Confirmation Paper.doc

LOKA 2.0

Legend of King Arthur 2.0 was part of an exhibition called “Participation” that happened at Falmouth Poly Arts Centre in October 2007 and it ran for 5 days. The idea was to explore what structures are needed to facilitate collaborative filmmaking.

But first lets have a look at how ants solve a problem:



The ants as a swarm encounter a lake. So how do they make the decision to cross it? Wouldn’t it be easier to try and walk around it? I suppose the underlying question behind my project and indeed the whole of my research is this: What does it take to get human beings to be able to cooperate like this?

Wikipedia defines collaboration as the following:

“Collaboration is a structured, recursive process where two or more people work together toward a common goal - typically an intellectual endeavour that is creative in nature - by sharing knowledge, learning and building consensus. Collaboration does not require leadership and can sometimes bring better results through decentralization and egalitarianism.”

Legend of King Arthur 2.0 (www.swarmtv.org/website.asp?page=Legend of King Arthur 2.0)

What I wanted to do in this exhibition was to try and build an open non-hierarchical system that would enable volunteers to collaborate in filmmaking. I called it “Legend of King Arthur 2.0” because the legend has many Cornish associations and the extra “2.0” referred to the fact that I was going to be using Web 2.0 technologies. It also implied that I was interested in rewriting the legend a little bit.

“Legend of King Arthur 2.0”, happened at website www.swarmtv.org, where visitors are encouraged to edit the site in either content or form without having to use a password. The interface is as open as possible. There is no password system, which perhaps is an issue we can discuss later. But the website also has a drag and drop interface, which I developed from the code of a German programmer called Walter Zorn (www.walterzorn.com), where elements on the screen can be moved around the screen. I linked this facility to a database and made them persist for the next visitor to the site. Editing is as easy as double-clicking on screen either to create a new media element or to change something that is already there.

Now, one objection I have with HTML is, how linear and hierarchical it is as the basic building block of such a rhizomatic system like the Internet - particularly with layout. CSS goes a long way in solving this, but if you’ve ever tried to change the positioning of something within a table for example you will know what I mean. So Walter Zorn’s approach is a great relief to me as it provides a messy but much more organic way of dealing with information.

My exhibit in the exhibition, then, was a projection of the website and the facility for people to interact with the website in the gallery. At the same time, they could equally well interact through any computer linked to the Internet. I stayed by the projection in the gallery throughout the whole exhibition and chatted to people about filmmaking and if they showed an interest I tried to persuade them to do something towards the project.

I set people a filmmaking task for the project each day and people could buy into that if they wanted to.

(www.swarmtv.org/website.asp?page=Statistics)

Here’s what happened over the week of the exhibition:
• the website had over 8,000 hits
• 3250 editing interactions took place on the site
• There were over 80 email communications to the project including ones from London, Ireland, the U.S & Australia

The project had clearly generated enough interest for us to begin to look at the kinds of interactions that take place within a collaborative filmmaking environment.

First of all, lets look at the generosity of people who participated. If you remember the clip about the ants, some of those ants were certainly generous in their part of building the bridge. In the project then I also found that people were incredibly generous.
• 8 different Ideas were posted
• 4 different Treatments were outlined
• A 1000 word monologue was specifically written for it (e.g. www.swarmtv.org/website.asp?page=Stories)
• 14 new images were uploaded (e.g. www.swarmtv.org/website.asp?page=Myths)
• 9 films were made specifically for this project (www.swarmtv.org/website.asp?page=Movie Clips)

There were also a number of people who didn’t know what to submit to the project but said that they would definitely use their skills and abilities towards the project if I asked them specifically for something. There was a Graphic Designer, an Animator and a Musician who all left me their email addresses if I needed them. I think if I had more time for the project I would have followed them up but as it was only a five day project, I didn’t.

Secondly, I am also very interested in the idea of authorship. Someone once said to me about my research that it’s all very well ants doing these amazing things, but human beings have ego. I think there’s a lot in this. Filmmaker Robert Bresson never liked using professional actors because he said that their egos always got in the way of the storytelling. In the project, then,

(www.swarmtv.org/website.asp?page=Contributors)

people were able to sign their contribution, (and incidentally I normally signed mine in an effort to set an example), but most people didn’t and when they did, it was only with their first names - so they were still pretty anonymous. So the idea of authorship, surprisingly, was not very strong at all. From the information that people did give me, either by email or by meeting up with them, I normally could work out who had done what and so I started a contributions page and listed people’s names who I knew would be happy to be listed in full. However, I think during the whole project only one other person edited the list of names there.

Thirdly, I’m interested in evidence of de-centralized activity. If you think back to the ant bridge that I showed earlier, you can easily see that there is no way that this kind of activity could be centralized. No one ant could possibly be in charge of this kind of project because they are tiny compared to the whole construction. I initialized the project and I set a task for people to buy into if they wanted and of course I tended the website (I say ‘tended’ because I’ve found that looking after this kind of website is very much like growing a Bonzai tree. You have to look after it in order to encourage it to grow healthily). But, LoKA 2.0 was in an exhibition called ‘Participation’ and although I set things going, I was particularly looking for evidence of other people doing things on their own initiative - things that might happen unexpectedly.

Unfortunately, not a lot of this happened. A number of people said to me after the event that they had really wanted to do something but they didn’t really know what was appropriate. Quite a few people did things in response to MY encouragement, for instance I set a task for the project each day and people generally contributed in response. I also ran a 1 hour workshop on the 4th day where I invited the public to make a film in an hour. This worked well and it is something that I will try and do more of when I do this kind of event again. However, people generally related to me as the centre of the hub of relationships, presumably because I was the artist who set the project up. But they could just as easily have related to other people on the site who had been involved in the project. I think people are generally too nice, perhaps? It is certainly something I need to try and build into similar projects.

(www.swarmtv.org/website.asp?page=Make a film in an hour)

The best example of de-centralized activity was when two people, who came along to the Film-in-an-hour workshop that I held, decided to work together to make a film based loosely on the 1000 word monologue they found on the website. They took various phrases out of the monologue at random and created a very abstract video by filming whatever was in the room at the time. That clip, incidentally, has since been shown at two artfilm venues since the exhibition.

The final thing that I found quite interesting was whether anything happened that could be termed ‘destructiveness’ in any way. I could easily have used some kind of password security to prevent this, but I felt it was really important to try and be as open as possible. I think more ideas come out that way. I’ve been involved with developing websites commercially for about ten years now and most people are very concerned about the security of their websites. I’ve implemented all kinds of security for them, but I wonder whether it really is as big an issue as people feel. First of all, by having a login facility you immediately set up a ‘them’ and ‘us’ situation. You create, in effect, different levels of people, which is something I am certainly trying to avoid in this project.

Secondly, I think you need to think a little about the motivation of people who try to disrupt websites. Why do they want to do it? Maybe it’s the same sense of reasoning that would make someone want to climb Everest or graffiti over a train carriage – maybe it’s just a challenge! If you make something more of a challenge, then it simply becomes more of an achievement for someone if they succeed.

I also like the idea of self-moderation. If everyone has access to editing, then if they come across something that they find offensive, then all they need to do is to edit it off the page.

Some people get nervous about writing something that someone else could distort, but everything that gets edited on the website also gets stored in the database, so that even if it doesn’t appear as the current version of the webpage, it doesn’t take much to be able to restore it back to any previous version.

One of the main reasons that I think my security model is pretty robust, though, is that people have access to edit individual elements on a page, but they can’t wipe out everyone’s contributions without going to a lot of trouble (and again, if they did, I can always restore it).

But enough theory, what actually happened in the project? Well, very little in terms of destructiveness. The interface didn’t work at times which I was concerned about but that is down to my programming. There were three incidents, however, relating to security that occurred which are worth mentioning.

First of all, you can get very paranoid deliberately having an open approach, but I noticed that pages I had deleted before the project were suddenly reappearing again although they were blank. They were really behaving like ghosts, after all I’d taken them completely out of the database but there they are again! I now think, what must be happening is that search engine robots are searching for pages on the website that think exist and by searching for a particular page it actually creates it!

Secondly, people have created page names that are links to other websites. I think this is some kind of commercial angle in that those websites get listed higher up search engine listings. But I didn’t mind this much, as it didn’t interfere with the project at all.

Lastly, and probably the most deliberate provocation (although I’ve only just noticed that it even occurred so it can’t have been that much of a disruption), was a cartoon that was uploaded on the home page in November about a month after the end of the exhibition. It portrays a woman on a tube with a niqab, thinking the words: “Kafirs, you’re time will come.” (A Kafir, by the way, is someone who doesn’t believe in Islam). It was visible on the site for about two hours before it disappeared again. I put put on the ideas page instead, because after all there is a strong link between the Christian knights of the round table and the crusades perhaps?

So to go back to my question then, What does it take to get human beings to co-operate – I would say that it takes a lot of generosity on behalf of the participants; Ego could well be an issue; I think De-centralized activity is a must and I guess you don’t want to come across too much destructive behaviour.

On the whole, though, the project was a great success. It got mentioned on the artcornwall.org website, a European academic journal website called www.freesideeurope.com and I also was interviewed by journalist, Megan Wakefield, who has written for the Artist Newsletter magazine.

Two of the video clips got shown at the PZ Gallery in Penzance the weekend following the project.

I want to conclude with a quote from an email that someone sent me as feedback – who incidentally hadn’t participated in the project at all:

“To be honest, Art house films leave me cold & I rarely get them ... Your project however, has made me think about film again. I have been particularly struck by the story telling aspect & subsequent evolution. Most film directors control the experience of the audience, aiming to evoke emotion, laughter, etc at a given point. They often reiterate the instruction with other devices to make sure we get it, resulting in its worst form, in canned laughter! The result of this is controlled, leaving very little room for audience engagement. That has been my expectation of film, my accepted transaction between film maker & myself. Your project showed me otherwise.”