Two seemingly dissimilar bedfellows, Nicolas Bourriaud and a ‘digital lifestyle’ magazine, came together in an interview entitled “Your Assignment: Art.” The interview by Leah DeVun with Andrea Grover, concerned Grover’s curatorial efforts around crowdsourcing (previously mentioned here).
Although I’m unconvinced by the precedents that she’s claimed (Matta-Clark’s Food), the contemporary work that she selects is quite interesting when taken as a group: ‘Learning to Love you More‘, ‘Found Magazine‘, ‘Sheep Market‘, ‘Signs That Say What You Want Them to Say, Not Signs That Say What Other People Want You to Say‘ and ‘We Feel Fine‘ (to name a few).
This selection forces some intriguing questions. What is the distinction between something that is truly ‘crowdsourced’ and work that is produced by a more traditional notion of an artist collective (an interesting test case might be Andrea Grover and Jon Rubin’s show Never Been to Houston)? In the interview, DeVun asked bout the role of the editor in crowdsourced works– Grover points to a preference for “the way the assignment is conceived at the beginning” rather than editing after the fact. But she never really answers if, and in what way editing can be part of a successful crowdsourced artwork. The interview also focuses on what makes crowdsourcing fail, and what contributes to effective projects. Grover concludes that clear and well-considered parameters are key, but also fostering a sense of community between participants– a feeling that they are contributing to something greater and larger than anything that they could accomplish alone. [read the entire interview here]
–> An interesting aside: This interview was selected for publication in “Wired” from the opensource (crowdsourced) journalism experiment “Asignment Zero.”
