Embrace the Swarm - Exploring Collaborative Authorship

Embrace the swarm is a long-term research project that was initiated by the University of Art and Industrial Design in Linz, Austria and is being carried on in the form of courses held in cooperation with the Ars Electronica Center / FutureLab.

Embrace the Swarm is conceptually oriented on strategies of creative cooperation, which means that sharing ideas and designs with others, discussing and evaluating them with respect to their qualities, and working on further developing contributions made by others are fundamental elements of the project. The World Wide Web serves as a means of enabling individuals at a variety of locations to cooperate with one another. In other words, the undertaking calls into question both traditional educational concepts in the sense of a master-student relationship as well as the belief that high-quality creative work can result only from one individual working alone. Thus, the project’s primary objective is to ascertain:

a) the extent to which computer networks like the World Wide Web are currently able to open up completely new models of collaboration in the fields of art and design;

b) whether there are realistic alternatives to conventional teaching methods in the artistic field, and

c) whether the quality of the output can match—or even surpass—the results achieved by individual authors.

The results of the project as well as a documentation of the collaborative working process were presented at Ars Electronica Festival 2002.

Contributing People:
Linz:
Nikolaus Diemannsberger, Peter Freudling, Gerhard Funk, Helmut Höllerl, Joachim Koll, Margit Nobis, Tina Reisinger, Regina Raml, Michael Shamiyeh, Bettina Steinmaurer, Heike Nösslböck, Vinzenz Naderer, Clemens Mock, Dietmar Offenhuber, Simon Wilhelm
London:
Michael Breidenbrücker, Karel Dudesek, Julieta Leveratto, Zoe Papadopoulou, Chan Ming Yee Amy, Martine Hermsen, Jon Cambeul, Steven Cullen, Wai-Sang Damon Yau, Nadia Kahn

Links:

Embrace the Swarm

Ars Electronica Center
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