A picture of the world

April 19th, 2010 by Ville Miettinen

Never in my life have I seen anything like it.

Under a giant dome, hundreds of monsters, aliens and other strange creatures silently went about their business. Beside the smooth curves of a naked mermaid, a dwarf fought his way free from a toilet. Nearby two headless lovers embraced, and a giant rabbit terrorized a city.

This was not a secret government experiment or the storage warehouse of a Hollywood studio. This was something much more disturbing: A peek inside the imagination of hundreds of Helsinki residents, all working separately to create a single artistic statement.

Outsourcing Art
The man ultimately responsible for this nightmare was artist Antony Gormley. In some of the most inspired artistic delegation since Milli Vanilli, rather than get his own hands dirty, Gormley put an enormous block of clay in a giant tent and invited Helsinki residents to do his work for him.

When I visited, there were about a hundred people busy working on the bizarre sculptures. Although the stuff of nightmares was perhaps over represented, the originality of thought on display was amazing, as was the effort people had made to contribute.

Thinking about it later, what struck me was not only how creative (and strange) my fellow Finns are, but how crowdsourcing could facilitate a similar sort of collaboration between people from all over the world, without the artists even needing to leave home.

Artists Anonymous
A project doing just that is Swarmsketch, a website that allows up to one thousand people to each contribute a limited line in the creation of a single picture. After drawing this line, contributors get the chance to vote on the opacity of other lines, making the final product a combination of the more popular contributions. Once one thousand people have drawn a line (or after a week, whatever comes sooner) a randomly chosen online search term becomes the subject for the next sketch.

This is unpaid work, where people willingly choose to contribute their time and sometimes questionable talent. To date Swarmsketch has been running for 1820 days, suggesting that the desire to participate in collective artworks is neither fleeting, nor limited to Finns. While the results generally resemble something that a blindfolded three year old high on sugar might produce, it is evocative, interesting art nonetheless.

Where Swarmsketch offers only the reward of participation, there are other collaborative art websites where such contributions are paid. The art project Tenthousandcents, enticed 10,000 people (through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk) to help create a representation of a $100 note, rewarding them with the princely sum of 1 cent each. Each contributor worked in isolation using a specifically designed tool to create the note, without knowing what the final image they were helping to produce would be.

The Factory factor
Although the shortcomings of these projects are easy to point out (especially if the finished artworks are in the room), there is a whiff of the avant-garde, an undercurrent of cool about the concept. For me, it’s not so much the finished product that is important, but its creation. Rather than trading the artwork, it is the artists that become faceless, tradable commodities. It seems like something Warhol with his assembly line “Factory” and of course, the great Vanilli would have embraced.

While there’s a big difference in the artistic satisfaction gained from molding clay with your hands for hours and tapping a keyboard for a few minutes, the advantages of the latter are also apparent. For a start, it’s easy and you don’t have to wash your hands afterwards. Not only that, it allows you to collaborate with people from all over the world, without forcing you to actually mix with these often weird artistic wannabes. I’m not about to say that it’s the future of art, but I like it.

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