Kevin McCourt Olvera

Two New Texts on Riverrun

Kevin McCourt Olvera — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 00:51:58 +0000

1. A brief description of concepts and processes.

2. A description of Riverrun’s collective creative function as an interdisciplinary project.

Objectives: Riverrun and Colourwall

Kevin McCourt Olvera — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 20:06:09 +0000

Riverrun and Colourwall: General Objectives

Both Riverrrun and Colourwall address how we are influenced by others; how we compete and collaborate, as we collectively create in a social network. They are conspicuously contemporary in this regard.

Our general objectives could be described as follows:

Present a series of experiments in collective creativity, involving public participation (or indeed the participation of professional writers or artists) and interaction.
Present the documentation of experiments preciously done in Spain.
Perform a scientific analysis of the results.
Publish theoretical texts with regard to the outcomes of the experiments and also their contemporary and historical context.
Give talks and workshops.
Promote collaborative creation and network building on a local, national and international scale, between individuals and institutions.
Create opportunities for intercultural communication and participation during the creative events.
Contribute to public understanding of collective creativity while providing a new creative tool which offers new cultural and artistic possibilities.

Riverrun and Colourwall: Specific Objectives

Perform various experiments, some on a one-off basis and others as a continuous basis.
Involve the exhibition visiting public as creative agents. These events, whether online or analogue, will unfold in real time. The online version will take the form of an immersive audio-visual installation.
Submit the data compiled to posterior scientific analysis. We are especially interested in the phenomenon of Collective Intelligence. The experiments will also permit us to explore relations between scientific techniques for understanding collective human behaviour and theoretical concepts related to shared and individual experience, sensation and perception.
Undertake a theoretical analysis of collective intelligence as a creative and artistic phenomenon. Concepts such as chance, randomness, noise and coherence, important as they are in both contemporary art and science, are also of interest to us.
Publish the results in high impact theoretical and scientific publications.
Arrange talks, workshops and debates of interest to artists, theorists, scientists and the public interested in creative practice.
Develop workshops and lectures specifically designed for students.
Promote cooperation and dialogue between individuals and institutions as local collaborating agents. For example, between creators and scientists in different countries, exhibition spaces, publishing houses etc.

Finally, we would like to emphasise the possibility of developing international projects between the UK and Spain in the future.

Riverrun and Colourwall: Publications

Publications produced will include a contextualisation of the project in scientific and artistic terms from a theoretical and historical perspective:

The scientific part will refer to studies of collective phenomena and complexity, with an analysis of the experiments conducted forming its starting point. The Physics of Complex Systems employs mathematical tools to describe emergent phenomena. Can such tools be applied to collective creativity? We will try to determine whether a phase transition occurs in the complexity of the stories and drawings generated.

The historical and theoretical part will refer to recent works in the field of art and new technologies and to earlier artistic movements whose methods involved collective creation, such as Surrealism and Fluxus.

Some articles will focus on the concept of collective intelligence as the basis for an “interdisciplinary movement” between art and science. Here we will also look at relevant empirical examples from both art and science.

Other works will focus on the experience of the experiments from the perspective of the participant, the visitor and the observer/reader, with a specific emphasis placed on the themes of interaction, authorship and coherence. This part will also refer to previous artistic and scientific experiments.

In each case above, the phenomenon of collective intelligence will form the central axis.

Action Plan: Riverrun and Colourwall

Kevin McCourt Olvera — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 19:19:14 +0000

action plan, methodology, update, exquisite corpse, colourwall, riverrun

Riverrun and Colourwall: Action plan

We plan to follow the following phases:

Phase 1:
A re-working or refinement of design and programming i.e. to produce the release version of each project. (The software for both beta versions is open source).

Having performed various public experiments we have identified the following problems with the Beta Versions of Riverrun and Colourwall:

Riverrun and Colourwall. The number of participants is fixed. This rigidity is problematic. People may leave unexpectedly, ruining the dynamic of the event. Others may find themselves having to queue in order to participate. The solution is a more fluid programming. Story /image should expand and contract should people enter or leave the story.

Usability on Riverrun seems fairly good. Participants find the interface quite easy to understand. By necessity the design needs to be simple, but perhaps improvements could still be made here. There is quite a lot here already which could act as a guide to the new programming and design process. Usability and the design look on Colourwall need to be addressed. Can we do this without the participants having to download an app.?

Riverrun only. Participants should not be restricted in the amount they can write. They should also be able to see the whole content of those within their radius have written or drawn. Some kind of scrolling system or other design element should be developed to resolve these problems. Again, the solution for this lies in the programming.

Colourwall only. Participants should be able to import and use a broader range of visual elements, such as found images and even, for example, mobile camera video. Again, a programming issue.

Riverrun only: Visualisation (for non-participants) of the entire story, as it evolves, could be improved. This is a design (graphics and typography) and programming issue.

Riverrun only: Options for outputting the entire process as video after the event are required. A simple sequencing application which automatically orders the timing and placement of contributions and sets the typeface to be used is required.

Phase 2: Perform experiments and present exhibitions. We plan to project the evolution of each story or image on a screen in an exhibition space in real time, so that the public present can witness the ongoing outcomes of the creative decisions taken by the dispersed online collective.

Phase 3:
Scientific analysis and publication. Publication of theoretical texts.

Phase 4: Publicity. The results will be presented to diverse institutions, with the aim of organising future international and intercultural creative events.

Phase 5: Expansion. Owing to their online nature, there exists a clear opportunity for national and international collaboration. Experiments could be undertaken as, or form the bases for, practical workshops. We would gratefully accept invitations to develop such events.

We will also explore the potential for analogical versions: (Further information is available)

Analogical versions could be produced to work in the same way as the online digital versions, except for the fact that the writers and artists would write and draw on a material object in a physical exhibition space, after having read instructions pinned on the wall. This version would have no sonic codification.

These analogical versions would work for a determined length of time, such as a month, without pause. Each individual action would be documented, so that later a time-lapse film of the whole evolution of the image or story could be produced and viewed.

It would be possible to give a specific theme to each Riverrun or Colourwall experiment undertaken.

Description: Riverrun and Colourwall

Kevin McCourt Olvera — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 19:33:12 +0000

description, introduction, riverrun, colourwall, emergence, exquisite corpse

Riverrun and Colourwall: Kevin McCourt (Artist) and Bartolo Luque (Theoretical Physicist).

See: www.kmccourt.org & http://www.dmae.upm.es/bartolo.html

The name Riverrun refers to the “first” word in the circular work Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. Colourwall is a playful reworking of the title for Ellsworth Kelly’s 1951 painting, Colors for a Large Wall.

Riverrun and Colourwall: Concept and Working Outline.

The online digital versions of Riverrun and Colourwall could be described as emergent “exquisite corpses”. They can be considered radical re-workings of this technique first used by the Surrealists, not only because of their use of technology but also for their focus on networks and collective creativity, rather than linear process. Crucially, it is also an interdisciplinary art and science project. The central research question behind the practice could be described as follows: “Will collective intelligence emerge (scientific analysis) and if so what are the aesthetic implications (art theory)?”

Both are based on the process and result of social interaction, within and across neighbourhoods, involving more than 100 makers who work together in the production of stories and images in real time. Each participant, using his own computer (client) to connect to the project for the duration of the event, writes, draws or paints (in the future this may include importing small (mobile) films or other objects) a small part of the work which is housed in a central computer (server). These creative experiments can be performed in different languages, and within and across varied geographical and cultural contexts. Each story or image will be projected in a physical, rather than virtual, exhibition space, as it evolves and in real time. The whole creative process will be recorded step by step on the server, allowing for each experiment to be freely distributed as video and re-presented in future exhibitions or conferences. The final stories and images will be made available online to the general public after each event.

The evolution of each work, incorporating the individual creative decisions made, will be codified as sound. The combined audiovisual project will be presented as an immersive installation as part of the exhibition mentioned above.

Riverrun: How does it work? http://riverrun.heroku.com

Let’s suppose that the creative community consists of 100 writers on their respective computers (clients). Each will write one line of the 100 which make up the story. The server randomly assigns a line number, from 1 to 100, to each participant. The writers do not know this number, that is to say, the position of their line in the story as a whole.

For each experiment, we set a radius of visibility; the number of lines above and below their own which they can see in the story. If the radius is, for example, R=1, and the writer 46, this writer will see, in real time, thanks to the server, how neighbouring writers are changing lines 45 and 47. Before beginning each experiment, we will ask each writer to seek “narrative coherence” (whatever that may mean) with neighbours’ contributions. To this end, they will be able to change their sentence, if they feel it necessary and whenever they wish, in order to adapt it to their neighbours’ modifications.

Extract from an experiment (Spanish)

If the radius is 0, there will be no interaction or coherence since each contribution will be totally independent. If the radius is the maximum possible, all the writers can see the whole story; their line and 99 others changing continuously. We believe this excess of information would prevent the writers from changing their own line in an adequate way, and the text would never crystallize or come to any final form. We expect there exists a critical value for the radius of visibility, relative to the number of writers, which may produce more interesting stories, from a creative perspective.

The first and last lines are especially relevant. If a writer doesn’t see sentences above his/her own, it is obvious that he/she is writing in position number 1, the first line of the story. Conversely, if there are no sentences below, the writer knows that his/her line is the last, number 100. This information would strongly prompt these participants to write a beginning and ending respectively, despite “pressure” from their neighbours to do otherwise. However, we can also change these boundary conditions by making them periodic i.e. if we join the beginning and the end together. In such experiments, number 100 will see 1, 2, etc. below, and number 1 will see 100, 99 etc. above. Consequently, no writers will be aware of their position in the text. Will a circular story emerge, with no beginning or end, or will certain writers insist on writing a beginning or ending for the story?

Image: Electrosmog Festival of Sustainable Immobility. (Test and online debate Medialab-Prado, Madrid).

Colourwall: How does it work?

Imagine there are 144 creators collaborating online. (We would expect a greater number of participants in a real experiment). They collectively paint or draw an image, which we can think of as a grid. (In reality, the shape of the grid and the way in which its individual cells fit together may well be very different and much more flexible). In this grid, there are 16 x 9= 144 squares or cells. Each creator paints or draws in only one of these, which is randomly assigned by the server. Each participant sees, in real time, what is being painted or drawn in the eight surrounding cells (in the diagram we can see participant A in the centre of these 8 immediate neighbours) and decides how best to change his/her cell in order to achieve “aesthetic coherence” (again, whatever that may mean) with these neighbours.

Given that the influence is local (each individual is influenced only by his immediate neighbours and not by the whole grid) we would not expect to see the emergence of global coherence. However, in reality influence can extend itself over a longer range. If we look again at the diagram above, we can see how B influences A, in spite of them not being immediate neighbours, through intermediary C.

Image: Colourwall (graphic visualisation).

Un Idioma sin Fronteras

Kevin McCourt Olvera — Sat, 25 Sep 2010 19:05:52 +0000

Bartolo Luque and I were interviewed on the programme Un Idioma sin Fronteras (Radio Exterior de España) on 23rd July 2010. This was broadcast on 23 September and is available as a podcast here:

http://www.rtve.es/mediateca/audios/20100923/libro-invisible-bartolo-luque-kevin-mccourt-idioma-sin-fronteras/884556.shtml

Interview on Radio Exterior de España

Kevin McCourt Olvera — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 11:30:27 +0000

Bartolo Luque and I were interviewed on 23rd July for the programme “Un Idioma sin Fronteras.” We talked about our collaborative projects.

http://www.rtve.es/podcast/radio-exterior/un-idioma-sin-fronteras/

Details of this upcoming broadcast will be published here.

Colourwall and Riverrun at Campus Party

Kevin McCourt Olvera — Fri, 28 May 2010 03:02:34 +0000


On Thursday 29 July, 2010 from 16.30 pm until approximately 19.30 pm (Spanish local time) we will be presenting *Riverrun* and *Colourwall* at “Campus Party”. This represents the first public event for *Colourwall* the collective online drawing project. Participants will be able to collaborate in the making of a work.	colourwall
*Riverrun*, the collective writing project, will run in parallel. Both experiments will be presented on large plasma screens during the event, so that visitors can see both the evolving images and stories as video.	riverrun
Further details: http://www.campus-party.es/2010/Diseno.html

Riverrun at La Noche De los Libros / World Book Day.

Kevin McCourt Olvera — Thu, 27 May 2010 15:56:51 +0000

Riverrun on World Book Day (8-11pm 23rd April 2010) went very well.

We set up various collective writing experiments: Ten in Spanish and twelve in English. Some of these were themed and others not.

Quite a few people came to Medialab-Prado or participated online over the course of the evening. The vast majority of participants were native Spanish speakers.

From a programming and technical perspective, the experiments ran much more smoothly compared to earlier outings.

It was extraordinary to watch the highly creative stories evolving and crystallizing in real time. The stories were stopped when the patterns of interaction seemed to indicate that a consensus had been reached. It seems evident that these stories could be described not only as imaginative in terms of content and stylistic variety (or irregularity), but also coherent and cohesive.

The stories can be read here.

file:///c:/Users/kevin/AppData/Roaming/Microsoft/Windows/Recent/la%20noche%20de%20los%20libros.lnk

Riverrun at La Noche De Los Libros / World Book Day 23/04/10

Kevin McCourt Olvera — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 23:12:04 +0000

We will be running a series of experiments on world book day at Medialab-Prado, Madrid on 23 April between 8 and 11pm.You can go there to write (please bring a laptop, if you have one) or simply to see the fascinating stories evolving on large screens in real time.

Remember, you can also participate online. Visit our website to register now: http://riverrun.heroku.com/

Riverrun First Public Event at Electrosmog (19th March)

Kevin McCourt Olvera — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 12:22:20 +0000

Our first public presentation and experiment (March 19 2010) was reasonably successful. Aside from a few technical problems and issues with access to the stories, the event went well. In the first story, on the theme of “sustainable immobility”, 13 people participated. In the second, with no fixed theme, 14 people participated. The stories are posted below. It is now our mission to improve on this event by ironing out technical problems and making remote online access to the event simpler. We will perform a series of experiments as part of “La Noche de los Libros,” Madrid on 23rd April, 2010. This event will also take the form of an exhibition, given that the multiple stories in evolution at any one time will be presented on a series of large screens.

A video of the presentation given at the outset (about the artistic and scientific ideas behind Riverrun and how it works as an interdisciplinary experiment) can be found here: http://www.electrosmogfestival.net/documentation/

Stories can be found here.