Web 2.0 And the Future of Art

I have been considering the future of electronic art recently - and how it will be effected by the arrival of what many are calling Web 2.0. Web 2.0 is a second generation of Web-based services and tools — which include social networking sites, wiki's, communication tools, and folksonomies—that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users, at both the Data level (content), and in some cases, such as with Flickr.com, the programmatic level.

Probably the most important difference between the traditional web system model and what is being called Web 2.0 is the disassociation of content, and form. Meaning that data, be it text, images, pictures, or any other form of digital information, is not presented in a deterministic fashion. This means that whatever the content, it can be displayed or used in virtually any way or context imaginable. Rather than being strictly defined to the frame of a web page, or other delivery vehicle, the content (data) is made available for whatever use the end user might decide to apply it to. This disassociation of content (information) and content (container, context, use, etc...) lets information become completely cooperative, promiscuous, and plastic.

The question is what effect will this have on Art? Clearly it will affect the delivery and context of some forms of artistic expression; it already has on sites likes Youtube, Flickr, and many others. But will it affect the content of artistic expression? Can there be successful Wikiworks, artworks with content and form that are in some way publicly malleable, or guided? How would something like this work? Will it transcend the screen?

I don't have the answers to these questions. While there is a history of collaborative artworks of varying degrees of success in realization, these radically collaborative works often share an uncomfortable disorganization, and unlike more traditional text based information portals - like Wikipedia, they don't tend to coalesce towards either an aesthetic quality or rational content.

It will be fastinating to watch as artist begin to examine these new technologies and tools.

New Gombe Chimpanzee Blog Launches

I am very pleased to report that the new Gombe Chimpanzee Blog launched successfully on Friday. I have been working on the concept behind the new blog for about 6 months, and over the last 5 weeks or so I was able to get all the resources and talent in place to make the concept a reality. The new blog is the newest incarnation of an idea I have been working with for the last couple of years: Conservation geoblogging.

The introduction of technologies like Google Earth, Google Maps, and all the other global mapping tools have introduced to the world new and unprecedented ways of seeing our planet and are leading to a rethinking of the way we interact with our world. The impact that these new technologies are going to have on our lives, and how we interact with the space around us is only just beginning to be conceived.

The concept behind conservation geoblogging is a simple one - give the people and organizations who care about our planet a tool to document it, a voice to tell it's stories, and the interconnectivity to make action a possibility. There are a multitude of ways that conservation organizations have used these tools, but the tools have historically been only available to well funded engineers, scientists and researchers. Using these tools for outreach and education has been prohibitively expensive, and limited by software that technically difficult to use.

The Amazon Basin: Vast deforestation threatens to destroy some of the most environmentally rich places on earth

A destroyed village in the Darfur region of Sudan: One of thousands now being documented by Google Earth and Amnesty International in two separate geologging environments.

The new version of the Gombe Chimpazee Blog takes advantage of new, cheap and widely available technologies to make telling these stories to a vast audience possible at a fraction of the cost. Behind the scenes of the Gombe Chimpanzee Blog is EarthWatchr, server software we have developed at the Jane Goodall Institute to make conservation geoblogging available to anyone.

EarthWatchr incorporates standard blogging tools with Google Maps and Google Earth with a simple content management system to create a rich geo-referenced blogging tool that will be useful to conservation organizations as well as individuals interested in creating geoblogs of their own. A beta version of the software is set to be released in July at http://www.earthwatchr.org/ under the Jane Goodall Institutes's new EarthWatchr program.

At the heart of the Earthwatchr project is the hope that by distributing easy to use geoblogging software, both individuals and organizations can use these new mapping tools to document the world around them. Weather the tool is used for tracking a long distance hike or for documenting the impact of logging on local communities, tracking a family of chimpanzees, or documenting bird sightings, the effect will be same. A picture tells a thousand words, and geoblogging tools help bring readers, donors and actors to the story on the ground in a way that is both powerful and entirely new.

I want to give special thanks to Nick Novitski, who worked very hard on this project with me. He was integral in developing the Google Maps integration for both the blog, and the content management system, and deserves kudos for both his excellent work on the project as well as his persistence in working out some of the more difficult details that make the blogging tool easy to use. Nick came to the Institute to work on this project and really took the idea of the blog and made it his own. His inquisitiveness and sharp mind has helped take this project to the next level. I look forward to working with him on the future of the EarthWatchr Project.