sign.

Nowadays, some artists are not so receptive to collaboration because they will lose the opportunity to put their signature as the only one for the finished piece.

But some other artists are very interested in this concept and find that the result of a collaboration is greater than what would be produced in isolation.

9. Pre-Internet

Before the Internet artists used the mail network as a conduit for collaboration.

10. Pre-Web

Before the web artists were collaborating using FTP. Instead of seeing the pictures directly, they saw the filenames (scary codes of

letters and numbers) and a description. The download process could take hours depending on the modem speed.

11. SITO.ORG Crosswire, 1993

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12. Deutsch Telekom Artifact, 1995

In 1995 the Deutsch Telekon commissioned a project developed by Joop Greypink in which he invited artists across five globe meridians, crossing different countries, to manipulate starter images on a chain as well.

13. SITO.ORG Slithr, 1999

In 1999 another SITO.ORG project proposed chain manipulations in the form of an animation. The first frames came from the TV

show “The Monsters”

14. Music Collaboration

Collaboration in music is a long tradition and there are websites and software dedicated to it on the Internet.

15. Video Collaboration - Operator11.com

Operator 11 provides live webcasting and users can join live shows in a built-in “studio” that allows up to 10 simultaneous cameras, plus unlimited pre-recorded video clips.

16. Video Collaboration - Jumpcut.com

In Jumpcut users can upload videos and edit clips uploaded by others using the tools provided, including effects and transitions.

17. Video Collaboration - YouTube.com

Even YouTube has a “response” feature so users can reply in video format to others. It is much more limited than the previous examples though.

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18. Text Collaboration - Wikipedia

Wikis are one of the first tools created for text collaboration. The fact that anybody can add to the Wikipedia generates some criticism that not all of the pages are very accurate and some reflect obscure interests that are not shared by the general population. This is a funny illustrations suggesting how the content of the wikipedia is represented.

19. Text Collaboration - Wikipedia

In response, someone created a picture based on the wikipedia actual statistics. It also represents the size of the articles in English, if they were to be printed like a paper encyclopedia.

20. SITO.ORG Gridcosm

I would like to choose one example of multimedia collaboration to explore in detail.

Gridcosm is an ongoing collaborative project that started in 1997. More than twenty thousand images have been contributed so far by almost 300 artists around the world. They collaborated with images, text and sounds for this piece.

We will watch 5 minutes of the Gridcosm animation.

21. Gridcosm - Top Level

This is the web interface for Gridcosm. We are at level 2903. (In the animation, total running time is 15 minutes and that covers 1000 levels) This level is not complete yet, we have 4 pieces added and 4 available. We can choose a square and create a piece.

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22. Gridcosm - Reserving a piece

After reserving a piece, the artist has 2 hours to create and upload. You can see that when this piece is reserved, the one next to it is not available for a while. This is because the goal is to make the pieces blend smoothly to their neighbors, and if they are doing adjacent pieces at the same time, their will not have the possibility to blend.

This brings me to the the “tribes” in Gridcosm. There are the BLENDY people who are always blending with the neighbor pieces, and also the QUILTY people, who are making the square borders visible. In the animation we can see examples of both and they are both interesting. Sometimes people make blendy for a while, and then quilty, and sometimes they argue with each other, but always in a polite way.

23. Gridcosm - uploading a piece

Here is the upload page. In this page the artist can send the file and write the text for the poem.

24. Level 2903

I haven’t uploaded, just cancelled so now we are back to the top level. If we click in the middle, we can zoom into older levels. The middle piece is created automatically by shrinking the last completed level.

25. Level 2902

Here is the next completed level, we can see on the artist boards that two artists participated twice, SUH and NLT. Both the

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26. Level 2901

Here is the level that came before that. Also some artists participating twice. There is a word coined by Gridcosm’s participants called “hogging” that refers to artists that are reserving many pieces and then doing a level (almost) by themselves.

27. Level 2900

This is a very “hogged” level with only two artists participating.

28. Artist Statistics

Clicking on the artist name we can access the artist statistics, showing how many pieces that artist contributed. Sunshine is one of the most active Gridcosm participants.

29. Project Statistics

We can also access the statistics for the project as a whole.

30. Mikecosm

One interesting thing that happened, Mike Casey was an artist that used to “hog” lots of pieces and other people complained about it. His reaction was to make a copy of Gridcosm on his own server and call it “Mikecosm”. He created images for a couple of dozen levels and then decided to go back to the “main” Gridcosm project.

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31. Communimage

There were some similar, independently created projects just by coincidence on the Internet, some years later than Gridcosm, like Communimage, which is also a grid-based collaborative project.

32. Audio readings

The audio from the animation comes from an idea that developed later in the project, the artists decided to do audio readings/ musication of the Gridcosm poem and submitted it to a special section of the project page. At the time they had no idea how that would be used, just a will to add an audio component.

33. Discussion

Some of the ideas for new add-ons and even new projects come up in the discussion boards. Here the artists can discuss anything from the making of the pieces, ongoing themes, blendy vs. quilty, hog vs non-hog, image connections, related projects, ideas, and more.

If the person is a programmer then they can write a beta version and implement their ideas directly, otherwise ideas suggested by others can be used by the site’s main programmers, Ed Stastny and Jon van Oast.

Gridcosm is a volunteer project, and the internet connection is donated by Novia Communications, Omaha Nebraska USA. The original server was donated by Sillicon Graphics and the current server was found in the trash.

Hygrid, wich is also a SITO.ORG grid project won a bronze Nica at Ars Electronica in 2006, and the Gridcosm animation won the VAD Net Art 1st prize in Girona Spain, 2003 and the ZKM Media Art Awards Special Prize in 2005.