Crowdsourcing Art

http://www.hitrecord.org/

Something that I thought of today in class but couldn’t really work into the conversation was this massive online collaboration project called ‘HitRecord’. It’s sort of like crowd sourcing art. Someone can post a poem that they wrote and they want to do something with but don’t know what, and other people can help out. They call it recycling, or remixing on the site. “It’s not stealing, it’s just how we work.” Is what the director of the project, Joseph Gordon Levitt, says when he’s describing this process. The idea is really powerful because so many people can have ideas but lack the skill or knowledge of how to transfer it to a different medium. Let’s say I have a poem and I post it here. Some one else can turn that into a short story. Someone else can write a song about it. Then they can do a drawing about it, or storyboard an animation to turn into a small movie. And if you want, you can turn it into a Tshirt!

It’s really interesting to me personally(I’m majoring in digital arts) but it’s interesting on a wider scale as well because so much time and effort goes into learning programs or the technicalities of a medium. I could have some really good ideas for a painting, but lack the ability to move the brush around on a canvas to make the shape I want. Or, I could want to animate an image of something I’ve drawn, but don’t have the time or know how to actually learn to do so. It’s sort of like the idea of bandwidth where someone can only invest so much time to working with one medium. I might like this tune I’m humming and the lyrics I put to it but I’m not going to have time to learn guitar. So it sets up people to help you out. Also if you’re someone looking for something to do because you’ve got some cool images and techniques you want to try out but no ideas to work with, this is a really good platform for that!

I think this is a very different application of the crowd sourcing and collaborative format that we’ve usually been discussing in terms of information. This is the same but with skills and ideas to create new things. I think it’s such a cool tool that never would have been possible without the internet and even if this company is small, the platform and the concept of the exchange of inspiration and skill has a lot of potential.


TL;DR  If you don't understand or want to learn more about it, here's the site. The opening video is short and informative.