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Art MobsCan an online crowd create a poem, a novel, or a painting?

By Clive ThompsonPosted Wednesday, July 21, 2004, at 11:07 AM ET

Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty Mobs have been getting unusually good press these days. In his excellent new book The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki (a former Slate columnist) argues that groups of people are smarter than any individual member. In Smart Mobs, Howard Rheingold showed how a massive gang of citizens connected by mobile phones toppled the president of the Philippines. And every day the unruly stock market, with its zillions of buy-and-sell orders, identifies a hot or cold company long before any individual analyst can spot it. Crowds, it seems, have a truly superhuman intelligence.

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Now there's evidence they may even be creative. A few weeks ago, Wikipedia—an "open content" encyclopedia where anybody can write or edit an entry—produced its 300,000^th article. At 90.1 million words, Wikipedia is larger than any other English-language encyclopedia, including the latest edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, which has only 85,000 articles and 55 million words. This is all the more impressive when you realize that Wikipedia came into existence a little more than three years ago, and not a single contributor has been paid. Every word was written by volunteers, an enormous army digging out a massive anthill, grain by grain.

Just how inventive can an anonymous group of people be? Could an online mob produce a poem, a novel, or a painting? We like to believe that the blue bolt of artistic inspiration strikes only the individual. "[The] group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man," John Steinbeck wrote in East of Eden. Hollywood scriptwriters constantly moan over how their brilliant ideas were mutilated by studio "editing by committee."

But collaboration has a long history in art. Plays are frequently infected with ideas that came from actors or even sound engineers. Some Shakespeare scholars wonder whether some of the Bard's lines came from onstage improvisations by actors. And though many of today's writers and creators would never admit it, editing by committee can rescue an overindulgent work. Collaboration is old hat.

Still, until now it's been limited to a small handful of people, usually face to face. The Internet lets thousands of total strangers collaborate to produce a truly hivelike result. One intriguing example is "Typophile: The Smaller Picture," a project that let an anonymous crowd design a font. Kevan Davis, a British Web developer, created grids of pixels, 20 by 20 in size, one for each letter of the alphabet. He randomly dispersed black-and-white pixels in each. Then he put them online and let people vote on whether a particular pixel should be white or black. As thousands of people voted on each one, letters emerged, forming a democratic consensus of what the alphabet should look like.

Davis created animations that show each letter taking shape, and they're mesmerizing, a time-lapse movie of a collective mind at work. Another designer took the results and produced crisper-edged versions of each letter. The final result looks like a mildly punk version of Helvetica, with occasional flashes of creative weirdness, such as the jaunty serif on the foot of the letter "J."

Yet the process has its flaws. When the mob tried to draw a few simple pictures, it couldn't. Davis told it to draw a television, but the image never congealed. The group agreed that the tube should be represented by empty space, but it couldn't generate any other details. An attempt at drawing a face produced an even more shapeless mess. The only partially successful picture was a goat: At around 4,000 votes, it looked pretty goatlike, and at 5,000 votes the mob revised it to make the horns curvier. But after 7,000 votes the picture decayed into a random jumble of pixels, as if the group could no longer agree on what a goat should look like. Mobs, it seems, can't draw.

Why did letters work, but not pictures? Probably because the second experiment was too free-form. Ask a group of people to draw the letter "E," and most of them will envision something pretty similar. Ask them to draw a face, and they'll have a much broader array of opinions, and thus more disagreement. Truly huge artistic collaboration on the Internet seems to work only if the gang has a well-defined objective.

The Wikipedia people have been discovering this themselves, after launching a project to have people collaboratively write textbooks: Wikibooks. When I spoke to Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's founder, he noted that while some textbooks are evolving nicely, most aren't experiencing the wild success of the Wikipedia. A textbook requires a consistent sense of style and a linear structure, hallmarks of a single authorial presence. An encyclopedia doesn't.

In a sense, the world of online collaboration is discovering what artists have always known: Rigid conventions are often crucial to producing art. Novels, poems, and oil paintings are really just structural devices that take an artist's zillion competing ideas—an internal, self-contradicting mob—and focus them into a coherent work.

Mind you, online collaborators are finding that freedoms are important too. The journalist JD Lasica recently put his unpublished book, Darknet, on a wiki—a type of collaboration Web site where anyone can edit a page or write a new one—and encouraged his readership to edit it. But readers mostly offered only tiny edits, such as grammatical fixes or fact-checks. Nobody plunged in and rewrote an entire section. Lasica suspects his book was too fully formed: People didn't want to mess with something that seemed finished. He thinks a better idea would be to post a much rougher draft of the book to make it seem more like clay that can be molded.

One day, it's likely that an artist will discover the right mix, or some Web designer will invent an online engine that elegantly channels a million contributions into a single compelling artwork. So far, the closest we've yet come is with music, which, thanks to the influence of hip-hop, techno, and applications like GarageBand, is increasingly a cut-and-paste art form. One new collaboration site is MacJams, where people share songs they're writing. The site recently gave birth to a jazz song called "Please Eat." An artist dumped a few tracks onto MacJams, and soon three other musicians—half of the four were complete strangers—contributed a total of 36 tracks to the song. The songwriters worked well together in part because jazz is inherently collaborative and structured, so they knew in advance how to cooperate.

The song emerged from a completely unplanned collaboration. I clicked on the link, and the trippy, witty piece came floating out my speaker: The music of the hive.

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Clive Thompson writes about gaming and technology for Slate.

Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty.

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

The question asked is provocative: can a group of people create a work of art, something as immediate and intimate to its audience as a poem, a novel, or a painting?

…I don't believe that a poem, novel or painting of any value or continued resonance could ever be created by a committee. A mediocre working writer once ruefully lamented that one could fill Yankee Stadium with all the mediocre working writers in New York City alone. One James Joyce is worth ten thousand, or perhaps a hundred thousand, of these competent but unspectacular souls, of which ruefully, I am probablyy one. Genius is rare, and even genuine insight is unusual. The effect of collaboration is generally to dilute any work to the approximate level of the weakest contributor, which only works if there is little difference between the strongest and weakest member. Why would Tolstoy or Shakespeare cede any control over his imaginative landscape to a lesser mortal?

The idea of creating collaborative art is a noble and egalitarian ideal, perhaps given a bit of new life amongst those who see the Internet as a medium that is allowing people to share knowledge and construct fruitful networks, but in the realm of art, there is a limit to what can be done. Ultimately, the result of group art is almost invariably bad art. On the other hand, since many great artists end dying of alcoholism, poverty, suicide, or simply go insane, perhaps it is for the best.

--gthomson

(To reply, click here)

As an anecdote from school a long time ago. The class was given a classic exercise in which each individual given a situation ordered a set of objects in order of importance for survival (I have seen the exercise as both a lifeboat and lost in the desert- I actually have executed variations of this exercise several times). Then you get into groups and discuss and reorder.

The result is an attempt to demonstrate that group thinking is generally superior to individual thinking. And that much is true. For the most part groups did better than individuals.

But that was not the lesson I learned. There were always a few that consistently did better than the group. The lesson is if you can reliably find a way to determine who they are you should put them in charge.

--Mike_Murray

(To reply, click here)

It seems wrongheaded to lump all collections of people together.

Maybe they all have virtues, maybe they all have vices, but I wonder if they all have the same virtues and vices.

Much of the art that was produced by groups of people was envisioned by a master, and completed in detail by journeymen.

This works: people with more time and particular incentives, as well as practical skills nearing their peak, do the detail work. The master, whose own skills may be in decline, and who has too much work to handle all the details, has the experience to compose the grand vision.

Committees, on the other hand, frequently are trying to get the 'grand vision' right, and the members may have no particular skills - they are responsible when things go wrong (high exposure to major failure) but have little responsibility or exposure to success. This is why they vitiate creative projects. They don't have someone responsible for assuming risk, who will benefit from it.

Mobs, real mobs, on the other hand, are usually much more complex than they look. Informal power structures push them forward, institutional inerita without anyone able to stop them keeps them going...
these new 'mobs' are not real mobs any more than the original US government was direct democracy.

--BenK

(To reply, click here)

(7/22)

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