2007-12-31. This post has been copied to the Art of the Net Wiki. All further updates and edits will occur on the Wiki. Link

What is audience-sourcing?

Audience-sourcing is the act of people, while in the process of observing a work of art, transmitting some aspect of their observation process to others in some durable manner.

Putting it more simply, audience-sourcing occurs when:

• A young lady Twitters that she is listening to a beautiful song while attending a concert.
• A young man IMs his friends that the movie he is watching “kinda sucks”.
• A geek posts by e-mail to his blog a description of the robot wars games is currently observing.
• A small group of people all raise their hands simultaneously having been alerted to do so through the Bluetooth telephones.
• A casual visitor’s comment is entered into a fresh blog post.
• You update your “is” on Facebook from your mobile phone just before the curtain goes up.

What are some examples of the results of on-line audience-sourcing?

The customer reviews on amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, the comments on http://flickr.com and http://deviantart.com, the reviews on newegg.com and bestbuy.com are all audience-sourcing. The interesting thing here is that the audience or customers appear to be just as happy making comments commercial products as they are about works of art. It appears that anything that has been “designed” ranging from “The Pirates of the Caribbean” to the iPhone is available for audience-sourcing. Reviews of all kind appeared to be equally insightful (or have similar lack of insight). In other words almost anything cast upon the public eye could be subject to audience-sourcing.

Audience-sourcing is popping up everywhere. The audience is talking back.

Is there a link to the book “The Wisdom of Crowds”?

It seems highly likely. Hopefully, this matter will be covered in depth in a later addition of this post.

Are there historical precedents for audience-sourcing?

College cheers, warpaint, the wave are all examples of audience participation. Perhaps so are lynch mobs. These are in some sort of way precursors to the current trend of audience sourcing. There are examples where the audience, of its own volition, were communicating to each other, not necessarily to the performers themselves, some aspects of their appreciation of the performance.

A significant difference between audience participation and audience-sourcing is that audience participation is transient and unrecorded.

How does audience-sourcing impact the work or the performance itself?

Audience-sourcing probably has very little impact on the work with the performance itself. Considering books, art and sculpture, the audience arrives well after the work has been produced. If we are talking about a “live” performance of a piece of music or a play, then one must look at Philip Auslander’s book Liveness (http://www.amazon.com/Liveness-Performance-Mediatized-P-Auslander/dp/0415196906) to see that a live performance is very often not very alive at all. What audience-sourcing may do is influence the sale of the product and its general reception by the community, but it is not very likely to affect the work of art itself. On the other hand, audience sourcing may have a long term effect on the artist, composer or author and somehow alter the way that person creates their next work.

What about art critics, reviewers, reporters, courtroom artists and photographers? Are they part of the phenomena of audience-sourcing?

The common link between all of these disciplines is that they have all been paid or will be paid because of their attendance at the performance. Therefore they have some vested interests in the performance apart from besides just being there. So the quite specific aspect of audience-sourcing is that the communication is for free, most likely without any digital rights management or copyright encumbrance and the author is unlikely to be well-known or famous.

Where are some places where there is a lack of audience-sourcing?

The surprisingly major empty space for audience-sourcing is in online museum websites. As far as we know there is not one museum that allows commenting or feedback on individual works of art in their online collections or exhibitions. Thus for the time being art and sculpture produced in the traditional manner have very little audience-sourcing. On the other hand the newer Internet-oriented artists collaborations do very much support audience sourcing. Examples include event deviantart.org and rhizome.org.

Will there be a confluence of audience-sourcing and Web Art?

Most certainly. It is a basic tenet of this site that Web Art must have audience comments. We predict that significant works a Web Art will last forever. And so should their comments. It will be just as important for members of the future beings to read what the audience thinks of a work through the ages as it will be looking upon the work itself. The effect of audience-sourcing on works of Web Art will be to add provenance, to intervene with the work, to add liaisons with other works, to amplify the emotions and simply to add depth to the original work.

What is the connection with crowd-sourcing?

Wikipedia defines crowdsourcing as “the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people.”

The moment a work of art is published, displayed or performed, to a certain extent it becomes an act of crowdsourcing. The artist, composer, or author outsources the appreciation of the work to an undefined, generally large group of people.

With audience-sourcing, there was always been by definition an audience which is a large group of people. Be the work of art a concert, a poem, a painting, a book or whatever there is a community of people for whom the work will bring pleasure, or displeasure or perhaps even no pleasure. For one reason or another, members of that audience decide to record these emotions so that others who follow in the same footsteps may see them.

Audience-sourcing is the reverse of crowdsourcing. Or what occurs after the audience has been crowdsourced. Certain members of the audience self-select themselves to be spokesman for that audience. The audience is “in-sourcing” a special talent.

What is the connection with audience participation?

Audience participation typically involves spontaneous acts or outbursts. When people applaud, boo or laugh, it is a moment of spontaneity that occurs and then disappears forever. When a reader cries upon reading a poem, poignant as that moment may be the tears soon dry and are lost. The comments written on the margin of a book, disappear when that book is trashed.

With audience-sourcing, those moments of inspiration or emotion are recorded and have a duration that may extend into eternity.

When was the neologism audience-sourcing actually coined?

At approximately 5:30 am on 8 December 2007 in San Francisco.

The Web Art of the Dot Com era is a Flash widget that you click on and lots of insanely great artistic things happen. People are happy with this. It works and it’s fun. What more could you ask for?

Art marches on. Comments like “She’s wearing Balenciaga. Last year’s…” are just as appropriate about web sites as they are about the rag trade.

We have real-time googling and mash-up Web Art sites now. Are they the Web Art 2.0 sites or is there something more that will happen? Is Web Art 2.0 officially under way or is it yet too happen?

A good test case might be the existence of Web Art Widgets for FaceBook or the Google OpenSocial Widget program. Once there are several such widgets, It will be say to say that Web Art has been upped to 2.0. Are there other such tests we can think of? Probably.

Here’s one dilemma: Do we let this art unroll quietly, un-self consciously? Or do we double-click on it for a closer inspection. How much will we change it by measuring it so early in its development?

Taking the lead from Marinetti’s traveling exhibit of the Italian Futurists in 1913: the more artists see the revolution the they will produce revolting stuff revolutionary works. (Just as before, bad artists produce crap. So do good artists, but much less so.)

There so many cool aspects of this new digital work:

For example it does not deteriorate. In all likelihood digital works could last until the end of time. Unlike Leonardo’s stalecoes frescoes. And innumerable paper works.

The next part is starting to be interesting. It’s interactive. The viewer owns the presentation. The viewer decides what is going to be seen and when and by which route. Compare this to boring contemporary videos where it is the artists that controls exactly what the viewer sees and for too how long.

And then the new stuff is almost all open source. Being built on HTML, JPG image files and MP3 sounds, the tools to recreate the work are available to all who can view the work. Instead being locked up in a rich old fart’s house, the work is as accessible to a youngster in a remote African village as it is the slickest silicon valley web guru. The work is accessible for many purposes not applicable to traditional art viewing, improving, scratching, embedding, whatever.

And the freakiest thing of all: what benefits do ownership confer? If you own something everybody can access easily and for free, what is it that you really own? It is simply your pleasure to own it. Perhaps it’s not about ownership it may be more like a marriage. You and this work are in partnership. You put a work of art on the web and its reward to you is the number of visitors that to whom it gives pleasure.

One of the great sites for art on the Internet is deviantART.com. In operation since 2000, the site provides free access to over 41 million works of art. In comparison the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art which started in 1870 has a collection of just over two million works.

deviantART hosts works that are drawings and paintings either scanned or digital, comics, photography (motion and still). The web site enables artists to display, sell, discuss and comment on a wide variety of styles and media. It’s well organized, easy to use and well-loved by its many members – over thirty-five thousand were on when I looked.

On the other hand, there no significant amounts of sculpture or installations – let alone craft works such as furniture or industrial design. In essence deviantART is a repository for static two dimensional graphical works. I have yet to see any work that could be called Web Art. In other words the there are no interactive works. There is no mixing of text, image and sound.

For most people deviantART and the many other on-line art galleries is the sort of thing that comes to mind when when they think of art on the Internet. These web sites and the artists they show are actually promulgating an art that is as old the cave paintings at Lascaux.

Will the new art come in gently and from many sources as did say Abstract Expressionism or will the new art start off with a single work by a single artist such as Cubism and Les Demoisells d’Avignon? Is the work we are seeing from Gerard Ferrandez and Ellen Pronk and many others indicative of the future or will there be another artist that blows us all away with revolutionary work? In either case, deviantART as well as the Metropolitan will have to reinvent them selves to cope with the new works.

In 1912 Marcel Duchamp (1886-1968) painted Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2. When exhibited at the 1913 Armory Show in New York City, an art critic for the New York Times describes the work as “an explosion in a shingle factory”. This canvas was controversial, provocative and, for many people, simply upsetting. Today, hanging in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the painting is called an ‘iconic holding’.

Jump forward nearly 100 years and play around with Tetka. You can use your left and right arrow keys to raise or lower gravity (you have to hold them down a while to see results).
If she gets stuck, grab her with your mouse and fling her.

Nude Descending A Staircase was ground-breaking for some, just not understood by most. Tetka, on the other hand, is an easily comprehended toy.

With Tetka we readily accept many strange phenomena. We accept that Tetka can drop an enormous distance without hitting bottom. We can drag her and slam her with impunity. We can see her in more multiple ways then we can see the Duchamp’s nude. Grab Tetka and jiggle hard and you will see more stop motion images than Duchamp could have painted in a year.

Duchamp is painting a nude. The spectator is thus assumed to be a man. And thus there is the whole woman being gazed on by a man scenario that critics have discussed since the first critic saw the first nude.

Thank goodness, Tetka is dressed even if it is but an itsy-bitsy bikini. The thought of thrashing a nude lady is too nasty to bear. I start thinking of a Jacques Lacan Other (I must find the passage where Lacan talks of objects of sexual desire as puppets that act out one’s fantasy scenarios) and other nightmarish thoughts. In other words because Tetka is the puppet you can thrash she is far more provocative than gazing on Duchamp’s nude could ever be.

These two elements (multiple representations and remote control) already define Tetka as a work of art. Not a masterpiece but something worth preserving and worth discussing.

She is a sign post as to how far we have come in the creation of art in the last 100 years. What Picasso started in 1907 has been acquired and we have tools and technologies that he could not have imagined.

On the other hand there is a lot that that the Internet has not acquired. Nude Descending A Staircase is about multiple view point angles fused together into a single image. The dotted lines and arc segments indicate we are looking at an engineering drawing of geometry in animation. The deconstruction of the nude into simplified geometrical objects and the flatness of the perspective are all delightful rendering tricks that are lost on the realist gamer programmers.

The art of the Internet is still in its infancy. It has not yet had its Picasso or Duchamp. But they will appear before too long.

***

The name of the creator of Tetka seems to be lost. The word “Tetka” translates as “aunt” but is used informally as a courtesy title when addressing older women whether or not they are relatives. Some dialects use the word, “Chotka.” (from Tetka’s House). A full screen version of Tetka. An alternate version.

Jacques Ferrandez has made two JavaScript/DHTML versions of Tetka, Way Back (2005) and What Power (2007) and Ragdoll (2007). Because of the limitations of JavaScript it is taking him some time to achieve the responsiveness and complexity of the original Tetka, but he has made remarkable progress. There’s a good chance that if he continues with his work that he will; eventually come up with with works that are as complex as traditional painted works and yet have the interaction of the new new technologies.

In 1912 Marcel Duchamp (1886-1968) painted Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2. When exhibited at the 1913 Armory Show in New York City, an art critic for the New York Times describes the work as “an explosion in a shingle factory”. This canvas was controversial, provocative and, for many people, simply upsetting. Today, hanging in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the painting is called an ‘iconic holding’.

Jump forward nearly 100 years and play around with Tetka. You can use your left and right arrow keys to raise or lower gravity (you have to hold them down a while to see results).
If she gets stuck, grab her with your mouse and fling her.

Nude Descending A Staircase was ground-breaking for some, just not understood by most. Tetka, on the other hand, is an easily comprehended toy.

With Tetka we readily accept many strange phenomena. We accept that Tetka can drop an enormous distance without hitting bottom. We can drag her and slam her with impunity. We can see her in more multiple ways then we can see the Duchamp’s nude. Grab Tetka and jiggle hard and you will see more stop motion images than Duchamp could have painted in a year.

Duchamp is painting a nude. The spectator is thus assumed to be a man. And thus there is the whole woman being gazed on by a man scenario that critics have discussed since the first critic saw the first nude.

Thank goodness, Tetka is dressed even if it is but an itsy-bitsy bikini. The thought of thrashing a nude lady is too nasty to bear. I start thinking of a Jacques Lacan Other (I must find the passage where Lacan talks of objects of sexual desire as puppets that act out one’s fantasy scenarios) and other nightmarish thoughts. In other words because Tetka is the puppet you can thrash she is far more provocative than gazing on Duchamp’s nude could ever be.

These two elements (multiple representations and remote control) already define Tetka as a work of art. Not a masterpiece but something worth preserving and worth discussing.

She is a sign post as to how far we have come in the creation of art in the last 100 years. What Picasso started in 1907 has been acquired and we have tools and technologies that he could not have imagined.

On the other hand there is a lot that that the Internet has not acquired. Nude Descending A Staircase is about multiple view point angles fused together into a single image. The dotted lines and arc segments indicate we are looking at an engineering drawing of geometry in animation. The deconstruction of the nude into simplified geometrical objects and the flatness of the perspective are all delightful rendering tricks that are lost on the realist gamer programmers.

The art of the Internet is still in its infancy. It has not yet had its Picasso or Duchamp. But they will appear before too long.

***

The name of the creator of Tetka seems to be lost. The word “Tetka” translates as “aunt” but is used informally as a courtesy title when addressing older women whether or not they are relatives. Some dialects use the word, “Chotka.” (from Tetka’s House). A full screen version of Tetka. An alternate version.

Jacques Ferrandez has made two JavaScript/DHTML versions of Tetka, Way Back (2005) and What Power (2007) and Ragdoll (2007). Because of the limitations of JavaScript it is taking him some time to achieve the responsiveness and complexity of the original Tetka, but he has made remarkable progress. There’s a good chance that if he continues with his work that he will; eventually come up with with works that are as complex as traditional painted works and yet have the interaction of the new new technologies.

The other evening I was at a wine bar thinking about my next post here. What started running through my mind were two web sites – one from 2004 and one quite recent site – where a number of people came together to create works of art. It soon dawned on me that the question I was asking was “Can social networks produce art?” and, if so, could a social network actually produce high art. I became quite excited. Wow, I’ve invented something new here: social networks producing art. And then I continued: is the art that social networks produce inevitably banal or low art? Is low art bad? Wow, this is going to be big, etc. It’s amazing how a glass of Prosecco will boost your confidence.

Later and back on the net and completely by chance I came across AssignmentZero. It’s a site about “crowdsourcing” or things created by groups of people over the Intenet. So, of course, my idea was not really new at all. Anyway I had fun looking at Wikipainting and A Million Penguins and other crowdsourced “works of art”. When there are six billion people thinking things, the chances of anyone coming up with something new are quite remote.

In coming up with the idea of social networks producing art, I did have two specific web sites in mind. We will talk about the second, the eye-project, in a subsequent post.

The first web site I thought of regarding “group art” is zoomquilt. The given link is a mirror because the original site cannot take much load. The original site is here. The feeling is that you are traveling through a fantastic landscape. In reality you are zooming through 46 still images. As you zoom closely into into area, the next picture comes into focus and replaces the previous picture.

The artwork has a gouache-like quality – quite like backdrops for computer games. It is unlikely that you will be moved by the work (that is to say in an emotional sense) but it certainly is fun to take the journey and move through this rather surreal space a number of times.

Every time I look at Zoomquilt I am reminded of a Chinese panoramic scroll painting. Because the scrolls are very long – several meters/yards – you only unroll several inches/centimeters at a time. You travel through the landscape (and sometimes time as well) as you continuously unroll the new areas and hide the old area. In panoramas you pan, in zoom quilts you zoom.

With both types of images you are in control. You proceed at your own speed. In the Chinese landscape panoramas you follow a river or a road. In Zoomquilt you follow a brown/orange winding ribbon as it is reinterpreted by each artist. Both are highly illustrational. You really feel the need that somebody should be telling you the story behind each new thing you are seeing. And I hope that in future zoom quilts you will be able to click on or turn on running explanations or listen to podcasts or music as the scene progresses. Something like the dude that tells you to watch out for the crocodile as you take the Jungle Cruise at Disneyland. Which I mention because it too is a quite linear, pre-formatted journey through a fictional landscape.

The difference with Zoomquilt unlike the scroll or Disney ride is that you can keep on going without rewinding. The end automatically brings you back to the beginning. So you can just keep on going and going – see new things each time.

I find very few meaningful references or homages to other films, works or art or even games in Zoomquilt. The tree monsters look familiar and the two men with glasses sort of look like Gandhi, but on the whole it looks mostly like random imaginations of people influenced by Disney, Lucas and Tolkien.

Usually when you see an illustration, you see it as part of a story. It’s the picture that represents the thousand words. But in Zoomquilt there is no accompanying story. So you could call these abstract or non-representational illustrations. Although everything seems to make sense there is no notion of time place or subject matter to hold the work together. Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending A Staircase was called an explosion in a shingle factory for trying to take a normal image and make it multi-representational . If contrast, is Zoomquilt what an implosion in a shingle factory would look like?

© 2007 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. The original painting is at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. This image was copied from Wikipedia.

Pablo Picasso finished painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon one hundred years ago this month. Les Demoiselles is the tipping point between old and new art. There have been some tipping points since, but none as important.

This post is a celebration of that moment.

It is the summer of 1907. Picasso and his contemporaries realize the photographer with camera is just as good at depicting reality as the painter. With the development of the moving picture camera, the output of the photographer in many ways outperforms anything the traditional artist can produce.

What can you as an artist of the day do to retaliate, to rebuff the onslaught of photography and cinema? Impressionism and post-impressionism are already decades old. To any young artist educated in any art school of the time it is clear that the oil painting of the day is heading into the backwaters of life. Current life (in 1907) is about cars, airplanes, radio and technology. Current life is about jazz, cinema, magazines, radio and revolution. As an average oil painter dabbing dots on canvas, your chances of swaying the collective intellectual consciousness of High Art are diminishing rapidly.

New techniques do not help. Every chemical, from eggs to oil, every dabbing tool from badger brush to palette knife has been tried. New subjects do not help. Depictions of rich and poor, beautiful or ugly religious or sacrilegious all exist and won’t stop the onslaught.

What is needed is something new, something only artists can do, something that will shock and awe the intellectuals.

And Picasso does it. He invents a new way of seeing. A new way of processing visual data.

It’s timeless. It’s this second and that second and this era and that era all at the same time.

It’s ubiquitous. It’s this viewpoint and that viewpoint and and that location and this location all in the same place.

It’s multi-valued. It’s a reference to this and a reference to that and this dogma and that dogma all in the same story.

Now you just try and do that with your fancy little piece of machinery, Mr Photographer!

Thus Pablo Picasso in a single work (painting plus studies) virtually saves the Western tradition of oil painting as high art. Imagining hight art without Picasso is like imagining the American Revolution without Washington or modern physics without Einstein. One can do it, but it’s not easy.

Are you OK on Picasso’s singular achievement? If not there will be more another day. For the moment let’s go back to the future which, for the moment, is today.

The world of art must surely be approaching another momentous tipping point. New works are increasingly derivative. The Internet is producing work that traditional oils painters can’t do. The artists are getting left behind.

On hundred years ago, Picasso with help from Braque, Duchamp and others put forward a new way seeing the called Cubism. Something like this is going to happen again.

I submit to you that in the next few years the world will again lurch forward with a jump. My guess is that it will have something to do with interaction, with technologies we are playing with on the Internet and with the environmental and social issues of the day.

Maybe a future Les Demoiselles will look back at you differently depending on whether you are male or female, black or white, rich or poor, old or young…