Project #8: Crowdsourcing

Part 1: three projects to participate in:


The Johnny Cash Project: http://www.thejohnnycashproject.com/

Young Me Now Me: http://www.zefrank.com/youngmenowme/

and I created a proposal for the iraqimemorial.org project: http://www.iraqimemorial.org

The Johnny Cash Project 
For The Johnny Cash Project I created three drawings for the project. I watched the video several times and looked at a number of drawings before deciding which scenes I was most interested in drawing. I decided to do three very different scenes including one of Johnny's face. He had a very expressive face and I wanted to capture that. I was also interested in experimenting with the in-browser tool provided to draw the scenes with, so for each of them I chose different brushes and went for a different feel in each one:

http://www.thejohnnycashproject.com/#/explore/TopRated/f3405e389a2dc51d390fb161e9fcdb57942c1ab8

http://www.thejohnnycashproject.com/#/explore/TopRated/a7b1398e318fa4d3ca2d6832327b6f3059c33d51

http://www.thejohnnycashproject.com/#/explore/TopRated/6a3221b6eebed9e4ddc19daab3830203ea015167

I enjoyed contributing to this project as it had a number of ways to interact- from drawing frames, to playing back your drawing sessions, to watching the video and it's various incarnations- it's really an interesting art experience with a lot of variations and options to try. In the future- I would add more to this project- building off the frames I already submitted and choosing to add additional frames near the frames I already did to be able to see more of an impact when viewing the video. 


Young Me Now Me
For the Young Me Now Me project, I selected a photograph from when I was almost 4 years old. In the photograph I'm sitting in the doorway to the house I grew up in, in Jefferson, MA with my dog Tammy next to me. The red color in the photograph is interesting as well- particularly on the door, as the door to my current home is also a shade of red.


As a kid I loved animals and still do which is why I chose this picture. I think my pose and my dog's pose in the photograph are comical and I thought it would be a fun photo to retake all these years later. In recreating the photograph, I enlisted my greyhound Ashby and we sat in the doorway to my house. 

young me 

now me

**updated to add that I got a response for the Young Me/Now Me project:

iraqimemorial.org
For the iraqimemorial.org project, I struggled in deciding what kind of memorial to create. Part of me felt really uncomfortable with creating a memorial because of all kinds of fears- I was afraid to be disrespectful, afraid I would come off insincere, and afraid I would trivialize something that was very serious and important. I kept feeling a guilt inside me about how much I/we take for granted having a relatively peaceful every day life. As I went through many many iterations of memorials- none of them feeling good enough- a question kept nagging at me, "how do you create a memorial for Iraqi civilians, when you feel guilt for having contributed to their deaths, even if indirectly?" 

We are not absolved or as disconnected from Iraqi civilian deaths as we may think we are. As citizens of humanity, and particularly as citizens of the United States, we are all responsible for the deaths of the men, women, and children of Iraq. No one is free of this burden- we all bear witness. 

Part installation, part performance, in this space, I invite participants to write with me letters of condolence, drawings, poems, whatever they wish to respectfully communicate in remembrance of the Iraqi dead and to the loved ones left behind. In order to participate, contributors must dirty their hands with loose charcoal first and use only the materials provided: white paper, white envelopes, and black drawing charcoal.

The submissions will be gathered and each card and envelope will be hung together along the wall in a gallery space. In communicating, participants will have marked themselves and the white surface of the table they work on- this will provide an interesting additional observation: it will be clear to see those who participate and those who do not.

Part 2: Crowdsourcing art project 
For my crowdsourcing art project, I created a website where contributors can participate in creating artwork and illustrations for the Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft, the ebook created/edited by Cthulhu Chick. Participants are encouraged to use whatever medium they like and can submit as many times as they like. The works are divided by chapter or story and further broken out by sections within each story to maximize the visual impact of the artwork in conjunction with the text. The works would be able to be viewed in 3 ways: as the linear story/by chapter, by tags that are created as the artwork is uploaded, and by randomized gallery. The artwork would accompany the text so it would be like reading an online picture book version of H.P. Lovecraft stories.

The works of H.P. Lovecraft are available via the public domain and offer a variety of interesting and haunting imagery within the text. This is an opportunity for a group to develop artwork to accompany the text and showcase these images with the text online. For those that don't want to contribute- they can still enjoy reading the stories and experiencing the artwork. This collaboration would be somewhat curated in that artwork would go through an approval process to aim for a higher level of work that creates the most visual interest and illustrates the text in interesting ways.


Here is a mockup of the tag cloud. When a tag is selected, the artwork associated with the selected tag will display as a small portfolio for users to select from.

Here is an example of roughly it would look like when one tag is selected. All of the images associated with that tag would appear in thumbnails. From here a user could select a thumbnail to see the full image and the text within the story.

and the following is an example excerpt of a page illustrated from the book:

I would probably put a link to other versions of the image for people to click on so that many people could illustrate an excerpt.