Crowdsourced Art: Activating Creative Publics
Crowdsourced art is an increasingly popular practice where artists use the Internet as a participatory platform to directly engage the public in the co-creation of art. In view of its reliance on the artistic contribution of a large pool of geographically dispersed participants, this type of art raises important questions about notions of collective creativity, authorship, collaboration, and the shifting structure of artistic production in the digital environment. The long-standing notion of art as the individual expression of one person’s vision and artistic sensibility is questioned within the inclusive, participatory modus operandi of crowdsourced art. In addition to introducing a useful typology for online practices of crowdsourced creativity, my presentation will explore the aesthetic, cultural and technological implications of crowdsourced art, and discuss the different levels of public participation (passive, executory, and structural) that such projects enable.
Presenters
Ioana Literat
PhD Candidate & Communication Researcher
USC Annenberg School for Communication
Ioana Literat is a PhD student and new media researcher at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California. Her research—which currently centres on crowdsourced art—examines participatory practices of collective creativity, as mediated by digital technologies. She has recently been awarded the Phi Kappa Phi Award for her research on crowdsourced art, and her work has been published in The International Journal of Communication, Communication Theory, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, and Postmodern Culture, among others. Ioana's background is in media literacy and digital storytelling; she has taught filmmaking and social justice curricula to children in the Dominican Republic, Romania, Uruguay and India.