Interactive Media Fall 2006 Assignment 8 Due Noon October 30
-Please read the Description of the new Crowdsourcing Exhibit at Apex Art.
and Chap. 3 pp. 139 - 159 in your text
and post your 1 p. reflection on both readings here.
-Do re-visit my Beginning HTML eLecture and continue practicing some of the tags we learned in class and exploring more on your own!
-Your Mid-Term Project, Ink City - your way, is due next Monday Oct. 30
Flying the Internet
Himalayan Art Resources
About Me
- June Julian
- The objective of this blog is to promote international understanding and communication through art. Please contact me for permission to use the text or images. Department of Art Education, The University of the Arts, jjulian@uarts.edu
1 comment:
Searching for ET?
So now we are searching for ET with computers? I didn’t really understand that part of the reading, but the rest I did understand. I like the term crowdsourcing, it kind of gives a term for what we are trying to achieve in our class and with computer assistance in education. Crowdsourcing is what we do when we edit our wikis, blogs and interact with the net. I agree with the articles comment about crowdsourcing, that “reputation systems-consumers have the power to create what they consume”. I also liked Beuys-ian theory of social sculpture: Everyone should apply creative thinking to their own area of specialization, be it cooking or otherwise. While reading this I started to compare this type of thinking or process to television. Big networks come up with these shows, but it is first screen tested by individuals, in a consensus group, to see if it will ever air. If the consensus of the group is low then the show does not air, if 75% or more do like the show then it goes through a trial running, for a few weeks, to see if it takes off. It is nice to know that individuals still have the power to change an outcome. It may be true what he says, “even the biggest supercomputers cannot compete with half-a-million networked home machines”. I also wanted to comment on the question, “If networked communication gives consumers newfound creative agency, can it also make the crowd more artistic? According to Clive Thompson in his 2004 Slate Magazine article “Art Mobs,” mobs cannot think free form, or as he more aptly concludes, mobs can’t draw”. People can find a way to make art out of and/or with anything, and to tell them they can’t just drives them to want to do it all the more. I think it is great that human interest will always defy skeptics; my opinion is that it one of the main driving forces in art. One final example I took from the article, that showcases the crowdsourcing clout, was when “Howard Rheingold predicted in Smart Mobs that “key breakthroughs [in technology] won’t come from established industry leaders, but from the fringes, from skunkworks and start ups and even associations of amateurs. Especially associations of amateurs.” Perhaps breakthroughs in art will come from the skunkworks, the noodlers, and the untrained crowd, too”.
My reflections on the readings in the book are the same. I find the examples in the book captivating and interesting. I feel as if the book is a library or gallery of works that showcase examples of what media and technology can do in and with the arts. The reading does however explain that computers and humans are dissimilar. Computers cannot create new ideas, that they are merely tools to be used by humans to create. I don’t really like to deal in absolute, like Clive Thompson. As I said before, defiance is what drives mankind, and someone, one day, may find a way for computers to have thoughts. And when that happens, we’re all dead… come on, hasn’t anyone else seen The Matrix. I am just kidding about the dead part, but I figured I would throw it in there since we were discussing Sci-Fi with the whole ET thing earlier.
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