Inspirations

Aaron Koblin, The Sheep Market, 2008 - Ongoing,

TheSheepMarket.com is a collection of 10,000 sheep made by workers on Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Workers were paid 0.02 ($USD) to "draw a sheep facing to the left." Animations of each sheep's creation may be viewed at TheSheepMarket.com. Site visitors can share their own drawings of sheep and even “Buy this Sheep” as part of a collection of stamps. The site shows data culled from the project, like average time spent drawing a sheep, number of drawings rejected, and average wage earned by each participant. Unfortunately now the project has stopped due to flash player shutting down, which is what the site ran on.

This piece combines crowdsourcing with data-driven storytelling. It's a website that has a funny yet darker social commentary on work in the digital age. Koblin states that “the project is a poignant reflection on the anonymity, economics, and humanity at play in the vast fields of the Internet”.

These illustrations were then placed together, similarly to the works of Penelope Umbrico with her sunset images. Having all these images together allows us to almost compare all the different art styles, which i think is a wonderful thing.

These drawings were then exhibited in;

• Laboral Centro de Arte, Gijon, Spain

• Japan Media Arts Festival, Tokyo, Japan

• Apex Gallery, New York, USA

• ElectroFringe, New Castle, Australia

• Media Art Friesland, The Netherlands

This piece, compared to the works of Penelope Umbrico, is very ethical. All images were drawn by people who consented to drawing and consented to their work being showcased, as well as this they were also paid for their services for this project and thus benefitted from the project.

I am the most inspired by this piece, the idea of using a website to draw and collect a large majority of peoples unique images and compile them all together is interesting and is something similar to what i plan to do. I think giving people a specific object or thing to draw will help with the creative block they may get from drawing, and also allows a better comparison of everyones piece. It all just works together better when they've all draw the same thing.

Jiro Yoshihara, Please Draw Freely

Originally an installation piece in the Outdoor Gutai Art Exhibition in 1956. Artist Jiro Yoshihara allows others to have creative input in his work by encouraging the viewer to interact with other artists and the art. The audience creates these works by continuously adding upon each others works serving as a reminder of our creative freedom. This is similar to what i want to do, but this is a more physical form. Allowing people to connect while creating art, which is important. Unlike The Sheep Market, participants in Please Draw Freely could interact with each others drawings to create one whole connected piece. Which is what i want to do, but perhaps with digital artistry due to the pandemic.

Splendid Playground, 2013, Gutai

Inspired by Please Draw Freely, Gutai members sought to break free from the rigid mindset of wartime Japan by radically expanding our understanding of what art was, encouraging viewers to collaboratively make art. During Gutai: Splendid Playground, February 15–May 8, 2013, Please Draw Freely invited visitors to draw with people from around the world. The website is closed to new submissions.

Participants got a whole digital canvas to experiment, doodle and play around with. Being able to use a range of colours and brush sizes to create whatever they want without any artistic limitations. After finishing their piece they are able to submit to Gutai's gallery where they can check out other participants works as well.

This is somewhat similar to the sheep market, where many different people have completed a piece and then had their work uploaded to a gallery where you can compare to others work. However with this participatory piece, the people are allowed to draw whatever they want, and are much less restricted than in the sheep market. As mentioned before this piece was inspired by Please Draw Freely, which you can see as Gutai allowed participants to have a vast majority of freedom with these canvases, like how participants drew in Jiro's work, however these pieces did not allow collaboration. This whole process is very ethical as participants consented to drawing and having their work be shown in the digital gallery and i think created some beautiful and interesting pieces.

Sougwen Chung, Drawing Operations

I was highly inspired by the works of Sougwen Chung, she is an artist who is interested in the mark-made-by-hand and the mark-made-by-machine as an approach to understanding the dynamics of humans and systems. Chung is a former research fellow at MIT’s Media Lab and a pioneer in the field of human-machine collaboration. In 2019, she was selected as the Woman of the Year in Monaco for achievement in the Arts & Sciences.

She works alongside an AI robotic arm to create pieces of artwork, as this arm almost mimics what she paints. She says it teaches her to embrace imperfection, that exploring art can help us shape the technology that shapes us. She says 'collaboration is the key to creating the space for both (humans and AI) as we move forward'

She built the robotic arm herself, and in her first exhibition with it she found that the arm was not following her lines perfectly, but as she describes 'the mistakes made the work more interesting'. It allowed them to both adapt to each other in real time, rather than the initial plan of the robot just mimicking her. That these imperfections is what made the interactions so beautiful.

I think this artist is extremely inspiring, she shows the beauty of collaboration in art even when you are collaborating with a robot. it also highlights how we are moving towards a time where technology and art is combining and we can embrace it and work with it. Similarly to how i want to embrace technology and digital art in my piece, as well as embracing collaboration and imperfections.

References

1. The Sheep Market, 2008 - Ongoing, Aaron Koblin http://www.aaronkoblin.com/work/thesheepmarket/

2. Splendid Playground, 2013, Gutai http://web.guggenheim.org/exhibitions/gutai/draw/

3. Drawing Operations, Sougwen Chung https://sougwen.com/info https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-GXV4Fd1oA