The first is the 10,000 cents project (http://www.tenthousandcents.com) in which the art (in this case a $100 bill) was created by an anonymous network of workers using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service. I thought this was a fascinating art project as it hilighted both the potential power and pitfalls of living in a networked world where we each contribute a small piece to something to create something larger. For me, the pitfall that this work illustrates is that, if each of us (represented by each anonymous Turk worker) are contributing to the network in the forms of comments, blog posts, likes, retweets – all those social signals and data points we create as part of our digital footprint that are being collected by others – then we are ultimately contributing to the capitalist creation of wealth for someone else (represented by the finished product – a $100 bill) AND that we are doing so without even knowing that we are doing it. To me, this is how Facebook, Google, et al work. So, I see this a a not too subtle metaphor for how wealth creation happens in the contemporary media ecology.

The second example is the Kutiman Thru You video ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tprMEs-zfQA) which is made up of found YouTube videos that are remixed to create something new – a shining example of the type of world we live in and something that would have been very difficult to achieve before. No deeper analysis of that one, other than it is a cool illustration of art created as part of being a 21st century networked interbeing . Which might be considered an emerging art form that I get really jazzed about – networked art, perhaps?

- you likley already heard about JR and the face2face project through his (IMO well-deserved) TED prize. But it was a follow-on to the original face2face project that really blew me away. I can only find this one image of the project, but in essence, when he took the idea of the original project to a village in Kenya, they said “great, we like the idea, but what we REALLY need are roofs for our homes” and so he produced the large posters in a format that could be used as roofing material.

- the other example is from TV, of all places. But an art form is for me more than simply the end product, and it was the way in which David Simon approached “Treme” that blew me away. Instead of this simply being a show “about” post-Katrina reconstruction, it was a show “as” post-Katrina reconstruction – he made a huge effort to track down and employee local musicians who had been displaced and put out of work by the disaster, and help them re-establish their careers (and indeed just have a livelihood) by featuring them on the show.

For my own purposes, I am trying to think through how some of the aspects of these approaches that appeal to me can play out online; what “forms” can respect the local, the individual, challenge the creator/viewer divide but not be solely critique. Ze Frank regularly provides inspiration in this regard. And possibly hints at part of the answer – that “my” effort needn’t be so couched in the myth of artist as lone actor, individual genius, but instead reflect a 21st century networked interbeing