By Caroline Goralczyk

Roel Wouters - 'Directing the Audience: What Happens When Media Producers and Consumers Merge?' Photo by Anne Helmond.

In his presentation on online video art and the design of fluid digital environments, graphic designer and project director Roel Wouters introduced the audience to interactive projects which include dynamic media such as web video and animation to install crowdsourced performances. With his collegues Luna Maurer, Jonathan Puckey and Edo Paulus he has published the Conditional Design Manifesto, which is based on the work of his collective called Conditional Design and emphasizes the idea of following processes in the digital realm rather than its products.

In their work, Wouters and his fellow group of designers focus on the increasing blur between consumers and producers which comes about as a result of web technology enabling user participation in the creation of online video art. Roel Wouters presented two projects that are based on users taking part in the installation of a video, one based on people taking pictures of themselves with a webcam, prior given the instruction to resemble a particular frame and one based on creating a video, resembling a particular scene or act.  As if to say “If I would be the director, you would be my actors”, these projects are based on collaborative story-telling in creating online video art which participants can share with their friends online.

“It is surprising how these projects result in really beautiful photography. People are not self-conscious when resembling the frame which they are given and that is why they appear very natural” stated Wouters when presenting the two projects “One frame of fame” and “Now Take a Bow” to the audience. His collective Conditional Design was recently involved in the 5days off festival in Amsterdam with a project based on an iPhone application which Routers calls a ‘social photo toy’, resembling ‘the ultimate amateur photo’, which is people taking pictures of themselves in front of a mirror using flash.

Here is an illustration of the ‘One frame of fame’ project:

by Carlos García Moreno-Torres

Since its birth in the early 20th century, cinema has probably caused a more visibly active reaction from audiences than any other form of art (fan conventions, discussions, reviews, seminars, remakes, parodies…). This bounty of responses is most likely due to cinema’s proximity to popular culture (its far-reaching stretch across a vast and diverse public), and its socializing character. Like many other media, participation in the creation, or more accurately re-creation, of content has increased drastically in the last few years; growth doubtlessly due to the omnipresent Web 2.0, cloud culture, internet society, or any other aspect of the phenomenon infiltrating the developed world today with smartphones, laptops, tablets and millions of users attached to them 24/7 creating and uploading content, often in collaborative or crowd-sourced ways.

If we look at fan films, a practice consisting of shooting your own version of a movie, TV show, or book etc., (with different productions having varying grades of fidelity in comparison to the original), we realize that they have in fact existed for many years. The first fan film, according to Wikipedia, dates back to 1926, even when recording technologies were far from accessible to the public at large. That being said, it seems natural that in this current moment, when internet trends continuously tell us that we’re somehow back in the era of craftsmanship, when everybody can be a photographer, a writer or a cinematographer, we are taking this trend seriously, and remaking and versioning the most significant pieces of modern culture in very personal ways.

Fan film initiatives illustrate the creative power of the millions of users connected to the internet every minute of every day, with the good news being that crowd-sourcing initiatives are growing up, maturing, and getting ready to leave the nest of the minority of intensive users to reach a larger public. There are more and more examples that prove that collaborative practices are not just an idea born as a logical consequence of this technological and cultural momentum, but a reality that is already making an impact in popular culture.

It’s significant that two really closed environments like TV and the Hollywood industries are now recognizing the value and interest of these initiatives. By the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences awarding a crowd-sourced and code-directed Star Wars fan film mash up project with an Emmy, and LucasArts (the copyright holders to Star Wars) supportively getting in contact with the “Star Wars Uncut” initiators, shows that these kinds of practices are here to stay. Interestingly, similar to cinema, there are both different genres, styles and breeds of crowd-sourced fan film video projects, as we find projects like the mentioned award winning “Star Wars Uncut” which draws from popular culture, but also others related to a more classical cinema sphere, like Perry Bard’s “Man with a Movie Camera”, a global remake of Vertov’s 1929 film.

Read the original article from the New York Times about the Emmy winning project to learn more about this Star Wars based project that opened industry doors to this new collaborative practices: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/28/arts/television/28uncut.html?_r=2&scp=1&sq=an%20emmy%20for%20rebuilding%20a%20galaxy&st=cse