Response 1, Ippolito - Obelleiro

In his lecture, Jon Ippolito describes the current (in 2004) landscape of cultural produces, where he sees two extremely different species: the Media Giants and the Small Scale Producers. While obviously the cultural landscape is not as simple as he describes it, I find his classification quite accurate for the purpose of his talk.

Ippolito states, “Cheating is the pedagogy of the internet” to portray the cultural remix that happens (and he intends to increase) over the Internet due, among other things, to its original purpose and architecture: Internet was meant to share ideas and information, and was designed to be completely open, as all the html code was visible since the beginning.

While I agree with the main ideas presented on the lecture, I think they are quite far away for being actually true. Creative Commons represented a huge leap forward in terms of consumption licensing, but as Ippolito explains it is focused on consumption rather than in creation. He presents “The Pool”, which intends to shift the focus to the creation, by creating a framework to develop collaboratively projects and ideas. Although I think it is a really interesting idea as a concept, I do not believe the situation will go beyond where it is nowadays (at least for some time). The reason why I say this is because brainstorming needs as much information and input as possible, and by using a tool like this, the creator is bound to the set of ideas/projects that are contained within the tool. Specially at the beginning, this tool would have a very small amount of information/ideas compared to what the creator would get from the Internet, and thus I believe it would never arrive to a point where it contained enough information/ideas to be more attractive than the “plain” internet as a collaborative creation tool.

Nevertheless, I think these efforts will lead to some feasible model of collaborative creation some time soon. For example, a project like “The Pool” that would actually grow automatically by gathering information from other websites. In a way, open source project’s websites (with their forums, wikis…etc) like Processing or Arduino are very good examples of collective creation, even though they lay the realm of tools, and not creative projects (although that could of course be arguable).

Finally I just wanted to mention a project I recently knew about. I’m sorry because all the project information is in Spanish. The project is called “La Wikipeli” (The Wikifilm), and it is a commercial project that aimed to create a collaborative film by setting a website where anybody could throw ideas and opinions about many decisions of the film. Afterwards, they were gathered and put into the film. The result can be watched here: http://www.lawikipeli.com/

Julio