The Public Record

While we're on the subject of collectively written music, lets take a look at The Public Record. This project has Mötley Crüe alum Tommy Lee offering some raw tracks of his music for download. Users can then play along and upload their own accompanying tracks to help create the new album of Lee's current (rap-metal) band, Methods of Mayhem.

My understanding is that Lee's producer Scott Humphrey came up with the idea when unsure that a new Methods of Mayhem album would move any units. I think this will certainly generate a lot of exposure and possible sales as participants point to their contributions and share the tales of their involvement. Scott Humphrey seems like a smart guy. Tommy Lee: definitely still an idiot.

It'll be interesting to see how this plays out, certainly there's some semi-related precedent, with jazz musicians who have never met before coming together to create a new version of a standard, infused with their particular style. A step closer to this is Radiohead's public invitation to remix "Nude" from their In Rainbows album. With The Public Record though, contributors are able to get in much closer to the ground floor.

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.

The Big Run-Up

Wow. A blog. How 2006.

Welcome to the blog component of the Indirect Collaboration Panel that will be debuting at the 2010 SXSW Interactive Festival.

In the coming months, this blog will be a repository of the interesting examples, dissertations, personalities, and trends of collective creativity on the web. We have been beaten about the head in the past few years with the notions that the gatekeepers have been vanquished, and that we are all have the potential to be informed, empowered individuals working for ourselves. This may sell a lot of business books, but the idea of collectivism in creativity presents a trickier problem. Creativity, especially in our age, has been wrapped around the ideal of the auteur as artist, that of the singular vision. Is there a space in our current media landscape for singular works to be made from many minds? Or is art by it's nature something that resists the flattening power of the web?


Our contributors, as well as panelists for the SXSW discussion, are:

Tim Lillis is owner of Narwhal Creative, and frequent contributor to Make Magazine, with his Tricks of the Trade series.

Joe Alterio is an illustrator, comic artist, animator and designer, and founder of the collective charitable art project, Robots And Monsters.

Andrea Grover is an independent curator, artist and writer. In 1998, she founded Aurora Picture Show, a now recognized center for filmic art, that began in Grover's living room as “the world’s most public home theater.” She curated the first exhibition exploring the phenomenon of crowdsourcing in art (PHANTOM CAPTAIN, apexart, New York, 2006), and, with artist Jon Rubin, organized an exhibit in which worldwide participants created a photo-sharing album of their imaginings on Tehran (NEVER BEEN TO TEHRAN, Parkinggallery, Tehran, Iran, 2008) She recently programmed an evening of films for Dia Art Foundation at The Hispanic Society of America, New York (LESSONS IN THE SKY, 2009); and has inaugurated a new semi-annual screening series, MENIL MOVIES, with The Menil Collection. Currently on view is 29 CHAINS TO THE MOON, an exhibition she curated for Carnegie Mellon University's Miller Gallery, which continues her research into cooperation and distributed thinking across disciplines. She has an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a BFA from Syracuse University and was a Core Fellow in residence at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Our Moderator, Joshua Glenn, a cultural semiotics analyst and independent scholar, is coeditor of Hilobrow.com and co-curator of the Significant Objects project.


Join us in our discussion, and come see us in Austin, as well!