Group members – Celine, Joey, Naomi, Nokwan
Project: It’s Storytime!
As part of our second micro project and in light of the Marc Garrett article regarding D.I.W.O, our class was tasked to produce a crowd sourced artwork in groups of 3-4.
Idea – The concept was for the entire class to work together to contribute one to two lines each in order to create an entire story, with selected participants having certain requirements they have to incorporate into their lines, as seen below:
Due to a couple of absentees in class that day, I was able to sub in as a participant too and it was through that experience that this particular line in the DIWO article stood out to me.
“It challenges and renegotiates the power roles between artists and curators. It brings all actors to the fore, artists become co-curators alongside the curators, and the curators themselves can also be co-creators.” (Marc Garrett, 2014)
During the process of coming up with our activity, when we were coming up with the restrictions such the one where the character had to say a certain line, naturally I came up with my own idea of how the scenario might play out, should I be the writer. However, because there were many different minds at work, and despite me being the “curator” in this case, I was limited to contributing just the same 1-2 lines as everyone else, hence of course, the outcome was completely far from what I imagined it would be, despite how cliche my original idea was. In a sense, what we as curators, served in this scenario, were merely as random word generators to push the artists in a certain direction, after which, they were free to follow their own creative direction.
Throughout this experience, I was reminded of two artist examples we were shown in class, namely the Human Clock by Craig D. Giffin and Cut Piece by Yoko Ono. Similar to both pieces, our work couldn’t have happened without the contribution of everyone else in our class. However, tying in more into the piece by Yoko Ono, our activity also required people to wait for their turns before they could contribute. This brings in an added sense of uncertainty as perhaps when it comes to their turn, maybe what they intended to do had already been done by someone prior (such as the sleeve already being cut off or a repeated line), which will require them to think quickly on the spot and change their original intention.
We will move beyond Do-It-Yourself (DIY) to Do-It-With-Others (DIWO) because collaboration, not competition, is the way of now, and of the future. (Tj McCue, 2012)
Overall, I feel that this was quite an informative project overall as while we have been exposed to group projects, I’ve never thought of doing collaborative projects on such a huge scale, which really opens up a whole new realm of possibilities on future projects!
References:
DIWO (Do-It-With-Others): Artistic Co-Creation as a Decentralized Method of Peer Empowerment in Today’s Multitude. Marc Garrett. February 2014.
https://marcgarrett.org/2014/02/12/diwo-do-it-with-others-artistic-co-creation-as-a-decentralized-method-of-peer-empowerment-in-todays-multitude/
Do It With Others – Maker Community Manifesto. TJ McCue. June 2012.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tjmccue/2012/06/12/do-it-with-others-maker-community-manifesto/#328bebfb7151