Tag: diwo

Do It With Others and Experimental Interaction

Do It With Others (DIWO) is a variation on Do It Yourself (DIY) where activity is now shared through participatory media.

In this approach, peers connect and collaborate, creating their own structures, using either digital networks or shared physical environments, making an art that is both made and distributed across a network.

— Do It With Others (DIWO): Participatory Media in the Furtherfield Neighbourhood, Ruth Cathlow and Marc Garrett, Furtherfield

DIWO is practiced in Furtherfield, where the focus is now drawn on collaborative effort through emerging social technologies. In art, the role of the artist and the spectator is blurred. Those who come as audience usually play a part in influencing the outcome of the artwork, while the artist lift his own directive authority on the piece. A commonly known example of this is Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece, whereby Yoko stays completely still and allows the audience member to curate how her clothes are cut.

In this Experimental Interaction module, we explore the concept of DIWO through micro-projects.

Our fourth micro-project titled “The Collective Body” is a feed of our body parts combined on a Flickr group to create what is a metaphysically diversified body. The technology of a Flickr group feed enables us to each contribute to the composition of this piece through our personalised frames and augmentations on our photos.

Another micro-project that works on DIWO is our first micro-project, whereby we stream on Facebook Live concurrently as we walk through our school. The streams are the aggregated onto a wall in a grid. The collaborative stream of events creates a metaphysical collage of space and time, moments we experienced together.

DIWO means exploring the potential to share visions, resources and agency, through collaboration and negotiation, across physical and virtual networks – maintaining a critical consciousness and hopefully, somehow having a decent life at the same time…

— Do It With Others (DIWO): Participatory Media in the Furtherfield Neighbourhood, Ruth Cathlow and Marc Garrett, Furtherfield

DIWO plays an integral part in interactive art since the media is largely dependant on audience activity and collaborative effort. An artwork is deemed interactive when the audience can expect to participate and even play a part in the outcome of the artwork. It could even be said that art is not interactive without DIWO.

DIWO embodies ability to aggregate work in collaborative curation, allowing any person to create art, and this has revolutionised our contemporary art scene.

A Collaborative New Media: The World’s Longest Sentence

The World’s Longest Sentence is an interactive art piece that is enabled by the collaborative contributions of the audience through a website. The site instructs them to “continue the sentence” by submitting material of varying type – including text, image, video and sound.

The audience member is unaware of what precedes in the sentence. I contributed by submitting the phrase “to continue the sentence”. This phrase will then be published at the back of the running sentence on the website.

Generated is a long running, haphazard sentence of all languages and slang. Oddly enough, we are able to make sense of the different fragments contributed, and the stark coincidence in some pieces is compelling to watch.

Narrativity takes on new meaning and form in networked practices, through collaborative, many-tomany systems of writing, media making, and other forms of online expression. In connection with open source thinking, the collective narrative is a sharing and open exchange of conversation, ideas, information, and media that leads to a synthesis of voices: forming a common thread among peers.

Randall Packer, Open Source Studio

The piece is a social media that synthesises the communicative language and thought of a multitude of audiences, creating what seems to be a collage of a narrative. By collapsing our differences as such, and enabling our sentence to tally, the artist has put forth an incessant stream augmented reality; a third space whereby our differentiated thoughts are able to tell the same story. In one read, we are able to experience the narrative from a plethora of physical angles and make sense of them in a metaphysical space of cognition.

The possibilities of peer-to-peer authoring of the collective narrative is now native to our writing tools, such as Google Docs, Microsoft Word, and WordPress, in which multiple authors can coauthor and collaborate on writing projects, often in real time. This dramatically alters the act of writing and narrative, from the singular activity of a very personal form of individual expression, to a collective activity that is highly collaborative: all publishable instantaneously to a global audience.

Randall Packer, Open Source Studio

Much like collaborative online systems such as Google Drive and Google Docs, The World’s Longest Sentence allows for multiple users to co-author a narrative. What differentiates it from such softwares is it’s provision of instruction to allow for live collaboration on a much larger scale. The instructions narrow function as facilitators for the users to move in the same direction when participating in this extensive narrative.