Collaboration is more common than not in New Media Art. This may be because the technology is complex and wide-ranging, and people tend to concentrate on specific areas of expertise. It may also be because the web was founded, and still maintains a strong commitment to the culture of open source--as we were examining last week. Information sharing is the core principle that the web was founded upon. Despite corporate attempts to carve out exclusive areas of the web (read as "Microsoft") it remains a democratic institution, where no one data stream has precedence over another. The web, with its roots in open-source culture, has many tools that foster and facilitate collaboration: email, chat (with or without video), teleconferencing (such as Skype), social networking, shared documents (such as googledocs), etc.
During lab time today, we will split up into collaborative teams of three to four people each. Meet with your collaborative team and decide upon a collaborative project that you can finish between now and March 31. Think of this as a week project, although Spring Break will occur in the middle of it and since I do not like to assign projects that are due the day you return, the due date will be the week after you get back from Spring Break. Be reasonable about expectations and try to choose a project that will fit within this two-week timescale (allowing yourself spring break time off). Today during class, you should brainstorm and document a project idea with your collaborative group. Divide the work up between the members of your group, considering each of your collaborators' strengths and weaknesses, and giving each member of the group a different aspect of the project to work on. Before you leave class, establish a working method: decide upon how you will communicate and how you will transfer information to one other during the week (Steve has set up a public directory "Virtual_Objects_Project" to use for this purpose). Use any available method to accomplish this that works (chat, skype teleconference, email, face-to-face). If one piece of the project relies upon another to be done, establish an agreed-to time schedule (identify the "critical path"). If you as a collaborator have agreed to provide a part of the project by a given time, stick to this schedule. The whole collaboration succeeds or fails on the strength of contribution from each of its individual members.
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David Rokeby Silicon Remembers Carbon
David Rokeby Artist's site
Ken Feingold Recent Works
John Klima on "We Make Money Not Art" site