HOW IT WORKS

“[…] art has become too narcissistic and self-referential and divorced from social life. I see a new form of participatory art emerging, in which artists engage with communities and their concerns, and explore issues with their added aesthetic concerns“  (Bauwens 2010)

Our project revolved around the idea of peoples’ perspectives on fear and love.

By asking people to draw their worst fears in pink and their favourite things in existence in pink on separate sheets of paper without giving any information on what the art piece is about, we force people to rethink the associated feelings that they have with certain colours; arachnophobiacs have just drawn their worst fear in the colour of Hello Kitty’s hairpin.

The intention lies for the audience to eventually understand that their fears can be made manageable by perspective and that what they fear may be another person’s love.

 

WHY IT’S D.I.W.O

It brings all actors to the fore, artists become co-curators alongside the curators, and the curators themselves can also be co-creators.

The success on the piece hinges on the collective effort of the audience, who in this case, are also the artists. Without a significant enough number of entries, the piece would not have its intended effect, and thus without an audience there would be no art piece. Such is a characteristic of D.I.W.O., which, in essence, draws upon the sum effort of several and not just a singular artist to determine both its meaning and its form.

 

SIMILAR WORKS OF ART

Swarmsketch is a website that allows for each user to contribute one line to a popular search topic that changes weekly. An additional function allows the users to vote for the thickness of another user’s contribution, leading to very interesting outcomes.

Akin to our piece, Swarmsketch only works if there is a significant amount of contributions, otherwise a single line of consistent thickness could hardly make anything distinguishable.