This week we’re going to look a bit further into participatory practices and the history of participation in art, media and documentary. This site gives a bit of an overview of participation over the last century.
YOUR TASK
Flipped lecture: come to the tutorial with an example of a participatory project that you find interesting, successful, problematic or inspiring for your own project.
Please read at least one of the following – making notes of any interesting points or questions you have.
Strategies of Participation: Sandra Guadenzi
Documentary Ecosystems: Collaboration and Exploitation: Jon Dovey
Toward a Theory of Participatory New Media Documentary: Patricia Zimmermann
And for a manifesto on the importance of collaborative and participatory documentary practices, this list by Reece Auguiste, Helen De Michiel, Aggie Ebrahimi Bazaz, and Patricia R. Zimmermann outlines a number of considerations and questions about these practices and spaces.
Participatory art
Art that involves some kind of audience participation or collaboration is not a new phenomenon. In 1910 the Italian Futurists began holding art performances in which they confronted audiences with inflammatory political texts, poetry, music and visual art. At the Teatro Lirico in Milan one evening in February 1910, the author of the Futurist Manifesto, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, provoked the audience into throwing fruit at him by crying ‘Long live war, sole hygiene of the world!’.
Gerardo Dottori’s ink-sketch Futurist Serata in Perugia (1914)
The French Dadaists held similar events where they attempted to provoke audiences into hurling food at them. These artists sought to engage the working classes in artistic performances in order to break the aristocracy’s monopoly on culture. They also wanted to devalue the art object as a marketable commodity.
YARD (1961), Allan Kaprow
In the 1960s in Europe and the US artists held less overtly political performances that demanded audience participation, known as ‘Happenings’. These events were designed to challenge conventional views of art and everyday life. For instance, Allan Kaprow made YARD (1961) in the sculpture garden of the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York. It consisted of hundreds of used tyres covering the ground in no particular order. Visitors were encouraged to walk on the tyres, and to throw them around as they pleased.
In the past two decades, collaborative art practices have both undergone significant development. Whilst participatory art practices traditionally occurred on the fringes of the art world, since the 1990s they have become a fully-fledged art genre. The art historian Claire Bishop writes that public participation in art projects is now a near global phenomenon, reaching from the Americas to Asia and Europe (2012).
Some recent examples of participatory art:
They shoot horses (2004), Phil Collins
Collins held a disco-dancing marathon for teenagers in Ramallah. “Collins paid nine teenagers to dance continuously for eight hours, on two consecutive days, in front of a garish pink wall to an unrelentingly cheesy compilation of pop hits from the past four decades. The teenagers are mesmerizing and irresistible as they move from exuberant partying to boredom and finally exhaustion.” (Bishop 2005)
References
Bishop, C. 2005. The social turn: Collaboration and its discontents. Artforum.
Bishop, C. 2012, Artificial Hells: participatory art and the politics of spectatorship, Verso Books, New York.
Dottori, G. 1914, Futurist Serata in Perugia
Kaprow, A. 1961, YARD (installation)
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WEB 2.0
Just as audience members have moved from observing to participating in art works, online users have moved from viewing web pages to actively generating web content. The term Web 2.0 describes those websites that:
- allow users add their own data
- collect user data as a side-effect of their use of the site (O’Reilly 2005).
The phenomenon of audience participation in web publishing has been described as the ‘network society’ (Castells 2000) and ‘participatory culture’ (Jenkins 2009). This new culture encourages online participation by having:
- “relatively low barriers to artistic expression”
- “strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations”
- and cultivating social connections amongst its members (Jenkins 2009, p. xi).
Web 2.0 sites are designed to make publishing text, photos, videos or tags both easy and socially rewarding. Users socially reward others for publishing material by:
- commenting
- tagging (labelling)
- liking
- linking (making a connection between personal web pages)
- retweeting or reposting (republishing with attribution) their contributions.
The Wisdom of Crowds
When a large group of people participate in an online activity, they are thought to form a collective intelligence that is superior, in terms of problem-solving and creativity, to the intelligence of any single group member. This concept is described as ‘the wisdom of crowds‘ (Surowiecki 2004), and the ‘hive mind’ (Kroski 2005). Crowdsourcing, which can be described as the request for ideas, content and labour from a large group of online participants, is thought to harness this superior collective intelligence and has become a commonplace feature of the web.
Crowdsourcing is frequently used to invite and enable the public to participate in art projects (Howe 2006) and is a strategy employed by a number of high-profile artists (Jenkins 2014). Online crowdsourced art has emerged as “a significant development across the entire artistic spectrum, from visual arts to music to creative writing” (Literat 2012).
A prominent example of a visual artwork that utilises crowdsourcing is The Johnny Cash Project (Milk 2010). The project website invites people to trace, by hand, a single frame of the film clip for the Johnny Cash song “Ain’t No Grave”. People rate the most popular frames and these are joined together to form an ever-evolving animation.
Using a similar approach the composer Eric Whitacre has crowdsourced several choral compositions as part of his Virtual Choir project (Whitacre 2009-2014). Utilising the video-sharing platform, Youtube, Whitacre sent out a call for participation in his composition Lux Aurumque. Participants filmed their own performances, uploaded them, and Whitacre edited them together. The finished composition comprised individual recordings by 185 singers from 12 countries.
The avant-garde artists who created participatory artworks in the previous century have strongly influenced those producing crowdsourced art. As Bishop explains, the authors of participatory artworks tend to have a common desire to subvert traditional relationships between the art object, the artist and the audience (2012). Crowdsourced artworks are also seen as a means of challenging traditional ideas about authorship and creativity (Literat 2012) and democratising art production (Stoddart 2009). Like offline participatory artworks, crowdsourced art works aim to build community through collaboration and sharing (Xiao 2009a) and to offer participants liberating vehicles for self-expression (Literat 2012).
Further research:
Examine audience engagement strategies in the following Idfa DOCLAB winners:
Serial (2014): http://serialpodcast.org/
Alma – the webdocumentary (2013): http://alma.arte.tv/en/webdoc/
Examine models of audience support examples in the following crowdfunding sites: Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/), Kickstarter (https://www.kickstarter.com/) – search for ‘documentary’, ‘webseries’ etc.
References
Bishop, C 2012, Artificial Hells: participatory art and the politics of spectatorship, Verso Books, New York.
Castells, M 2000, The Rise of The Network Society, Blackwell Publishing, Hoboken, N.J.
Howe, J 2006, ‘The rise of crowdsourcing’, Wired magazine, issue 14.06, pp.1-4.
Jenkins, H 2009, Confronting the challenges of participatory culture, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Jenkins, H 2014, ‘Rethinking “Rethinking Convergence/Culture”‘, Cultural Studies, vol. 28, no. 2, pp. 1–31
Kroski, E 2005, ‘The hive mind: Folksonomies and user-based tagging’, InfoTangle Blog, accessed April 2, 2014, from <http://web20bp.com/13z2a6019/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/The-Hive-Mind-Folksonomies-2005.pdf>
Literat, I 2012, ‘The work of art in the age of mediated participation: Crowdsourced art and collective creativity’, International Journal of Communication, vol. 6, p. 23.
Milk, C 2010, The Johnny Cash Project, accessed April 2, 2014, from <http://www.thejohnnycashproject.com/>
OReilly, T 2005, ‘What Is Web 2.0’, O’Reilly Network, accessed April 29, 2014, from <http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html>
Whitacre, E 2009-2014, Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir, accessed April 2, 2014, from <http://ericwhitacre.com/the-virtual-choir>
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AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION
Storytelling is no longer just about transmission, it is also about engagement. We are all competing for attention in an information saturated society. According to some reports you have less that eight seconds to engage someone online before they click away. Storytelling for the 21st century has to include a narrative that draws our attention and a strategy of community engagement.
Advertising, public relations, marketing and journalism are converging. Traditional advertising doesn’t work any more. The world is saturated with advertising images and the public are highly suspicious of any company making unsubstantiated claims about their products. Public relations and marketing are now about opening a conversation with consumers and connecting with them in a more honest, transparent and authentic manner. In this regard, marketers can learn a lot from storytellers and journalists.
On the other hand, storytellers and journalists now have to think more like businesses and seek new ways to get a return on their investment (ROI). In other words, they need to find new ways to capitalise on the time, energy and resources they expend creating their content. In finding, engaging their audience and profiting from their audience, they need to think more like marketers.
Different levels and types of participation
Elan Lee, of 42 Entertainment and Fourth Wall Studios, was one of the earliest designers of alternate reality games (ARGs). An ARG is an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, and often involves multiple types of media and game elements. In 2004 he created I Love Bees, an ARG designed to promote the Xbox game Halo 2 (2004). I Love Bees was modelled on Orson Welles 1938 radio play, War of the Worlds. It was a six-hour radio drama broadcast over thousands of payphones around the world. Every time a phone was answered, that portion of the audio was then unlocked on the I Love Bees website.
Lee groups users into three categories: Casual, Active and Enthusiastic. The group at the bottom of the pyramid (Enthusiastic) are the ones who participate wholeheartedly in Lee’s alternate reality games. The Casual and Active groups watch from the sidelines and are occasionally inspired to join the Enthusiastic group. As Lee puts it: “Cause they’re watching, like ‘Oh my god, these guys are going out in hurricanes and answering payphones!’ And you have all that insanity. And what happens is that triangle grows, because people from the top, every once in a while they trickle down to the middle. And people at the middle level start to trickle down to the bottom level. And that bottom level grows when there’s more core players doing more and more and more, the whole triangle grows because now there’s more to be entertained by.”
Here is a chart of different types of online participators, put together by Forrester Research (2008):
Forrester’s Social Technographics data classifies consumers by country, gender and age via this social technology profile tool.
Videogame players
The game designer Tracy Fullerton identifies the following types of player:
- The Competitor: Plays to best other players, regardless of the game
- The Explorer: Curious about the world, loves to go adventuring; seeks outside boundaries – physical or mental
- The Collector: Acquires items, trophies, or knowledge; likes to create sets, organize history, etc.
- The Achiever: Plays for varying levels of achievement; ladders and levels incentivize the achiever
- The Joker: Doesn’t take the game seriously – plays for the fun of playing; there’s a potential for jokers to annoy serious players, but on the other hand, jokers can make the game more social than competitive
- The Artist: Driven by creativity, creation, design
- The Director: Loves to be in charge, direct the play
- The Storyteller: Loves to create or live in worlds of fantasy and imagination
- The Performer: Loves to put on a show for others
- The Craftsman: Wants to build, craft, engineer, or puzzle things out (Fullerton 2008, p.90)
As Fullerton points out, there are many other types of player not mentioned in this list, some of whom are not well served by today’s video games.
Not every player likes the same challenges or experiences. People have a variety of needs and interests and it is important to consider the type of person you are designing for. For instance, what types of interactivity might you design for your user? Here are some characteristics of interactive activities that you could experiment with:
- Tests of skill – users like to test how good they are at something.
- Competition – users like to test their skills or wits against others.
- Cause and Effect – users like to find out what will happen when they perform a certain action. This allows them to work out the answer to a question through trial and error.
- Feedback – using a simulation is like having a conversation: you perform an action and you receive immediate feedback on how you went.
- Incentives and Rewards – users like achievable goals and payoffs.
- Levels of Difficulty – users like the focused tension they experience when attempting a difficult challenge. When they overcome the challenge they experience a feeling of achievement and release. It’s a bit like climbing a high mountain.
- Repeatability – when aspects of a simulation are repeatable, users feels in control. You could undermine this feeling of control by introducing elements of randomness.
- Level of Randomness – users know what will happen but not where or when. This builds a sense of tension.
Profiling your ideal audience
Can you characterise the ideal viewer/user of your digital narrative? Here are some (but by no means all) user/viewer characteristics that may be relevant to your audience:
- Age – children, teenagers, baby-boomers, young adults, over 65, in their thirties
- Gender – mostly male, mostly female or both in equal numbers
- Social group – family with young children, seniors
- Language – English as first language, English as a second language
- Education – school, college, university, post-graduate
- Expectations – what they expect based on their experience with similar websites or games
- Existing knowledge – If non-fiction, how much they already know about the content? If a game, what similar games are they familiar with? If an animation, what other animations are they familiar with?
- Web and computer experience – low, medium, high
- Device – Mac/PC, mobile, console, small/large monitor, other?
- Software – OS, latest software updates, browser software and version
- Internet speed – slow, standard, fast
- Location – local, national, international, urban, regional, remote
- Where – home, school, work, library, public spaces, in transit (car/plane/train)
- When – during work hours, during a lunch-break, after the children are in bed, weekends, at night, early morning
- Why – to be informed, complete a task, seek an answer, buy something, entertainment, training
- Learning preferences – visual (learns by reading and watching), auditory (learns by listening and speaking), kinaesthetic (learns by doing)
- Income – what can they afford to buy? what are they willing to pay for?
- Work attributes – employee, home duties, shift-worker, academic, professional, business owner, executive, carer, unemployed, volunteer, specific industry sector
References
Fullerton, T 2008, Game Design Workshop, Second Edition: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games (Gama Network Series), Morgan Kaufmann, Massachusetts.
Forrester Research 2008, Forrester’s North American Media & Marketing Online Survey, http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/stories/2007-06-10/chart-who-participates-and-what-people-are-doing-online
Ipsos MediaCT 2015, 2015 Essential Facts about the Computer and Video Game Industry, Entertainment Software Association. Available: http://www.theesa.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/ESA-Essential-Facts-2015.pdf
Phoebe 2010, Elan Lee wants you to convert part of your life into the storytelling experience, http://workbookproject.com/culturehacker/2010/07/27/elan-lee-the-rolling-stone-interview-part-ii/
Further reading:
Morse T 2014, ‘All Together Now: Artists and Crowdsourcing’, ARTNEWS, http://www.artnews.com/2014/09/02/artists-and-crowdsourcing/
Situationist International: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SvdWk8zRrI
Lots coming out of the theatre tradition, Jason Mailing et al: http://www.jasonmaling.com/#
Live art: http://www.triageliveartcollective.com/
Festival of Live art: http://fola.com.au/
http://www.thisisliveart.co.uk/about/what-is-live-art/