Phantom Captain: Art and Crowdsourcing
apexart, NYC
Oct 18—Nov 25, 2006
Curated by Andrea Grover

Projects and participation by:
Jeff Howe, Peter Edmunds,
Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July,
Aaron Koblin, Davy Rothbart,
Allison Wiese

Phantom Captain explores creative collaboration that involves groups of individuals responding to “crowdsourcing” initiatives set forth by artists. Jeff Howe introduced the term crowdsourcing in his June 2006 Wired magazine article, “The Rise of Crowdsourcing,” to describe a new form of corporate outsourcing of labor to armies of amateurs. As the methodology behind websites like Wikipedia, Ebay, Flickr, Youtube, Blogger, etc., crowdsourcing is becoming common practice in business while its potential is also being harnessed by artists to create communal artworks.

Through assignments, collections, solicited submissions, and even the farming out of creative tasks like drawing and decision making, the artists in Phantom Captain create works of “distributed creativity,” employing 10-10,000, geographically dispersed, voluntary collaborators who collect, submit, vote, perform, or otherwise contribute to create discrete, multiple, and ongoing art works. The effect is an exploration of a crowd’s aptitude for creative consensus, rendering something akin to a portrait of contemporary collective unconscious. 

Pictured:

Harold Fletcher and Miranda July, Learning to Love You More, Assignment #20: Take a picture of strangers holding hands, 2005.

Aaron Koblin, The Sheep Market, 2006.

Peter Edmunds, Swarm Sketch, 2006.