Statement of the Problem
crowd & art – Art by Lots of Non-artists or the Quality of the Masses?
Based on hypotheses put forth by H.G. Wells, a science fiction pioneer who, as early as 1938, was discussing the possibility of a World Brain defined as a compilation of individual knowledge made into collective knowledge [9], as well as on 1934 publications by Paul Otlet, who had a vision of a world knowledge network for all and wanted to create an archive of universal knowledge as a means of insuring world peace [10], today’s internet pioneers and crowd intelligence & cloud computing advocates such as David Sasaki hold that collective knowledge available on the internet promises undreamt-of possibilities.
Cognizant of the fact that there are always real human beings seated behind all the processors that make up our networks and they’re actually the ones feeding this information into the servers of the world, and likewise fully aware that the internet’s system of control and self-regulation is more or less functional (see Wikipedia), I have asked myself how this can be adapted to the working process of the internet. Crowdsourcing sites like Mechanical Turk live from the fact that work can be accomplished online, whereby this is generally a matter of translations, graphic design jobs, picture descriptions, coming up with ideas and encoding/decoding. The fact that contributions can be processed further by other people is the bread & butter of the internet. Exchanges and platforms like Mechanical Turk, Innocentive et al. [11] work due to their orientation on the market economy and function as a marketing tool. The laborers are more or less qualified; those commissioning the tasks can pick and choose from among lots of submissions to satisfy their quality requirements.
The question that arises is: What sort of results can be expected from massive reliance on non-professionals or semi-pros? And applying this question specifically to artistic processes: Can art result from the mass deployment of non-artists? (Here, I have intentionally avoided use of the term amateur, since I assume that the majority of those who participate online in the production of a work of art would not wish to designate themselves as amateur artists or artists of any kind for that matter.)
Or does something called “the quality of a collective” exist?
[9] Cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Brain
[10] Cf. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Otlet
[11] Cf. http://www.socialnetworkstrategien.de/ubersicht-crowdsourcing-projekte/
