The Politics and Ethics of Participatory Culture and Collaborative Practice
- w1728587
- Mar 5, 2021
- 5 min read
Participatory art- describes a form of art that directly engages the audience in the creative process so that they become participants in the event.
The one and the many (2011) Grant Kester
In Grant Kester's 2011 book 'The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context' , Kester places emphasis on the value of participatory art as a means for reducing the hierarchal notions of the artist as the supreme creator and the viewers as passive spectators. He argues that open-ended forms of participatory to create social utopia.
Artificial Hells (2012) Claire Bishop
Claire Bishops, in her book 'Artificial hells' (2012) describes the politics of participatory art, defines it as art in which people constitute the main artistic media and material, with the artists occupying the role of collaborator instead of individual producer of objects.
There are often arguments that participatory art does not have critical worth, as it is community art and not created by specialists. Artists working in this art field seem to display more interest in producing an ethical relationship with a set of participants than to foster the exercise of critical judgement.
What is crowdsourced art?
Crowdsourced art is about inclusiveness, turning formerly passive audiences into active creators and empowering people who aren’t normally part of the art world.
It provides thousands of free (or cheap) man hours to artist, enabling them to realise projects of magnitude. “It would take one person 10,000 hours or a lifetime to create something like that on their own. It couldn’t be done. Crowdsourcing is creating something that’s greater than the sum of its parts”.
Participatory Art/Crowdsourced Art Examples
Cut Piece (1966) Yoko Ono
The audience had been instructed that they could take turns approaching her and use the scissors to cut off a small piece of her clothing, which was theirs to keep. Some people approached hesitantly, cutting a small square of fabric from her sleeve or the hem of her skirt. Others came boldly, snipping away the front of her blouse or the straps of her bra. Ono remained motionless and expressionless throughout, until, at her discretion, the performance ended.
Cut Piece has inspired numerous interpretations, including those offered by the artist herself. She described it as “a form of giving, giving and taking. It was a kind of criticism against artists, who are always giving what they want to give. I wanted people to take whatever they wanted to, so it was very important to say you can cut wherever you want to"
This is a participatory piece which could seem unethical as Yoko ends up naked in the end of the piece however is ethical as she consented to be on display and the active participatory audience could take part only if they wanted to.
Please draw freely (1956) Jiro Yoshihara
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 a participatory piece which is ethical as all participants consented to draw and exhibit their artistic abilities.
Suns from sunsets from Flickr (2006) Penelope Umbrico.
She took sunsets from Flickr to compare how similar they were. Ethical problems being that she did not ask permission. She collected 541,795 images of sunsets, cropped them so they would be even more similar, just showing the sun. She searched Flickr to find out sunset was the more photographed image.
She then took pictures of people posing in front of her work, and made that a piece.
Sun/screen 2014, single channel digital video. Gathered single images into a slideshow, each image of sunset slowly dissolving into the next. It draws attention to the materiality of the screen and further distances us from the natural sunlight source of the original images. It is a meditation on simulated light activated to produce images of natural light derived from digital images- a dialogue between analogue and digital; natural and simulated. http://www.penelopeumbrico.net/index.php/project/sun-screen/
These pieces involved no consent, and no active participants.
The Sheep Market (2008) Aaron Koblin
combining crowdsourcing with data-driven storytelling, its both fun and a darker social commentary on work in the digital age.
Using amazons mechanical turk crowdsource labor platform, source 10,000 digital drawings of sheep from thousands of anonymous workers paid $0.02 per drawing. Site visitors can share unique sheep from the massive collection or take up an offer to buy a sheep as part of a collection of stamps. A small digital placard also shares other data culled from the project, like average time spent drawing a sheep, number of drawings rejected, and average wage earned by each participant.
The question of payment, how much should they be paid, what is enough etc..
Amazon mechanical Turk explained they can complete simple tasks that people do better than computers.
‘After forty days of collecting ship I shut down the sheep application and discontinued the worker requests. However since the relaunching of the project site I have begun to receive hand drawn sheep and requests to add new sheep to the lot. The presumption that workers were being driven by something more than money scenes to be official verified’
Skies painted with unnumbered sparks (2014) Aaron Koblin and Janet Etchelman
“ a social space that is simultaneously physical and virtual’
The culture was presented with an original, interactive work created in collaboration with artist Aaron Koblin. At night the sculpture came to life as visitors were able to choreograph the lighting in real time using physical gestures on their mobile devices. Vivid beams of light were projected across a massive scale as the result of small movements on spectators phones.
[The love story project] ongoing - Florian Thalhofer
The [lovestoryproject] is a growing collection of stories and thoughts about love. It started in Cairo in 2003when Florian Thalhofer asked friends ti explain their definition of love. They published an online survey that you can still participate XXLove-survey.
People from very different cultural background talk about one common phenomenon: love. Without claiming universal validity, the answers provide a new perspective on your own and the other culture.
Its database-driven video-archive that can be viewed in a computer-installation or over the internet. It is evolving and dynamic documentary-film. A oil that is never the same twice.
My Africa (2018) David Allen
Narrated by Lupita Nyong’o, virtual reality transports viewers to an elephant sanctuary in Kenya, where a community is re-knitting the binds that have long enabled people and wildlife to coexist https://www.conservation.org/stories/virtual-reality/my-africa
“The film is not a documentary, but it is based on real-life stories. The crew interviewed the community extensively for background information. The plot lines and specific are based on those interviews and other real-life experiences”.
Worked in collaboration with Vision3 and conservation international.
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