The World’s First Collaborative Sentence was a digital artwork by Douglas Davis. The reading provided was a description of the artwork’s crash and corrupted file of coded text and the restoration of the artwork. The online artwork allows the public to participate and create a sentence, the world’s longest sentences being created by the collective effort of the audiences.
The digital artwork had close relations to our next lesson, Super-Participation, and it was also closely related to our social network today. In today’s social media, we were constantly commenting and sharing content, spreading videos or images with one another and the cycle might continue again and again. It proved the power of the public and showed that the “third space” had the ability to create something that was bigger than all of us combined. The World’s First Collaborative Sentence was such idea that illustrates the capacity of the internet.
A similar example of such ability being displayed should be the bike lock incident. In a demonstration in America, a masked man took out a bike lock and smashed another man’s head. The incident angered an online community and they were determined to find out who the masked man was. With the collective effort of each individual from that community, the internet was about to identify the culprit and informed the law enforcer about the incident. This also showed that with the effort of the public, there is nothing impossible.
In conclusion, I had to first admit that I felt extremely saddened by the fact the online artwork was being corrupted in the first place. The same goes for any artwork that was being destroyed or damaged, it felt as if a part of history was lost to time, and we would not have a chance to educate ourselves about it. However, I am shaken by the power of the internet and what it was able to do, the online artwork by Douglas Davis demonstrated such power in a form of a sentence.
Excellent, and good example of the bike project that involved crowd-sourcing. That is the operative term for when individuals collectively problem solve, or cooperate. In fact in the essay, they talk about having people translate the corrupted text through crowd sourcing. I thought you capture the scope and quality of this important seminal Internet work very well.
I totally agree that the artwork is related to our social network today and how we constantly share and comment on this platform. A few days back, I came across a Twitter wall where people can post their twitters on this wall and everyone can see their post online. It shows that people are willing to expose themselves to people around them and interacting by commenting. This brings the point of how the public can create much more content towards an artwork as compared to a few people interacting with the internet art. As more people get expose to internet art, there is a possibility of collaboration among people across the world bringing people closer than before. People are scared to lose out in social media hence the constant checking of these platform to share and comment creating super participation.
Overall I enjoyed your essay!