A million-artist painting
MillionArtists is fundraising project with an interesting way of gathering donations: Everyone who gives money can choose the color and placement of single pixel on a massive online canvas. In theory, as thousands or millions of people donate, it'll take shape as a picture.
But a picture of what? Heh -- interesting question. A story in the Globe and Mail points out that at the moment, there are only 88 donations, so the pixels are so insignificant on the sprawling digital canvas that they "could easily be mistaken for dirt on the screen." (That's a possibly lovely, if dispiriting, metaphor for the philanthropy's always-heroic but never-enough attempt to solve the world's problems.) You can check the painting out in real-time here; a snapshot of the current pic, shrunk down to 1/10th size, is above. The guys running the project describe the aesthetic of the project thusly:
I see the point regarding the "meaningful and pleasant look" and have to agree that our picture may become just "white noise" ... On other hand I'd compare this "random pixel location" method to Jackson Pollock's method of "dripping paint from cans with holes in the bottom", but I must agree that mine is ever more extreme: when Pollock used his own senses to make what he believed reflects his art vision, I'm going to use sense of color of a million different people. Will I get the "meaningful and pleasant look" at the end? I do not know. Will it show the feelings of the million people? I believe it will.
A while back, I wrote a piece for Slate about whether "collaborative art" was possible -- hundreds or thousands of people working, hivelike, on a single project, each unaware of the intentions or desires of the others. I think it is indeed possible that a hive can produce art, but it all depends on the framing device. The device here is so open-ended that it's likely to produce an entropic beige sludge. But hey -- it'll be an entropic beige sludge that has raised a bunch of money for charity!
(Thanks to Jonathan Kotcheff for this one!)
Posted by Clive Thompson at June 12, 2006 07:52 PM
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Entropic beige sludge, indeed. You know my thoughts on this. :)
I think the beautiful thing about art is its individualistic expression. Creative visions occur in individual minds. An artist can have minions helping to construct a piece of art, but they can never be more than peripheral. Only one person has the "eureka" moment, only one person sees that vision clearly. That vision can be explained, but never duplicated in another.
The problem is dilution. Two artists working on equal footing = two separate visions. Two separate visions results in a mixed message, or a confused creation. Three separate visions dilutes it even further. Repeat ad infinitum, and we're back to entropic beige sludge.
Any successful art that comes from collaboration is, in my opinion, the result of pure chance.
Dave
Posted by: Dave Sandoval at June 13, 2006 10:59 AM
I'm beginning to agree with you. I certainly agree with you that a defining aspect of art is an individual vision. Though in a lot of modern data-driven art, the artist's work consists of taking a big stream of information generated by gazillions of people -- such as online traffic -- and filtering it in a way that produces interesting imagery, sound, etc. The art, in this sense, is the design of the algorithms. If there were some algorithms filtering and shaping the contributions of the million contributors here, the results might be more interesting.
Posted by: Clive at June 13, 2006 11:30 AM
Yeah, this may not turn into a grey blob, but it'll be a blob. There's no way, when you control one pixel, you can influence the final piece enough to produce some coherent picture.
My favorite example of collabortive art at work is a site that's actually been in action a really long time now, tiles.ice.org. Each artist gets a square, with the borders revealed but the center missing. The borders are there so they can make things blend. They have produced some crazy, amazing work. It looks like these days they are really tending towards the surreal category.
Posted by: Peter at June 14, 2006 10:47 AM
Peter, that stuff is just superb. It's the Exquisite Corpse concept, brought to "high" art!
That Escher-inspired piece is truly amazing.
Posted by: Clive at June 14, 2006 1:11 PM
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Entropic beige sludge, indeed. You know my thoughts on this. :)
I think the beautiful thing about art is its individualistic expression. Creative visions occur in individual minds. An artist can have minions helping to construct a piece of art, but they can never be more than peripheral. Only one person has the "eureka" moment, only one person sees that vision clearly. That vision can be explained, but never duplicated in another.
The problem is dilution. Two artists working on equal footing = two separate visions. Two separate visions results in a mixed message, or a confused creation. Three separate visions dilutes it even further. Repeat ad infinitum, and we're back to entropic beige sludge.
Any successful art that comes from collaboration is, in my opinion, the result of pure chance.
Dave
Posted by: Dave Sandoval![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.collisiondetection.net/nav-commenters.gif)
at June 13, 2006 10:59 AM
I'm beginning to agree with you. I certainly agree with you that a defining aspect of art is an individual vision. Though in a lot of modern data-driven art, the artist's work consists of taking a big stream of information generated by gazillions of people -- such as online traffic -- and filtering it in a way that produces interesting imagery, sound, etc. The art, in this sense, is the design of the algorithms. If there were some algorithms filtering and shaping the contributions of the million contributors here, the results might be more interesting.
Posted by: Clive![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.collisiondetection.net/nav-commenters.gif)
at June 13, 2006 11:30 AM
Yeah, this may not turn into a grey blob, but it'll be a blob. There's no way, when you control one pixel, you can influence the final piece enough to produce some coherent picture.
My favorite example of collabortive art at work is a site that's actually been in action a really long time now, tiles.ice.org. Each artist gets a square, with the borders revealed but the center missing. The borders are there so they can make things blend. They have produced some crazy, amazing work. It looks like these days they are really tending towards the surreal category.
Posted by: Peter![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.collisiondetection.net/nav-commenters.gif)
at June 14, 2006 10:47 AM
Peter, that stuff is just superb. It's the Exquisite Corpse concept, brought to "high" art!
That Escher-inspired piece is truly amazing.
Posted by: Clive![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.collisiondetection.net/nav-commenters.gif)
at June 14, 2006 1:11 PM