art by everyone

art by everyone is temporarily down, as APIs have changed and I have not had time to update the code. e-mail me if you'd like to see it back.

"art by everyone" is a framework for users to create meaningful works from existing public material. The piece itself stems from my inherent desire to bridge the gap between low art and high art. It allows anybody to create works that can be held on high in the public eye, with only a few clicks on the user’s end.

In addition, this was presented at the Myhren Gallery at the University of Denver for the 2008 BFA/MFA Exhibition.

When I approached the project, there were a lot of concepts flying around, namely in terms of authorship. On the surface level, the work indicates that there is no author per-se—classically, the onus of the author has been on the person doing the work. In each art by everyone piece, there are a fair amount of people doing the work: I wrote the code, but the Processing dev-team provided the framework. The content is pulled from people taking photos on flickr and writing in blogs, but the user provided the search term.

Being a graphic designer in an academic environment, these issues have been raised time and time again: we are authors, but we almost exclusively use (or adapt to our needs) others’ work. We create designs in privatized programs, using typefaces designed by others, tuning in to aesthetics that have been built over time by everyone. There is nothing new under the sun, there is only remix. art by everyone, then, takes that concept to an extreme. The only original piece is the framework itself, but none of the results: the text is pulled from blogs, the photos from flickr, the colors from kuler, and the algorithms for combining them from my own library of aesthetic choices. I’ve always valued making myself relatively hidden in a work and allowing the work to speak for itself, but in this piece I’m instead drowned out by a cacophony of author’s voices.