The Interface is the Message

I just came across this TED talk by Aaron Koblin – artist and now lead on Data Arts at Google Labs. It’s a treat. Koblin whips through his work – from his data visualisation projects which began with Flight Patterns, through his meditations on the human and the crowd using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, to his standout 2010 work with Chris Milk – The Johnny Cash Project  - exploring collaborative creativity, and The Wilderness Downtown - which takes advantage of HTML5 and javascript for personalisation. ( See earlier posts on The Johnny Cash Project and The Wilderness Downtown.) It’s a formidable body of work – playful, critical, moving – and fascinating to hear his account of how his thinking has evolved. Enjoy!

Ain’t No Grave

I just came across a short documentary recently posted on You Tube by Chris Milk, director of the luminous Johnny Cash Project. It’s based on interviews with some of the fan / artists who have taken part in his virtuoso crowd-sourced work. The interviews underline the powerful feeling about Johnny Cash that the project draws on, and help explain just how good so much of the art work is, in that people show themselves as more than willing to invest time and effort in homage to an artist who had given them so much. The project is a very contemporary act of devotion, a collective memorial.

I recall a decade or so ago, people would say; “The internet – it’s all very interesting, but you don’t get stories there, or emotion. I mean, when was the last time you cried at your computer?” Well, that would be this morning, watching this video… It’s very moving – about loss, yes, but also about human creativity, and what we’ll give for culture that feels authentic.

Arcade Fire

Since my recent post about The Johnny Cash Project, its director Chris Milk has followed that up with the launch this week of another very interesting participatory piece, a collaboration with Google Creative Labs and Aaron Koblin in his role as Technology Lead there.

The Wilderness Downtown offers an interactive experience of the Arcade Fire song “We Used to Wait”. Invited to select the address of your childhood home you can (providing you live in territories covered by Street View – see below) become the subject of your own music video as images of your street, house, and area are effectively woven into a multi-screen interactive work. It’s an evocative, slightly uncanny experience as a live action and then CGI figure appears to run through the hyper-familiar but strange (not-quite-as- remembered) landscape of one’s own childhood.

The piece is innovative on a number of fronts. It takes advantage of Google Maps and Street View as archives for personalised storytelling – an inspired idea. It turns the thoughts provoked by a ‘lean back’ viewing experience into a creative act; at a certain point in the song you’re asked to write a postcard to your youthful self. It also showcases the interactive potential of HTML5 – find out more about how it’s done on the Chrome Experiments blog.

Music video producers have been slow to pick up on the potential of participation but The Johnny Cash Project and The Wilderness Downtown show just what a powerful space this can be.

Google Street View Coverage

The Johnny Cash Project

In the latest in a series of works exploring crowdsourcing, American artist Aaron Koblin, with director Chris Milk, has created a lovely collaborative piece – a collective portrait of musician Johnny Cash.

The Johnny Cash Project invites fans of the country musician to share their visions of Cash, who died in 2003, “as he lives on in your mind’s eye.” Each contributor is offered a choice of three frames from a video accompanying one of Cash’s final recordings “Ain’t No Grave”, and a drawing tool to create their portrait, working with one of the frames as a template. The thousands of contributions that have now been created are combined into an animated image track, “a collective whole… rising from a sea of one-of-a-kind portraits”, as the website describes it. Take a look, it’s very effective – a terrific idea, beautifully executed.

Koblin is perhaps best known for his data visualisation works – Flight Patterns, which pictured air traffic over the US, and New York Talk Exchange which provided a visualisation of phone and internet communications out of New York. His previous explorations of  crowdsourcing include For Ten Thousand Cents for which thousands of people worked separately using a drawing tool to jointly create a representation of a hundred dollar bill, and  The Sheep Market, for which he commissioned workers through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to draw “a sheep facing to the left”, turning the process of each animal’s creation into an animation.

Koblin said in relation to The Sheep Market, “There is so much humanity online but it currently exists in such a visually sterile form”. He’s interested in expressing, ”the individuals within the vast dataset.” He’s certainly pulled that off in “The Johnny Cash Project”.  The video/s combine a vivid sense of the multiple artists involved with a surprising aesthetic coherence. The project is a moving tribute to “The Man in Black”, bearing witness to the continuing power of his music. And it’s going to continue to grow and evolve. As new people contribute, their frames will be added, so the project is an emergent, open-ended piece.

I have one criticism from a contributor’s perspective. I drew a frame, which I found quite hard to do – the instructions are minimal, and drawing’s not my thing. When I submitted it I found that there was a vetting process that wasn’t mentioned at the start. Were they just weeding out potentially inappropriate content, or were submissions being selected for quality? Either would be fine, but it should be clear at the outset. As Clay Shirky observes in “Here Comes Everybody“, the terms of engagement will vary in these collaborative projects, but what matters is the transparency of the deal, and that applies even to great projects like this one.