Polyopticon.org and the Drawing Program

This paper researches a particular strategy for diminishing the authority of the figure of the artist and closing of the gap between the figure of the artist and the museum audience. It was studied through a direct engagement with audiences and by observing and facilitating networks of artistic practices that are distributed across audiences and artists. The two practical projects that were created to test this investigation were Polyopticon.org and a custom Drawing Program.

Polyopticon.org engaged with artists and audiences as collaborators for their own artistic practices. The Drawing Program is custom software that placed the audience within a proscenium of a computer mediated space that invited an inclusive collective of participants to act cooperatively to produce performances and images. With both projects, I studied the way the work produced the identity of the artist and the museum audience. I used the Internet as an experimental space to explore the social production of the artist and audience. By dispersing my artistic practice across a number of participants, I hoped the central identities of the artist and audience would be challenged to produce an art that distributed rather than centralised expression.

From the beginning of the 20^th century the space between audience and artist began to shrink. Futurist performances were “seeking the audience’s collaboration”¹ and were “communicating with the actors in surprising actions and bizarre dialogues”².  These provocative performances were designed to close the gap between the audience and the performance. It sought to awaken the passivity of conventional audiences and engage with them directly. They succeeded in doing this because they broke with the conventions of museum display by speaking directly to the audience. This begins a recent history of direct interaction between artists and audiences that are mediated by artworks.

Another example of this is in the early 20^thC during the second Dada exhibition in Cologne. Max Ernst put an axe next to one of his artworks, to be used by the participant if they took a disliking to the work. This provocative display is typical of early attempts to elicit audience engagement. By challenging the audience to act on their critical judgement of the work and physically harm it, Ernst set up a situation that requires the participant to perform either a refusal to destroy the work or to smash it to pieces. This performance is a reciprocal act between the artist and the participant via the artwork. By destroying the work, the participant asserts himself over it. By not destroying it the relationship becomes more ambiguous, because the reasons for not destroying it could be that the participant is too timid to because of the museum convention of caution around art, even though they dislike the work.

 

In the same exhibition was a drawing that left some ‘free space’ on the paper. Beneath it was written the words “any visitor of this exhibition is entitled to insert a Dadaistic or anti-Dadaistic aphorism in this drawing. No prosecution.”³ The inclusion of the words ‘no prosecution’ are of interest to me here. Once again this provocation suggests that the authority of the work would be that any physical interaction with it would normally be dealt with by subjecting the participant to prosecution. However this dominance is overturned and the participant is invited without fear of prosecution to express their view of Dada. This breaks down the hegemony that museum culture has imposed on the visual display. Not only are they invited to express their view of Dada, but they are provoked to say something anti-Dadaistic. This adds a level of complexity to this as now the participant can also attempt to undermine the authority of the very context of the artist via the work.

Marcel Duchamp took a different approach to cooperating with the audience to produce the work, than Ernst. His main interest was on the technical transfer of perception which he explored more fully in his Rotoreliefs. The mechanised spinning spiral disc formed an image in the perception of the participant. The participant completed the mechanised work with their perception.  This completion means that the participant is directly acknowledged as part of the optical procedure of looking at the work. In this way the participant’s technical perception and the mechanical sculpture cooperate to produce the image. This cooperation between the machine and the participant led some of the artists that were experimenting with technology in the Sixties to see Duchamp as a role model of interactivity.

After WWII the role of the audience established its independence with increased invitations to directly engage with artworks. John Cage transfers the responsibility of sound to the audience. Allan Kaprow creates the happening as an interactive, non-authoritarian event. Rauchenberg exhibits his reactive environments. Yoko Ono coins the idea of the ‘participatory event’. This is where we can find the roots of the Fluxus Movement, The Gutai Movement, Situationism, Kinetic Art, Cybernetic Art and Closed Circuit Video Installations. This explosion of cooperative acts in art can be traced to the questioning of authority and state institutions that the Sixties and Seventies are famous for. These artists recognised that cooperation is a reciprocal, exchange of hierarchy that challenges hegemony and centralised power. Society changed from the Sixties onwards as the civil rights movements extended to include diverse social groups across a much vaster field of engagement.

The two investigation projects explore an aesthetic of social engagement by creating dynamic architectures of artist-audience cooperative space. Nicholas Bourriaud describes his book ‘Relational Aesthetics’ in his later book ‘Post Production’.

“… their point of departure in the changing mental space that has been opened for thought by the Internet, the central tool for the information age we have entered. But Relational Aesthetics dealt with the convivial and interactive aspect of this revolution (why artists produce models of sociality, to situate themselves within the human sphere.”⁴

Allan Kaprow also explored models of sociality and he made it “abundantly clear that not every form of participation per se implies a higher responsibility for the visitor and thus a less authoritarian role of the artist.”⁵ His work negotiates the “fragile border between the emancipatory act and manipulation.”⁶ From here it can be stated that there is a method of obtaining the “decisive factor in judging the receptive situation is how active the unprepared viewer becomes within a certain framework of action and without specific instructions.”⁷ It is from this method that I can judge the emancipatory potential within my own work, as well as other works of cooperative art.

The dialectic of the emancipatory act and manipulation provides a discourse about cooperative art and how it can highlight the ethical interrelationships of the participants; an ethic of cooperative art. For example, the work ethic of art can be “the hackers’ ethic”. By ‘hacker’ I don’t only mean some kid trying to vandalise computers. From “the MIT of the sixties onward, classic hacker has emerged from sleep in the early afternoon to starting to programming with enthusiasm”⁸ to create a new space for labour and production. This shift in work ethic is an example of the less didactic ethic of protestant traditions.

Claire Bishop mounted a critique of what she called ‘collaborative art’ in ‘Art Forum’ in the article ‘The Social Turn’. She attempted to dismantle the argument that collaborative art withdraws from aesthetic critique in the name of ethical practice. She says:

“There can be no failed, unsuccessful, unresolved, or boring works of collaborative art because all are equally essential to the task of strengthening the social bond. While I am broadly sympathetic to that ambition, I would argue that it is also crucial to discuss, analyse, and compare such work critically as art.”⁹

I agree with her assessment of the importance of critique. However, I would argue that it is also crucial to discuss, analyse, and compare such work critically as art while also testing the social bond. The two propositions are not in conflict.

 

Artists who don’t Live in Society are either Animals or Gods¹⁰

Contemporary art increases the depth of negotiation in “artwork that manifests a counter-conscious”¹¹ that a “separation which existed between the artist and the audience is closed, that they become mutually engaged, to the point that the audience become the rationale in both making and reception of the work.”¹² This concept of viewer participation and its increased exploration can be traced to the art that “follows the avant guard traditions of the beginning of this century [20^thC], traditions that reacted to the widening gap between the mass audience and the art audience.”¹³ The mass audience became a powerful social force throughout the 20^thC and is continuing to grow in strength as populations increase and with the impact of networked communication and information technologies.

The Internet and digital technologies can facilitate an increased participation by mass audiences and artists in cooperation. The Internet particularly has become a place for various experimental artistic practices. Net artists that practice subversive work such as 0100101110101101.org describe themselves on their website as “Eva and Franco Mattes - internationally known as 0100101110101101.org – is a couple of restless European con-artists who use non-conventional communication tactics to obtain the largest visibility with minimal effort.”¹⁴ The site continues to boast that past “works include staging a hoax involving a completely made-up artist, ripping off the Holy See and spreading a computer virus as a work of art.”¹⁵ This kind of cooperation is quite different from the feel good work of many cooperative practices that survive on the funding of government bodies with an interest in community development. Here we see the intersection of an art that seeks to close the gap between the artist and the audience by employing cooperative strategies in order to provoke the attention of mass culture. It cooperates in order to subvert. It can cooperate the way a virus or parasite may cooperate with its host, to exploit or destroy it. However, this context is not the only place cooperative work takes place. Society itself is a cooperative network and is therefore a readymade context for participants interested in closing the artist-audience gap.

It is interesting to note that government and community play a large role in society and art. Initiatives to encourage an inclusive participation by various groups have become commonplace, particularly in multicultural states like Victoria, Australia. Many artists depend on these initiatives to make work that is cooperative. There is a lot of rhetoric by governments about how “a community where people participate in cultural activity has greater potential for connection, caring and social development”¹⁶. The Victorian Government issues statements that “it is committed to fostering local identity and community participation throughout Victoria”¹⁷. It contends that “engagement in the arts can promote wellbeing and contribute to a healthy society.”¹⁸ This attempt at harnessing an artistic community is ultimately undermined by a rigid bureaucracy of funding bodies and proposal procedures which tend to centralise the identities of the participants to particular social groups and disciplines. The aim of which is so that “a number of projects and programs supported by the government departments add value to the arts sector and to Victoria’s social and economic capital”¹⁹. A counter culture as seen in 0100101110101101.org can provide a non-nationalist kind of self-organisation that does not require formal governance. This hybridised field of identities can generate funds through donation across the world via the Internet. This allows its participants to make work that does not conform to ‘big brothers’ concept of art, and has allowed some artists, such as film-makers such as a ‘Swarm of Angels’ who “reinvents the Hollywood model of filmmaking to create cult cinema for the Internet era.”²⁰ Even with government money, the intention of developing the identity of a community can be easily extended across national borders via the Internet, which leads to a non-centralised definition of community.

Digital technologies can open the field of cooperative practices. Once it was at the café and in printed journals that cooperation and discourse was founded in artistic society. Now with the Internet it has become mobile phones, email, websites, wiki, blogs and online discussion boards were discussion increasingly takes place. Projects such as wikipedia blur the role of the producer and the user creating a new hybrid identity that has begun to be called a ‘produser’. The produser engages in a reciprocal act of discussion in order to share knowledge. It is a non-linear institution that is self organising and networked. My practice is particularly interested in how I can shape these technologies to engage with wide audiences and create participatory environments that can have unexpected aesthetic outcomes. My practice does not have the romantic subversion approach found in 0100101110101101.org’s work. I am more interested in a two way dialogue between the audience and the artwork.

This art can also be been described as a “progressively more extreme mode of collaboration that blurs and doubles the ‘normal’ figure of the artist as an individual identity”²¹. To place the artist’s identity as equivalent to the audience is an annihilation of the traditional role of the artist. This in-between position of neither artist, nor audience, is the role of the participant.

 

The process I went through to arrive at these two works spanned the first half of the research year. It began with a desire to explore the interactive potential of digital technology. I was really excited by the idea of “the artist [who] delegates his role to the program and withdraws from the action”.²² This lead me to continue previous investigations I had undertaken in recent years to explore artificial intelligence computer programming as a way to create a situation where a participant is able to realise the work through an undirected dialogue with a machine. This automatised system is not limited to a strict logic because it is capable of accepting any response, responding in a variety of ways and independently acquiring new responses.

This led me to think about a kind of freedom in interaction. It felt like art that acknowledged the audience’s presence and their observation and interpretation had a kind of freeing potential in the construction of meaning by the individual. I wanted the work to be emancipatory because art can at times feel rigid, lifeless and uninviting. Paintings by ‘The Great Masters’ can be presented in museums as some kind of religious experience, or as a demonstration of discipline by the state. This does not appeal to me because it becomes more of a demonstration of power, rather than a work of art by a person (or people) in a shared society. Cooperative projects seem to be able to break down some of these mythological structures that surround the institution of art, by including people in the production, the work takes on a new life that is closer, more intimate and perhaps more enjoyable by the participants and the artists.

In search for this idea of participation and emancipation of the viewer, I decided to let go of the idea of an artificial intelligence program as an interactive work. I was frustrated by the limitations of interactivity that only take place between a person and a machine. Often the more interesting interactions are when technology is only a mediator between people. My first attempt after this was to create a custom software program called ‘6.5 Billion’. It was not interactive in the literal sense but the work was completed by the participant’s cognition of it. The idea was that by observing a field of numbers counting backward from the number 6,500,000,000 that the observer would feel a sense of the “Mathematical Sublime”.²³ I have lived in Tokyo near Shinjuku, which has a train station that moves two million people through it every day. I experienced a kind of sublime feeling when I was among Japanese society due to its enormity, and this is what I was trying to express with ‘6.5 Billion’. However, this test failed. The number was counting at the rate of 2000 units per second and took four weeks to countdown to zero. The work failed to excite my interest in interactions with the audience as many participants didn’t feel the sense of the sublime that I was trying to convey. It did allow me to get a better sense of what I was after, but not being it. It was neither emancipatory nor effectively interactive. Rather it tried to unsuccessfully subject the participant to feel a particular way according to a manipulation of affect. It also relied too much on the audience to figure out what was happening, and in this way it was overly demanding. I realised that I needed to find structures were the participant can input some kind of action and have that action reciprocated by another action, preferably between people mediated by a machine. I also wanted something more visual, as I wanted to make work that excited a range of aesthetic challenges. I was frustrated by the artificial intelligence program and 6.5 billion because they were both text based works.

This led me to consider two works that were at very early stages of development. The Drawing Program and Polyopticon.org were both side projects that I was working on in my spare time, but as they developed I came to realise that they were exactly what I was seeking in my investigation into direct engagement. By studying these projects I came to realise that the notion of interactivity was not what I was after because it was limited to a machine-human relationship. Instead, I wanted a deeper interaction; a cooperation or dialogue with audiences. This notion developed alongside these two projects into an understanding about the role of the artist and audience as a limited context that can be provoked to obtain surprising results. 

Polyopticon.org is a community website and a work of art that I have been developing throughout this research year. Originally a side, project it became a main topic of research when I realised it had was achieving the results I was seeking in other work. It has approximately one hundred members and has nine collaborative art projects within its context. It is an online environment and an artistic ecology that has rapidly grown over the course of the year. It can function as a studio, gallery, archive and visual diary for its members. It has a number of advantages over traditional museum spaces because “whereas physical meeting places depend for their success on centrality within densely populated areas, virtual venues need not”²⁴. It also seeks so called ‘real world’ outcomes, such as museum exhibitions, from its projects as well as online outcomes, such as net art. In line with my ideas about cooperation as a way to free the conventional role of the artist and audience it can be emancipatory to engage in Polyopticon.org artistically. This is because the figure of the artist and the audience are blurred easily online. The figure of the socially constructed identity of the member can be reconfigured as they are “not compelled to display usual markers of age, gender and race.”²⁵ This option to remain ambiguous or anonymous as an artistic identity allows for participations that normative social values might otherwise repress. Polyopticon.org provides as an artistic space that is less inhibited and socially defined compared to the museum or public sphere.

Polyopticon.org asks that the potential participant to set up a free user account. This process gives the user the option of providing information about their identity via a user profile. This option can be used to consciously construct the identity of the participant and is used by many to create alter egos. I see this active construction of identity as a positive because the user has greater power over the construction of their identity which highlights the arbitrary nature of identity. It is also possible that the user inputs their actual biological markers of identity; a photo of the users face. We can see the profiles as an addition to the roles of identification. If a member gains a reputation for being argumentative and becomes frustrated in their role, they can start fresh and simply construct another identity. This allows for trial and error and makes the social system far more stable which harnesses an environment of experimentation and testing of positions.

Polyopticon.org was named in relation to Michel Foucault’s theory of the ‘panopticon’. It is intended to evoke a critical relationship to the idea of the centrality of modern power and its architecture. My invented word ‘polyopticon’ is also meant to describe a structure that is more contemporary than the monolithic construction of the ‘panopticon’. Contemporary “domination has now found lighter, less burdening, less awkward and less constraining strategies than continuous ubiquitous surveillance, meticulous minute-by minute Taylorist regulation and dense nets of sanctions all calling for bulky administrative offices and the setting of permanent garrisons on the conquered territory”²⁶ as is suggested by the ‘panopticon’. This inclusive structure allows for many insights and positions of identity. It encourages discourse, dissent and negotiation. To “’know how to be’ is to develop and expanding network of communication with oneself at the centre, or better still to position oneself at the interface or crossing point of a great number of networks.”²⁷ By this way of thinking, society can be thought of as a network. This is an aesthetic shift in the composition of society that changes its reading from one of neighbours and centralised relationships to one of distributed, networked communities.

For contemporary artists, the networked society offers a new medium for cooperative practices. By “putting the accent on polyvalence, on flexibility of employment, on the ability to learn and to adapt to new functions rather than on the possession of skills and acquired qualification, on the capacity to gain trust, to communicate, to ‘relate,’” artists and audiences can engage in reciprocal acts of the critical construction of space. The networked space has qualities that are not bound to the skill and craft of the artist. The aesthetic is not bound to notions of taste and pleasure. It provides an aesthetic ground within which the figure is blurred and abstracted within the visual plane of society. This blurs the aesthetic with notions like ethics, politics and society. The roles of artist, audience and artwork become indivisible. Zygmunt Bauman does not like this idea. He wants to hold onto the idea of security and so laments “the end of security once associated with status, hierarchy, bureaucracy, fixed career tracks and tenure.”²⁸ He fears that “the void left by security and long term visions and planning is filled by an accelerating succession of episodic projects, each one in the case of its successful implementation offering not much more than a slightly enhanced chance of ‘employability’ in the other.”²⁹ His fears echo the criticism levelled at the Turkish collective Oda Projesi by Claire Bishop, about how we should not mention the ‘aesthetic’ because it is ‘dangerous’. But here the danger is in the networked society and its lack of security. As an artist, these problems translate into aesthetic challenges of expression between a work of art and the audience. They also provide the medium within which this aesthetic relationship can be explored as a starting point for other ethical, philosophical and political discussions. Central to the discourse is the aesthetic relationship between the art and the audience and by blurring this relationship we create an aesthetic of gaseous social identities. This better describes the social condition of competing registers and interests rather than the panoptic relationship of the figure of the artist and his subjects. For me, the ‘polyoptic’ structure seems more honest and interesting for developing meaningful aesthetic relationships between the participants.  

Polyopticon.org can be considered a literal approach to dealing with networked society. It is a website within the social networks of the Internet, it has its own internal social networks of members that know each other as well as loose networks of people finding and looking at each other, anonymously if they choose. Bauman’s notion of a “succession of episodic projects”³⁰ is accurate in that Polyopticon.org does not have an end in itself. It is a continual development of ideas. It will never be finished as an objective whole. It may however be completed subjectively as an extension of the identity of the participants. Like the entire project of art, it is in constant development, its members change and its processes and identity changes with it.

This does not mean that it cannot be critically evaluated as an aesthetic thing. Like the exhibition of a public sculpture, its aesthetic composition shifts as the viewer walks around it. A public sculpture too may be moved from one civic or regional space to another, and in so doing, its meaning and reception change. This fluid reading does not include the idea of a fixed solid meaning. And yet it does make a space for a critical evaluation and analysis. However, it encourages a more critical discourse to be dispersed across the participant public. It is this more inclusive, rather than discriminating structure of aesthetic analysis that is preferred for Polyopticon.org.

Anyone can comment about ant aspect of Polyopticon.org by posting their thoughts onto the website and anyone can read the comments and respond to these comments. This is like the free space created in a Dada drawing. It is a cooperative space. Should people want an added feature, it is my role to facilitate that feature, rather than to dictate what there can only be. Of course, there is not an ‘anything goes’ approach, but rather an opening up of the roles of producer and user. This new role has gained the buzz word ‘produser’. This echoes Alvis Tofflers ‘prosumer’, a word he coined in the 1970’s “highlighting the emergence of a more informed, more involved consumer of goods who would need to be kept content by allowing for a greater customisability and individual-isability of products; this indicated the shift from mass industrial production of goods to a model of on-demand, just-in-time production of custom-made items.”³¹ These new structures breaks down the traditional structure of producer > publisher > distributor and it extends “Marshall McLuhan's dictum 'everyone's a publisher' as on the verge of becoming a reality - and more to the point, as the Wikipedia proudly proclaims, 'anyone can edit.'”³²

The Drawing Program

Last year, I had begun writing a computer code that negotiated the territory that I was seeking in this research investigation. It was a computer program that I had hacked together and developed in my spare. It was based on computer vision algorithms that allowed a computer to organise a visual plane of pixels inputted live from a video camera into a series of vector lines. It was from this code that The Drawing Program was made.

Computer vision represents a tangent of artificial intelligence. One of the more unromantic algorithms is called ‘blob detection’. It seeks groups of pixels of similar colour and identifies them as a shape. As the shape moves and changes, the computer vision system can track its movement by adjusting its identification of it. This amorphous, constantly changing shape is called a ‘blob’. The interactive potential of blobs for art practice quickly became an interesting territory of exploration. Without fully grasping what this relational practice was at this early stage, I sought to investigate how the participants could use ‘blob detection’ to make a system that would result in collaborative drawings. I abandoned the conventional role of the museum audience, instead inviting the audience to perform with each other as part of the work.

By assigning the calligraphic gesture to the system the formal arrangement and composition of the picture plane can become more widely distributed amongst participants. I added Bezier curves to the algorithm to make the feel of the drawings more organic and signatory. I also added a feature that saves the images produced by the software which enables the social production of images through the audience’s performance. This created a second level of production as the performance space was documented as fixed images. I felt that the Drawing Program had succeeded at this point in creating the kind of space I was seeking. It was a space between performance and image making that included the audience as artists.

By inviting multiple participants to interact with the Drawing Program during a series of mini-exhibitions, I hoped they would cooperate to create interesting and aesthetic images. They did. Without speaking, groups of two or more participants, including myself, were cooperating in the composition and testing of visual results from the instant feedback of the Drawing Program. These impromptu events became their own performances and were the best evidence of the potential of uncoordinated, self-organising practices by participants that displayed unrestricted intelligence and artistic practice. A will by participants to test the aesthetic range of the system was demonstrated. Also, ethical considerations of representation were tested as participants negotiated the affect of their performances on each others figure and experimented with normative values, narrative and the iconography of art, in particular drawing and etching. The participants enacted narrative fantasies, classical poses, grotesque figures and behaved in ways they would not in everyday life. Some leapt on each other, some embraced and some used tricks of the medium such as scale and shadow to produce interesting relationships between figures and forms. The resulting performances were carnivalesque displays of physical gesture and the social negotiation of form and content, often among an audience of strangers. These cooperative participants had expressed many of the ideas I had in decided on during the year about the interactive potential of the crowd and the intelligence of some audiences for cooperative artistic practices.  

After I had tested the work a number of times with many participants, I had a very large archive of over one thousand digital images. I really like some of them for their aesthetic qualities. They depicted crowds of people gesturing and interacting, not only with the program, but with each other and the environment. I selected a blue fill and a thicker dotted line for the final work [appendix fig #2]. These images were successful in visually exploring the concepts I am researching. They reinforce this idea of cooperation in that they were socially produced images that are non-authoritarian and emancipatory. They also depict the subject in which they produce. The mass audience and the audience as subject are referenced with the imagery of the crowd with individuals connected by calligraphic lines. Mediation occurs at all levels of production and perception, so this precondition does not inhibit the social freedom of the participant, in fact it extends it beyond non-participatory museum displays.

Cooperation and provocation

Like those early Futurist and Dada experiments in audience participation, I wanted to provoke the audience to be a part of the production. I did not wish to use the audience’s actions within a limited system, because I thought this was a waste of the audience’s talent. By creating flexible, free spaces that encouraged the audience and other artists to act, a reciprocal cooperative exchange was made possible. This led to surprising outcomes that no individual participant, including myself, could have predicted. Some of these outcomes were interesting aesthetically and some were not. Some were ethical and some were not. It was the shared role of the artist and the audience to observe those different qualities in the artwork and the task of producing these qualities that was shared.

I agree that “every reasonably aware person of our time is aware of the obvious fact that art can no longer be justified as a superior activity”³³. By making my identity as an artist blurred with the audience, a third role became possible; both as an artist and as an audience. My figure as an artist and the figure of the audience were freed to engage in a reciprocal performance via the cooperative work of the Polyopticon.org and the Drawing Program. I was emancipated from the role of a singular authority and the responsibility for artistic production was shared and distributed. It emancipated the role of the audience who were then free to cooperatively complete the work.

 

Bibliography

Bauman, Zygmunt	Society Under Siege, Blackwell Publishers, USA, 2002
Bourriaud, Nicholas	Post-Production: Culture as Screenplay: how art reprograms the world / [editor, Caroline Schnieder; translated, Jeanine Herman], Lukas & Sternberg, New York, 2002
Debord, Guy and Wolman, Gil J,	Bereau of Public Secrets: A Users Guide to Detournment(1), Belgian Surrealist Journal’Les Levres Nues #8, 1956
Green, Charles	The Third Hand, UNSW, 2001
Hershman Leeson, Lynn	Clicking In: Hot Links to a Digital Culture, Bay Press, USA, 1996
Himanen, Pekka	The Hackers Ethic, Random House, USA, 2001
Kester, Grant H.,	Conversation Pieces, University of California Press, USA, 2004
William, Mitchell J.	e-topia, MIT Press, USA, 200

Journals and Magazines:

Anon,	Art-Look: a Report on the State of the Arts in Victoria, Bambra Press, Melbourne, 2006
Bishop, Claire	The Social Turn, Art Forum, NY, Feb 2006

Anon,	A Swarm of Angels, http://www.aswarmofangels.com/, Oct 2006
Burnham, Douglas	Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) Theory of Aesthetics and Teleology (The Critique of Judgment), http://www.iep.utm.edu/k/kantaest.htm/, Oct 2006
Bruns, Axel	The Institute of Distributed Creativity, http://distributedcreativity.org/, Oct 2006
Gibson, Alex	Polyopticon.org, http://www.polyopticon.org/, Oct 2006
Mattes, Eva & Mattes, Franco	0100101110101101.org, http://0100101110101101.org/, Oct 2006
Saminejad, Mojtaba	'Anyone Can Edit': Understanding the Produser - Guest Lecture at SUNY, Buffalo / NewSchool, NYC / BrownUniv., http://snurb.info/index.php?q=node/286/, Oct 20

 

Appendix Fig #1: Polyopticon.org