Design Problem

Artists need to create. Ideally, they would like to have audiences for their creations, without whom, the feedback loop of the creative process would be incomplete. The audience members generate a spontaneous network amongst themselves through word of mouth, quite often sharing their experiences – if not creating the “buzz” so desired by publicists and marketers – which can move beyond the performance’s original time and place. In turn, audiences need to be able to “connect” with the works of the artist, whether it be a tangible, physical object, or an ephemeral, intangible performance. Ideally, the audience would like to feel that they’ve contributed to the artists’ creative process in some way, if only to indirectly provide the environment for the artist to create. In this respect, the audience’s traditional role as consumers of an experience has become blurred in the postmodern collapse of high and low culture. Equipped with new digital communication technologies – such as cell phones and cameras embedded with media capabilities – audience members can now act as de facto producers by acquiring and remixing content as never before.

This phenomenon and its inherent issues are best summed by a comment by Stanford Law professor and author of the recent book Free Culture (2004). Lawrence Lessig. In a recent Wired Magazine article regarding the chilling effect of intellectual property laws which restrict the innovation which takes place in ordinary cultural activities, Lessig offers the following view of the fans’ role in creation of contemporary music:

“The artist controls just part of the music-making process; the audience adds the rest. Fans' imagination makes it real. Their participation makes it live. "We are just troubadours," [Wilco’s Jeff] Tweedy told me. ‘The audience is our collaborator. We should be encouraging their collaboration, not treating them like thieves.’” (Lessig. Wired magazine)

As designers, we can look at “the music-making process” as reflective of the creative process as a whole. Furthermore, if we then culturally and historically situate this activity in the context of an artifact-mediated and networked environment, we can get a glimpse of the relevance of this artist-audience dynamic in today’s digital culture. We also get a glimpse of the rhetoric and the ideological positioning which inevitably lead into discussions – if not vehemently fought legal battles and political maneuverings – on the role of the audience in the authorship of a work . The goal of this paper is to anticipate potential design needs and solutions within this developing cultural discourse by producing a prototype that is situated within this context.

Contact

Please send email to joearthurshow "at" gmail.com.