NoTube Contest
http://notubecontest.com/
IOCOSE (IT)
2009 - ongoing
The Internet is full of garbage. We share everything, including thoughts that nobody will read, images and videos that nobody will look at. Yet, finding out a completely valueless content is still quite hard. The NoTube Contest allows you to apply with the most valueless video you found on YouTube. According to Iocose, “A good NoTubeContest's video makes it difficult to answer these three basic questions: Why has this video been produced? Why has this video been published? Who should be interested in watching this video?”
Why We Protest
http://www.whyweprotest.net/
Anonymous (global)
2006 - ongoing
Anonymous is the collective name shared by those who choose not to have any name. It came out of many platforms where people gathered to share anonymously their thoughts and contents, most notably 4chan. It is NOT an art project, even if what they do has been described as one of the best embodiments of Nicolas Bourriaud’s “relational aesthetics”. Why We Protest is the community platform where you can get in touch with them, follow their discussions, see what they think and why they do what they do. And maybe become one of them.
3frames
http://3fram.es/
Aaron Meyers (USA)
2011
3frames is a simple, evolving website that allows visitors to create and share animated .gifs using their webcam. As many other works in this selection, it is based on a very simple gesture that can be enacted and improved by everyone. Start your webcam, do anything, broadcast yourself and go viral!
Spirit Surfers
http://www.spiritsurfers.net/
Spirit Surfers (USA)
2008 - ongoing
Founded by Paul Slocum and Kevin Bewersdorf in 2008, Spirit Surfers is one of the first surfing clubs, group blogs in which a community of artists is involved in an ongoing dialogue, usually mediated by images. Contributors include a small number of invited artists. Most posts are separated into “boons” and “wakes”. According to Paddy Johnson, «the former are treasures brought back from a day of surfing the net, the latter images, text, or video telling us where the boons come from». But the vocabulary they developed along three years is so advanced now that any attempt to identify the “style” of a contributor, or to decode a sentence, may be a frustrating experience. You’d better enjoy it as the first explorers enjoyed hieroglyphics before decoding the Rosetta Stone.
Blind Mist
http://blindmist.com/
Jonathan Vingiano, Brad Troemel (USA)
2011
Blind Mist provides a chance to see a constantly revolving display of images organized at random. All images function as links to their place of origin and will eventually expire from public rotation. To be included in the rotation of images, add your own URLs to Blind Mist by entering them in the input at the top of the screen.
What’s more fascinating in Blind Mist is probably the fact that it turns the link into something as ephemeral as an eye blink. You forget to click on a link, and you loose it forever. You click on it, and you loose dozens of potentially interesting links while browsing the new tab you just opened up. But don’t complain: that’s the internet, babe!
River of the Net
http://riverofthe.net/
Ryan Trecartin, David Karp (USA)
2010 - ongoing
How to express ideas without using words? Make a short video (no longer than 10 seconds), associate it to three keywords and upload it anonymously. River of the Net is a flow of videos created by the users, and based on the logic of the semantic web: no interface, no authors, no buttons, no dates. Not just entertainment, River of the Net is also a research tool for audio-visual, collaborative contents based on the issues addressed by the tags.
Bicycle Built for 2,000
http://www.bicyclebuiltfortwothousand.com/
Aaron Koblin (USA) y Daniel Massey (MX)
2009
In the age of crowdsourcing, you may have the chance to get a job that allows you to participate, through a platform such as Amazon's Mechanical Turk, in a creative project, instead of a commercial one. Even without knowing it. That's the case with Bycicle Built for 2,000, a wink to the fist song ever synthesized by a computer, that Koblin and Massey composed using short voice clips provided by people from all over the world.
Bycicle Built for 2,000 is a poignant comment upon the ethos of the Web 2.0. When we share, are we netizens or exploited workers? Should YouTube or Facebook pay us, when we “broadcast ourselves”?
Touch My Body (Green Screen Version)
http://oliverlaric.com/touchmybody.htm
Oliver Laric (DE)
2008
What's a star out of the context that the cultural industry builds around her? Oliver Laric let internet users wonder it and propose alternative views on this subject by simply and freely altering an original product. Using the green screen technique so common in cinema and TV, Laric offered to the internet users a version of one of Mariah Carey's videoclips where everything but the main character has been deleted. In this web page, you can see how people filled the empty spaces, later publishing their own version of the video on YouTube.
Dump.fm
http://dump.fm/
Ryder Ripps, Scott Ostler, Tim Baker and Stefan Moore (USA)
2010 - ongoing
DUMP.FM is a website allowing pictures to be used for realtime communication and collaboration. Users can send image URLs (which display instantly in the chat), upload locally from their hard drive or post pics right from their webcam. Since its launch, contributors are involved in the ongoing development of a new vocabulary, consisting of static and animated images, appropriated or self produced contents, internet memes and webcam screenshots and whatever you can use to say something.
Paintfx.biz
http://paintfx.biz/
Rafman Jon, Ito Parker, Schippa Miqueas, Robayo Tabor, Juan Transue
2010 - ongoing
PAINT FX is a tumblr where the administrators share abstract “paintings” they created using in the most banal way the most common options (defaults) provided by image editing softwares. Though you can’t contribute to the flow, you can easily go home, open your favourite image editing program and start contributing to the digital painting avant-garde making your best to avoid a “signature style”. As PAINT FX said in an interview, “Styles are over. All hail the brand.”