generation/mutation: from crowdsourced to ai-sourced new media art

generation/mutation: from crowdsourced to ai-sourced new media art

by Holger ‘H-Ray’ Heine

Launched in the early days of the Internet, before Google or Facebook or iPhones, the new media work generation/mutation explores the possibilities of collaborative art production and distribution afforded by the evolution of digital technologies

Based on the idea of crowdsourcing creative work online, years before the expression “crowdsourcing” was coined, generation/mutation received contributions from an international group of new media artists. During its first two years, the project’s online exhibition attracted more than 2.5 million visitors and has remained one of the most iconic collaborative new media artworks online.

Over time, generation/mutation evolved from an online exhibition showing crowd-sourced contributions created by human artists to the inclusion of machine-made contributions found on Google Street View, to completely ai-generated contributions, generated by neural style transfer (NST) algorithms.

As a creative exploration, generation/mutation is a deeply philosophical work. Not in the traditional form of a book or academic journal paper, but in the form of a collaborative and creative meditation on the nature of artistic practices at the onset of the twenty-first century, an articulation of new methods of artistic collaboration in an age of global digital networks.

Product Details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Topos Media Books (December 22, 2020)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 160 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 6976230750
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1943354030