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Juan Felipe Rincón, Arts and Sciences, Cornell University
The experience of artistic creation does not have to be limited to the individual effort of a single artist. Spatial and temporal separation, however, limit the degree to which artists can cooperate in the realization of a collective creation. The use of cooperative art as a thoroughly developed and representative medium of expressing a collective sensibility, or an individual's perception of a membership in such a collective entity, is hampered by the limits to interaction presented by distance.
With the increasing popularity and availability of the Internet, new ways of arriving at well- integrated collective expression are being developed, explored, and adapted. A computer network's ability to connect geographically-distant locations reduces the impact of spatial disassociation on collective artistry. Magnetic, optical and digital media make both synchronous and asynchronous cooperation possible in different ways--with images, texts, audio and video stored on high-capacity disks and tapes, access to and manipulation of an extensive collective enterprise is limited by the artists' technological savvy and the hardware's capacity, not by previous limitations such as staggered times of creativity or the physical size of an unmoveable canvas.
The technical possibilities offered by the World-Wide Web, coupled with more availability of high-speed connections capable of transferring high-resolution image files and large text-based files has opened new possibilities that different art students, professionals of graphical design, digital imagers and general dabblers are using for collaborative and creative enterprises. With this interest in electronic interaction as a form of enhancing or transforming artistic expression comes the question of access and communal definition. Not only is there interest in creating art, there is also a need for establishing the form of the artistic expression. The degree to which collaborators have freedom to manipulate, add and alter the existing parts of the communal creation is limited by the desire to protect the communal work. Artistic collaboration over a medium with such a popular user base as the Internet carries with it the need to maintain the integrity of the art form against possible vandalism while maintaining open access and ease of integration of new artists into the existing work. Different projects and groups have established different approaches to both these questions
[History and Projects]|[Paradigms of Electronic Cooperation]
This page created by Juan
Felipe Rincón. Copyright 1996 by Juan Felipe Rincón.
This page last edited May 1, 1996.