Wikipedia Art

Wikipedia Art is a project in self-realization. The idea is for folks to collaboratively work on a Wikipedia webpage about the project... According to Wikipedia's standards, an encyclopedia entry must be notable and backed by third party sources. And, based on that, the first version of the Wikipedia Art wikipedia page has been deleted.

But for Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern, who conceived of this project, that's just a start. If a big enough stink is made (if enough people blog, write about the project, and continue to add it to Wikipedia), doesn't it become notable enough to merit a Wikipedia entry?

On the Wikipedia Art project page Kildall & Stern wrote:

Wikipedia Art is art composed on Wikipedia, and thus art that anyone can edit. Since the work itself manifests as a conventional Wikipedia page, would-be art editors are required to follow Wikipedia's enforced standards of quality and verifiability; any changes to the art must be published on, and cited from, 'credible' external sources: interviews, blogs, or articles in 'trustworthy' media institutions, which birth and then slowly transform what the work is and does and means simply through their writing and talking about it. Wikipedia Art may start as an intervention, turn into an object, die and be resurrected, etc, through a creative pattern / feedback loop of publish-cite-transform that we call "performative citations." Wikipedia Art MUST BE written about extensively both on- and off-line. This serves the dual purpose of verifying the work - which is considered controversial by those in the Wikipedia community, and occasionally removed from the site - as well as transforming it over time. WE INVITE YOU TO DO SO!

In a Rhizome discussion of the project, MTAA noted:

But I can sympathize with the Wikipedians. If these Wikipedia art interventions became a popular game it would become vandalism (the resources to clean them up would become burdensome to the volunteers). But just this one is fun.

[via Networked Performance]

Complexification

Complexification is an interesting (and well designed) site that I found via Make Magazine's blog. It is a gallery of generative artworks done in the Processing programming language by Jerry Tarbell. If you check it out, be sure you not only view the static images but also launch the applets so that you can trigger Tarbell's generative algorithms and see new artworks being formed.

A thought that has been in the back of my head lately is how New Media art often seems to be automatically considered Contemporary. But that isn't always the case... for example, generative art (such Tarbell's) is often focused on formal aesthetics in a way that I'd characterize as Modern.

I suppose the temporal names all these art categories have (new, contemporary, modern) does nothing to help clarify... Many, many people (including those who should know better) seem to think that Contemporary refers to a time period (i.e., art being made today is Contemporary because it is contemporary). But that's not really any more true than all art today is Modern because we're modern. Post-Modernism seems to confound as well... more than once it's been argued to me that there can never be another art movement because everything that comes after Modernism will be post-modern (I usually counter by pointing out by the same logic we're all making Post-Impressionist art). And of course the cherry on top is the Pre-Raphaelites who were founded 300 years after Raphael's death.

Incidentally, the Wikipedia currently has a particular bad definition of Contemporary Art. I spent a week or two discussing it with the folks who edit the entry... I managed to convince them to mention the idea that Contemporary doesn't not simply mean "art made today." But overall, the entry tries to describe the movement as a moment in time. For example:

The institutions of art have been criticised for regulating what is designated as contemporary art. Outsider art, for instance, is literally contemporary art, in that it is produced in the present day.

The idea of outsider art always makes me a bit queasy. I find the category patronizing and overly focused on the human-interest aspect of the artists' lives (i.e., the artist is insane, has a low IQ, a murderer, etc.). Oddly, while I agree most "Outsider Art" isn't Contemporary Art (because the intention behind the art isn't really Contemporary), faux-Outsider Art (which is Contemporary) was a fad for a few years recently. If this seems wrong-headed, consider this... a child's scrawling might be reminiscent of of Picasso or a Pollock, but that doesn't mean the child is a Modern artist (because the child isn't trying to address Modern concerns).

Desk Set

Back in the early 90s I saw Desk Set, a Spencer Tracy/Katherine Hepburn movie, on TV. The story is about a computer expert (Tracy) who is setting up a system for storing a TV network's research department's archives. I thought the representation of computers was ridiculous.

I happened to see the movie on TV again last year, and immediately began thinking (or perhaps, just simply replaying my earlier thoughts) about the unrealism of the movie's computers. The idea that people could simply type an English phrase (e.g., "What is the annual rainfall in the Sahara?") into a computer and get an answer is just crazy! While watching the movie I brought up the IMDB to look up facts about the movie... and I did a Wikipedia search on ENIAC (the computer that the movie's EMERAC seems to be spoofing).

And suddenly I realized that technology has caught up to the movie's speculative fiction... today we can simply type a question into our computer and have it bring up the answer. (And, incidentally, the annual rainfall in the Sahara is below 25mm). The movie suddenly seemed to have a fairly sophisticated idea of computers: garbage in/garbage out (i.e., if given faulty data, the computer will return faulty data), programming bugs, poorly worded questions giving undesired answers, etc.

I remember wondering about all sorts of things as a kid and knowing that I'd never know the answer--the barrier to researching the information was simply to great for matters of idle and passing curiosity. The internet has changed that, and these days I consult the Wikipedia at the slightest impetus.

In the early world wide web days (perhaps 1995?), there was a guy who kept a log of what he ate for lunch every day... it was the first thing I saw that resembled a blog and seemed quite striking (for it mundaneness & humanity) at the time.

In the spirit of that lunch diary, here is what I looked up on Wikipedia in the last seven days (a fair percentage of these entries represent the research for the book chapter I'm writing on randomness, and not idle curiosity):

ENIAC
Bitter Sweet Symphony
Cranberries
Cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generator
Democratic Party, United States presidential primaries
Arsenio Hall
The Arsenio Hall Show
Talk show
Dick Cavett
FLOPS
Radioactive decay
Random seed
Hardware random number generator
Pseudo random number generator
Jackson Pollack
Pecan
Hickory
Iraq
A Year with Swollen Appendices
Lagniappe
Meret Oppenheim
Linear congruential generator
Pseudorandom number generator
Random number generator
Zinc toxity
Prejudice
Omega-3 fatty acid

[citation needed]

Citation needed is a link added to Wikipedia articles when someone thinks a particular statement needs a third party source to back it up (or someone just wants to imply a statement is false).

Matt at biphenyl.org created citation needed stickers to add to posters that make dubious claims. Read about it here.

Update: PO8 pointed out that this idea was borrowed from xkcd