OPEN SOURCE ARTMAKING ӿ let’s make art!

let's make art!

What is the content of the work and who is creating it?

Our crowd-sourced art consists of a Google Excel sheet ‘painting’. We asked participants to ‘fill in as many squares as you like’. Using the colour fill tool in Google Sheets, people filled up the cells in the document with a myriad of hues.

Our team–Qing Yan, Yuan Xin and I–watched as anonymous icons entered and exited the document, leaving a few coloured cells as a mark of their virtual visitations.

In a way, even though our team came up with the rubrics, we did not fully create the artwork that emerged from our crowd-sourcing.

 

 

Where does this work take place?

In the virtual collaborative space that was our Google Sheets document.

 

How does this work involve social interaction?

In a weird way, our participants didn’t fill in each other’s squares and were mindful to give space to people who were trying to create recognisable motifs using the cells.

One example of this was the rabbit face that appeared in the right of the main mass of filled in cells.  It was surprisingly intact by the end of the collaboration. Some participants went as far as to fill and colour the rabbit face in.

 

 

How is your crowd-sourced project different from one that is created by a single artist/creator?

The artwork that was produced by our crowd-sourced participants didn’t have a cohesive aesthetic.

Many of our participants were our family and friends that we recruited to help us with our project. Many of them do not have any artistic inclinations whatsoever and they filled the cells in with random colours with no clear vision for the finished product.

There was also kitschy images like the pixelated Mario incorporated into the artwork that didn’t match the rest of the document which was mainly abstract colours and bars of cells.

Many of the elements in the artwork such as the gradients were created as standalone elements and were not added in response to the artwork as a whole.

All in all, there was no creative art direction with this artwork and all the artists were bored people tapping at random on their phones.

Only our crowdsourced chaos could create such a mess of a masterpiece! 🙂

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ending note: Our artwork kind of reminds me of Outsider art where artists that managed to avoid any sort of artistic influence or training whatsoever make their own form of bizarre artworks. 😮 i thought that was kinda interesting!