Who Owns Virtual Art? A Q&A with Andrew Sempere

Andrew Sempere is a Cambridge, Mass.-based design researcher with IBM's Collaborative User Experience Group/Center for Social Software. He's also an artist whose interactive works have been exhibited (most recently) at the 2009 Boston Cyberarts Festival and the 7th Champ Libre Manifestation Internationale Video et Art Electronique in Montreal. Indirect Collaboration's Joshua Glenn interviewed Sempere — about online collaboration, for business and aesthetic purposes alike — via email, in February 2010.

GLENN: You work with social software researchers at IBM, helping them make smart decisions about encouraging or discouraging content sharing and reuse. How is doing so important to successful, inclusive business collaboration?

SEMPERE: My role is mostly to help the researchers think through user experience to develop an interface that helps support the work they are trying to do. I personally have a particular interest in the content sharing idea, but it's not always that, although it does usually come down to figuring out what design principles to apply in order to help the users and the researchers accomplish their goals. Since we mostly make prototype systems (and not customer facing products) I also consider a big part of my job to be keeping an eye on what is happening in the social software space outside of the corporation, to try and understand early and see if there is anything that can be adapted for use inside the enterprise.

GLENN: Some skeptics might say that sharing and reuse are antithetical to business culture...

SEMPERE: It depends on your definition of business, and of sharing! Usually when people say this, they mean "socialization" as in, "Isn't allowing my employees to socialize giving them allowance to goof off." Or the more formal "What's the ROI on social software." I think these questions are the wrong ones to ask. Companies have long recognized that social interaction is important to business — certainly at the executive level. Business is fundamentally about interpersonal relationships.

But if you are looking for a quantifiable cost savings as a result of providing your employees access to social software, you're probably not going to find it. It doesn't work that way.

This is a long way of saying: yes! If your definition of business culture is essentially Taylorist, then social software is completely antithetical, but so is Internet Culture. This collision leads to what I call Compliance Theatre (more on that later). Taylor's model of standardized work practices is about getting rid of the outliers. Imagine a bell curve... the purpose of standardization is to focus single mindedly on the middle of the curve, where things are average. You don't want the low end of the curve, and as a result you also get rid of the high end of the curve. In many organizations this turns out to be exactly what people want. You probably don't, for example, want MBTA operators texting each other, no matter how boring it is to drive exactly the same route in exactly the same way. You need their focus, and you need standard operation for safety.

In other organizations, eliminating the outliers is disastrous. Research, design, any field where you want creativity or are particularly interested in high quality output: you need to allow your employees to take risks.

There are other issues more specifically related to sharing and distribution which are diametrically opposed to certain business models. The music industry, for example, and the publishing industry to a certain extent. These industries were predicated on the notion of gatekeeping by controlling distribution channels, but in an era of nearly free distribution via the internet, they are mostly useless. This is not to say that music or books are useless, just the idea that you can profit off of distribution by selling little containers of culture — it's a broken idea.



GLENN: Speaking of gatekeeping, according to Eric Raymond's 1997 formulation, there are two methods of developing software (and by extension, anything): the "cathedral" approach, in which a group of experts do the work, and the "bazaar" approach — a cooperative activity initiated by members of the public. It seems to me that crowdsourcing software — which permits experts/gatekeepers to outsource part of their project to members of the public via a call for contributions — has been received so enthusiastically in business circles because it promises a third way, a synthesis of the cathedral and the bazaar. But is this enthusiasm misguided?

SEMPERE: I'm not entirely sure it's a synthesis, or just a case of the clergy of the cathedral occasionally buying things from the bazaar. TopCoder is the best example that I know of. The main takeaway for me from the cathedral and the bazaar argument is that it's a symbiotic (maybe codependent) relationship. Both must exist. Open source software works because professionally employed software developers have spare cycles. Second Life works because most of the residents have other sources of income. I think business is becoming more comfortable with the idea that this means they can take advantage of these spare cycles to get high quality work out of motivated individuals. It makes sense and it does work, at the same time it's not a sustainable business model, it's just a good way to accomplish some tasks. There are also serious issues from a business perspective related to licensing and such, but in general I think it's great that businesses are thinking flexibly. I do sometimes worry that it potentially devalues professional work, but I even if that is true, there's no stopping it.



GLENN: You're also interested in artistic collaboration. Last year, you published a paper analyzing the fraught psychological and cultural implications of making art within Second Life, whose object-creation tool assumes individual ownership as a prerequisite to the creative process. From the SL user's perspective, why shouldn't an artwork, like any other object, be governed by a commodity-style trading system?

SEMPERE: Second Life itself is not crucial to the fate of the universe, but it is very unique, and as such represents an excellent place to see where things might go (or might go wrong) as we continue down a path of virtualizing our culture. We humans, at least in the developed world, are moving anything and everything we can online, and developing new content, ideas and tropes that never existed in the analog world. This is not a bad thing at all, but I am deeply concerned that at the same time we are relinquishing ownership of our output to private organizations whose end goals and values are often accidentally preventing that culture from breathing properly, and in some cases smothering it.

A very small but significant portion of the content on Second Life is art. It is culturally significant, and it deserves a chance to play a part in art history. Even the "lowbrow" content is often part of someone's personal history and deserves some kind of respect.

The way that SL is designed, content is created by individuals, but owned by a private for-profit entity whose goal is (and perhaps should be) to make money. This isn't a bad thing, but the money making goal and the user created content goal interact in some strange ways:

I'm not a lawyer, but the ToS for Linden Lab (which apparently Lawrence Lessig consulted on), reads like a huge problem to me. Linden gives you full rights over your intellectual property, but they do NOT give you rights over the instantiation of that property. That is to say, if I build a house in SL, I own the idea of the house, but not the record of the house as it exists on Lindens servers. The idea is a good one — apparently it was Lessig's influence that ensured it wasn't the standard "LL owns everything." But, Linden has backed itself in a corner here. They promise ownership of IP, but they have also styled themselves as the content police, and are in fact being sued for failing to properly protect the "rights" of certain content creators. These individuals represent an extreme minority of the SL user base, but they, by virtue of invoking lawyers and DRM, are making world-changing decisions within the walls of SL.

Here's the doomsday scenario: The company goes under, the servers are sold. Since the ToS relinquish IP rights, whatever is left of the LL company cannot use the content, nor can any of the creditors. In fact, the content of the servers is worse than useless, it's a legal liability, since the ToS (might) open them to lawsuits. The safest course of action from a business perspective would therefore be to delete all the content. Literally, they will burn down a library, and ten years of collective work will be gone forever.

I mentioned I'm not a lawyer, and I actually hope that I'm wrong about my reading of the situation, but even if I am I think the example stands: extremely complicated negotiations are occurring right now in spaces where we are entrusting our cultural artifacts. These discussions are of crucial importance and worth keeping an eye on, especially since we are seeing a dismantling of public libraries and other shared institutions in favor of virtual archives controlled by private organizations.

Incidentally all of this virtual talk might be hard to fathom for people who haven't spent much time online, but try and imagine if Kodak asserted ownership over that box of super 8 movies in your parents' attic just because they made the film. It's already true that it's hard to view these technologically, but imagine that one day you pulled down the box to discover that every frame of your recorded memory had been deliberately erased, not because of time, or rot, or bugs, or neglect, but because of a licensing dispute at the Kodak company.



GLENN: Are we really moving towards this possibility?

SEMPERE: Yes — for example, the recent #amazonfail where Amazon retracted versions of Orwell's book that they didn't have the rights to, AFTER they were sold. iPhones and presumably iPads all have a built-in remote "kill switch" which allows them to delete apps and data from your device. The company has promised not to use this, but they reserve the right to, not to mention the fact that these days when I buy DRM music from itunes it's nothing like when my parents bought records. I won't be able to leave them for my kids to listen to without making sure they have my login, password and the right hardware, and I have a hard time imagining finding iTunes version 7 at a garage sale (especially since software is now distributed online, rather than via "dead media") the way you might find an old 8-track or phonograph.

We're moving towards a model where were we can casually consume content from the cloud and most of our structures of control are embedded in software. In many ways this is wonderful, but we need to be very very careful about what we're coding into the system if we don't want to risk accidentally creating a dark age.

There is also a secondary shorter point to be made here: by forcefully insisting (as Second Life does) that creative practice be monetized you exclude the outliers and push towards lowest common denominator content. Rather than make something interesting and daring, you will trend towards saleable, which means copying the tried and true. It's Taylorism again: terrific for selling widgets, terrible for culture. Linden has taken several steps to encourage more revenue (because they need it). I have friends who work there, and I don't want them losing their jobs either, but aggressively chasing every revenue stream, especially in a micro economy, completely destroys innovation.



GLENN: From the online arts community Learning to Love You More, which takes Fluxus-style assignments (e.g., "Recreate an object from someone's past") out of the gallery and onto your desktop, to Takashi Kawashima and Aaron Koblin's "Ten Thousand Cents," which used Amazon's Mechanical Turk service to outsource the digital painting of a $100 bill to thousands of turkers (who could each only see their own section of the picture), artists have started using "Web 2.0" (for lack of a better term) tools originally created for crowdsourcing or social networking as a spur to innovation and creativity. Are projects like these the antidote to Second Life's approach? Or do they also fail, albeit in a different way?

SEMPERE: They fail spectacularly but are beautiful for it. Fluxus is close, but yeah, I think the whole point of crowdsourcing an art piece is to play with the idea of an artwork as singular vision. The people who are contributing to the work (especially in the Mechanical Turk example) have unknown motivation, or are motivated by micropayments. Second Life artwork is still incredibly traditional in its approach (i.e., a single individual or close team working towards a single idea). None of this is problematic exactly, there's room for both, but what Second Life is missing is exactly what the other examples have — the ability to share and collaborate in a "Web 2.0" manner. As I said earlier, I don't think SL is the end-all of art in 2010, but as an example of what is possible it frustrates me for exactly that reason. There is a collision of world views, namely the Linden business model you are obliged to internalize (effectively the old commodity model, which requires single owner/creator permission systems and DRM to exist ) and the possibilities of a universe in which everyone can have infinite virtual resources. I think this categorizes the debate going forward on how we attempt to monetize creative work in an age where we have rendered distribution control effectively free. Devices like the iPhone and iPad and the Kindle seem to be aimed at this space. In particular I find it interesting that Apple created their own processor for the iPad. The only reason I can see for this is to control DRM down to the hardware level. We'll see, I guess.



GLENN: You recently gave a talk at the 2010 ACM conference on CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work) on the topic, "What Changes Since Computation: A Design Manifesto for 2010." You took issue with the received wisdom that the work style of "digital natives" (those who've grown up using computers, the Internet, mobile phones, MP3s, etc.) is different in important ways — specifically having to do with social networking and online collaboration — from that of their elders. How is this by now widely accepted bit of common sense incorrect?

SEMPERE: I discussed the Digital Natives argument because I always find it frustrating. First and foremost, kids are no more born digital natives then they are born literate. Literacy (reading or computational) is something that is learned, taught, part of a culture. Also, pretty much anyone who uses email and IM (standard business tools these days) is already living in a virtual world. The first MMPORGs date to the early 1970s! So I believe the digital natives argument is baloney, but I also believe it is invoked as a kind of shorthand to describe a complex anxiety, and that's where it gets interesting.

People, especially business folks of a certain age, invoke this argument when they have faith in the structured, top down model of business and they begin to discover that work, actually, is occurring in a completely different way then they thought. Employees routinely socialize using websites and exchange information outside of the sanctioned tools. Employees are more comfortable crossing hierarchies, or with casual interpersonal communication that would be unheard of in their experience. It is all very confusing to someone who has internalized the myth that you work 9-5 and pass everything up and down the command chain.

As a result, a huge amount of effort is spent on compliance theatre: generating the illusion that business is proceeding along standard lines, while successful employees produce their work by circumventing the culture of control.

I borrow the term from Security Theatre, and here's an important subtlety: in both security and compliance theatre, it isn't that the theatre is pointless. Theatre is never pointless: It serves an extremely important role in re-enforcing organizational culture and defining mental boundaries. It also, ironically, enables circumvention by making a production of what is "important."

GLENN: I have experienced that problem — circumventing the culture of control — almost everywhere I've worked, even before Web 2.0 tools made doing so commonplace. Which is anecdotal evidence supporting your point that anti-gatekeeping trends making older people nervous in the business world aren't new — but they're newly exacerbated by new tools and software.

SEMPERE: I couldn't agree more — it's not new at all, just working at computational speed, and so more visible, and sometimes more effective (although counter measures can also move at this speed).

GLENN: In the art world, too, indirect collaboration is as old as the parlor game Consequences, whose descendants include the Surrealists' "Exquisite Corpse" technique, not to mention Mad Libs. Now that new tools and software have (unintentionally) made it simple to invite the general public to participate in various sorts of art projects, will we see (what you call) Compliance Theatre in art?

SEMPERE: Compliance Theatre in art? Why not! I suspect it's already there, and it probably depends on art versus Art. Certainly the art world has all kinds of theatricalities... I'll have to think on that one more!

Ten Thousand Cents

San Francisco media artist Takashi Kawashima has been exploring crowdsourced art for a few years, now.

For example, Takashi's 2005 project "The King Has...", a collaboration with Krister Olsson, invited people to text the artist(s) their most burdensome secrets; these secrets were then posted (anonymously) in a public place. Video below:

The King Has... from Takashi Kawashima on Vimeo.

Between November 2007 and March 2008, Takashi collaborated with Aaron Koblin on "Ten Thousand Cents," a "coordinated, crowdsourced [digital] art project" created by several thousand individuals using Amazon's Mechanical Turk service — a crowdsourcing marketplace, publicly launched in 2005, that enables computer programs to coordinate the use of human intelligence — and a customized Flash-based drawing software.

Koblin and Takashi divided a high-res scan of the $100 bill into 10,000 equal parts, each of which was delivered to a "turker" who was paid a penny to duplicate it using the drawing tool. Contributors (who hailed from 51 different countries) didn't have any idea of the whole picture. The project took 5 months to complete; the idea was to use 10,000 turkers, but some turkers participated more than once. The end result was a reproduction of a $100 bill that cost $100 to create. Video:

Ten Thousand Cents from Ten Thousand Cents on Vimeo.

There's a neat interface here that lets you watch any one of the 10,000 Flash paintings being created. "Ten Thousand Cents" was a finalist (Experimental category) for a SXSW Web Award in 2009.

More recently, Aaron Koblin and Daniel Massey collaborated on "Bicycle Built for Two Thousand" (great title), which used Amazon Mechanical Turk to record 2,088 sound clips. Turkers were sent a short-short sound clip — snipped from a mechanical-speech version of the 1892 song "Daisy Bell" — and asked to imitate what they heard, using a custom audio recording tool in a web browser. They were not given additional information. People from 71 countries participated; they were paid six cents apiece. Stitched back together, the clips sound like this:

Bicycle Built for Two Thousand from Aaron on Vimeo.

Why a mechanical-speech version of "Daisy Bell"? Because the song was used, in 1962, as the first example of musical speech synthesis. (That's also why HAL sings it, in 2001: A Space Odyssey.)

Q&A: Margaret Wertheim

Margaret Wertheim is an Australian-born science writer who — along with her sister, the poet and critic Christine Wertheim — cofounded the Institute for Figuring, a Los Angeles-based organization "dedicated to the poetic and aesthetic dimensions of science, mathematics and the technical arts." In 2005, the Wertheims launched the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef Project in their Highland Park living room; in 2010, the now-massive sculpture will be exhibited at the Smithsonian. From the beginning, the Wertheims imagined the project as a collective enterprise — but they had no idea how far it would spread. Joshua Glenn interviewed Margaret Wertheim in January 2010.

GLENN: What is the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef Project?
WERTHEIM: We produce sculptures that are a crocheted version of the Great Barrier Reef. Coral reefs have this very distinctive look about them — these crenellated, frilly forms, which are basically versions of hyperbolic geometry. And it turns out that the only way we know how to make models of hyperbolic geometry is with crochet. [From the IFF website: "The basic insight is to understand that these forms result from the simple process of increasing the number of stitches in every row. The more often you increase stitches the faster the model will grow and the more crenellated the finished form will become."] The Project was conceived because coral reefs all over the world are dying out. The evidence is that by 2030, corals might not grow any more due to the effect of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere going into the seas. So the Project resides at the intersection of mathematics, marine biology, feminine handicraft, and collective art practice. It is also a political project, because it is raising consciousness of global warming.



GLENN: The code that allows you to model hyperbolic geometry with crochet was discovered by Daina Taimina, a Latvian mathematician at Cornell. Was it she who figured out that these crochet models look like bits of coral reef?
WERTHEIM: Dr. Taimina was interested in just doing them as pure mathematical models. Christine and I realized, after we'd crocheted a few [hyperbolic models], that if you started deviating from the mathematical perfection of Taimina's models, the [resulting creations] actually looked like a coral reef. As soon as we started varying the formulae a little, you get things that are not mathematically perfect — so, not good for teaching a course on hyperbolic geometry at Cornell, but they look a lot more organic. We realized, this is what nature is doing. Nature is not being strictly geometrically perfect because nature doesn’t have to adhere to the rules of mathematics. Instead, it is doing variations, and that is why you get the diversity of forms in nature — because life starts from a simple code and then diversifies and complexifies. We started saying, "OK, how can we replicate things that look like natural forms rather than pure mathematical ones?"

GLENN: How has the Crochet Reef developed differently, thanks to "indirect collaboration," to use Joe Alterio and Tim Lillis's phrase, than it otherwise might have?
WERTHEIM: Everybody who takes up these [crochet] techniques starts to vary it in different ways — in ways that that we would never have thought of, necessarily, ourselves. So you get this endless variation that comes from people just trying things that are, as it were, inherent in the whole system. [From the IFF site: "Loopy 'kelps,' fringed 'anemones,' and curlicued 'corals' have all been modeled. While the process that brings these models into being is algorithmic, endless permutations of the underlying formulae result in a constantly surprising panoply of shapes. The quality of yarn, style of stitch, and tightness of the crochet all affect the finished forms so that each is as individual as a living organism.] Which raises very beautiful questions about the relationship between pure mathematics and the physically manifest material structure of the world that we actually live in.



GLENN: You and your sister started to make the Crochet Reef in Christmas 2005. Did you imagine it as an open-source collaborative project from the beginning?
WERTHEIM: Yes, I put up an announcement on the Institute for Figuring website asking for people to join us. We thought maybe ten, twenty people around the world would join us — and that the final project would occupy a few coffee tables' worth of space. Nearly five years later, there have been thousands of people who have contributed models to our exhibitions and hundreds of thousands of people have come to the exhibitions, and who knows how many have attended workshops and learned to do it. It has become this unintended worldwide movement, and it has just blown our minds.

GLENN: Why has the Crochet Reef, which has no major institutional support of any kind and very little funding, taken off like this?
WERTHEIM: What people are really doing when they participate in the Project is a form of experimental mathematics. And I think it is not insignificant that that is happening among women, not men. We have had a few men, and we welcome them, but 99.99% of people who do this are women — who tell us, again and again, that they love the idea of being taken seriously as people who engage with math and science. Here is a project in the context of a handicraft that women feel comfortable with and enjoy, and they are being told, "You too, can understand the mathematics that underlies general relativity." The Project has tapped into a hunger of women, everywhere, to be taken seriously as intellectual forces. Which is a reason that I've made it my full-time job, though there is no full-time salary.

GLENN: Might the Crochet Reef one day receive funding from the kinds of institutions that try to engage folks with scientific and mathematical ideas — through things like Lego Mindstorms and the X Prize?
WERTHEIM: I guarantee, from my work as a science communicator, that 99% of people who engage in Lego Mindstorms will be boys. Millions of dollars are being pumped into such projects, and there is no money being pumped into the Crochet Coral Reef Project, which is engaging thousands and thousands of women and girls all over the world. I think community projects and community creativity, it is one of the important trends of our time. But the resources available to encourage such projects are overwhelmingly in computers, say, or robotics. I am all for those things, but most of people involved in those things are boys. Engaging people in math and science can also take place in things like paper and scissors, it can take place in crochet. There are lots of handicrafts that have math and science involved — in fact, weaving led to the invention of the loom, and punch-cards come from the loom, and punch-cards helped lead to the computer. So it can be argued that weaving was the first digital technology. When any collective project happens, it's worth asking a political question: "Where is the support, and which projects get supported?"



GLENN: Is the opportunity to collaborate in a collective artwork — as opposed to being a solo artist — another important part of the appeal of the Crochet Reef?
WERTHEIM: One thing that we get told, again and again, is how much engagement with the math and science is meaningful. And the other thing that the participants tell us that is immensely powerful to them is the opportunity to participate in a total work that is more than just themselves. In the upper echelons of the art world, what is valorized is the individual genius of the artist. But what this project taps into is the opposite of that. There are many tens of thousands of hours of work in this totality. When you walk into an art exhibition where there is more than five hundred people’s work on display, the sheer congealed hours of human labor helps you see that it is just simply is physically impossible for one person to do this much work. The totality of what thousands of people produced is much more — both greater and more beautiful — than what any individual genius, one individual person, could produce.

GLENN: So it's not merely the Crochet Reef's sheer size that's so impressive, but its variation?
WERTHEIM: When you walk into a room with five hundred people’s work and each person has been free to express themselves differently — obviously many of them just do the "canonical" reef patterns, but lots of them will also take up and go in special directions — you get such a feeling of commitment and intensity, of handmade labor. There are knitting machines, but there is no such thing as a crochet machine, so the Project is true commitment.

GLENN: Do you think women are more attracted to collaborative projects than men are?
WERTHEIM: In terms of the collective group enterprise, women have been having sewing circles and quilting bees since the dawn of time. Some critics have argued, with good cause, that the collective feminist art projects of the early 1970s — like the 1972 installation "Womanhouse" — were the start of this whole trend that is now called Relational Aesthetics, which is to say artistic practices that take as their point of departure human relations as opposed to a solo genius, and which has been taken up by many men.



GLENN: What is your end goal for the Crochet Reef?
WERTHEIM: What we would love is if some museum somewhere would give it a permanent home so we could set it up once and for all beautifully. It is too big to store in our house. At the moment it is all in storage in Arizona, and then it will go to Ireland, and then to Smithsonian Museum of Natural History later this year.

GLENN: If a museum does take the Crochet Reef, will people stop contributing to it?
WERTHEIM: I doubt it. Every week, I get emails from communities all over the world saying, "We want to do this." It has truly gone viral. People say, "How long do you intend to keep doing this?" I don’t know. I used to have a serious career as a science journalist. I write books about the cultural history of physics, and I have been struggling to get my most recent book finished because the reef literally took over my life.

Sour's 'Hibi no Neiro'

Ok, ok, maybe a bit beneath the intellectual vibe we're fostering here about Big Ideas. But cute nonetheless.

Welcome, Riley Crane

In seems very appropriate to announce on this New Year's Eve that Tim and I are Super-pleased® to confirm Dr. Riley Crane as our last panelist. Riley Crane is currently a "Society in Science" Branco Weiss fellow in the Human Dynamics group at the Media Lab at M.I.T. After receiving a Ph.D. in physics from U.C.L.A. he spent several years investigating shocks and spreading phenomena in social systems in order to understand whether or not there are rules governing collective human activity. He is the co-founder of AppZoo.com, which uses "social intelligence" to help discover iPhone apps, and is also the co-founder of Charity Note, which harnesses the vast power of social systems in order to collect millions of dollars for charity. Riley is best known for leading the MIT team that won the DARPA Red Balloon challenge, mentioned everywhere, as well as on this humble blog, before we even knew him. Riley's efforts and expertise – namely, using the creativity of crowds to solve big problems – makes him not only a perfect fit for the panel, but a heady addition to our humble team. Expect to see Riley's name everywhere in the next few months (including the Colbert Report! Yow!); we're glad to have him on board.

Crowdsourcing Merit Badge!

While visiting my father's house the other day, one of my old Webelos activity badges practically fell into my hand. I don't remember what the pin symbolized -- good citizenship? (Apparently it no longer exists, at least in this particular shape.) Anyway, it made me think that crowdsourcing, or collective creativity, is the kind of know-how we ought to be teaching kids today.

And it also struck me as a good omen for the success of our SXSW panel!

Massively Collaborative Mathematics

From this weekend's NYTimes Magazine's Year In Ideas, Jordan Ellenberg has a fascinating blurb on "Massively Collaborative Mathematics":

Gowers's goals for the so-called Polymath Project were modest. "I will regard the experiment as a success," he wrote, "if it leads to anything that could count as genuine progress toward an understanding of the problem." Six weeks later, the theorem was proved. The plan is to submit the resulting paper to a top journal, attributed to one D.H.J. Polymath.

Check it out in full here. So cool!

Science Gets a Helping Hand

Here's an interesting bit of collectively creative coolness: FoldIt is a site where users play a puzzle game that can help advance medicine. The goal of the site is to see if humans, with their intuitive reasoning and problem-solving skills can fold proteins more efficiently than a computer. If it turns out they can, the organizers want to teach this kind of thinking to computers to finish the job.


From the site:

The number of different ways even a small protein can fold is astronomical because there are so many degrees of freedom. Figuring out which of the many, many possible structures is the best one is regarded as one of the hardest problems in biology today and current methods take a lot of money and time, even for computers. Foldit attempts to predict the structure of a protein by taking advantage of humans' puzzle-solving intuitions and having people play competitively to fold the best proteins.

DARPA gets in on the act

From a NYTimes article today:

Dr. Lee said he was not certain what to expect in the tactics that teams might use to track down the balloons, which will be visible from public roadways for a single day. Some groups are developing software applications. Dr. Lee said he also expected large teams of spotters and even the possibility that some groups might use subterfuge like disseminating false information.

Other groups may try to pay for information, he said, noting that even during a brief experiment the agency ran with a balloon near its headquarters, information on the location was offered for sale on Craigslist.

It's interesting to think of 'creativity' in not just the narrow terms we've so far offered, but it terms of problem solving. DARPA's mission is to see how collective creativity can help in a large scale search – like, oh, say, for a wanted fugitive. That's DARPA: even when they're doing something really cool, they still manage to make your skin crawl.

Artist Harrell Fletcher sent me this call for proposals for Open Engagement, a three-day conference at Portland State University (May 14-17, 2010), exploring the role of the artist in socially-engaged art.

Open Engagement is a three-day conference that is an initiative of the Portland State University Art and Social Practice concentration and co-sponsored by Pacific Northwest College of Art and Portland Community College. Directed by Jen Delos Reyes and Harrell Fletcher and planned in conjunction with the Portland State University MFA Monday Night Lecture Series, this conference features three nationally and internationally renowned artists: Mark Dion, Amy Franceschini (Futurefarmers) and Nils Norman. The conference will showcase work by Temporary Services, InCUBATE, and a new project by Mark Dion created in collaboration with the PSU Art and Social Practice concentration.

The artists involved in Open Engagement: Making Things, Making Things Better, Making Things Worse, challenge our traditional ideas of what art is and does. These artist’s projects mediate the contemporary frameworks of art as service, as social space, as activism, as interactions, and as relationships, and tackle subject matter ranging from urban planning, alternative pedagogy, play, fiction, sustainability, political conflict and the social role of the artist.

Can socially engaged art do more harm than good? Are there ethical responsibilities for social art? Does socially engaged art have to do civic or public good? Can there be transdisciplinary approaches to contemporary art making that would contribute to issues such as urban planning and sustainability? As both urban planning and contemporary art imagine new worlds, how can art projects be seen as potential models for living?