For artists, the open source system is one which allows a better mode of communication, a freely available and vast source of inspiration, as well as a platform upon which they may easily share their own works. The scale in which artists are enabled to reach people and fellow artists have already resulted in numerous new creative works, for example, Kit Galloway & Sherrie Rabinowitz’ “Hole in Space”, which allowed people in New York to see other people in Los Angeles in real-time, and vice versa.
In contemporary times, artists now have access to millions of people’s thoughts, opinions and comments thanks to platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. These platforms facilitate a shared and often spontaneous collective narrative, each post organised through tags and hashtags. This form of collective narrative can roughly be seen in Douglas Davis’ 1994 “World’s Longest Collaborative Sentence”, where the artist invited the online public to compose a single sentence collaboratively.
The open source system provides the artist with tools to reach out to the public, to invite them to interact and communicate, as well as a huge repository of individuals’ ideas and thoughts from which the artist may draw inspiration from. In this way the open source system could be a creative inspiration and approach for artists.