Collective Perspective is a Processing sketch which focuses on representing the Cubist art movement physically, but using Dada and Surrealist strategies to gather the information to display. Through the use of photography, networking, and digital image manipulation, the artwork downloads photographs from the web and combines them together to form a single image. The images are gathered based on a set of rules based on the Dada and Surrealists ideas of objective chance and displayed in a way that mimics Cubism's multiple perspectives.

Today's society has a strong focus on social community and networking. Social networking websites such as Facebook, MySpace, and Flickr have brought together millions of people. It seems now that the majority of peoples lives have become public, and with the price of phones and cameras these days a whole network of images and ideas has been documented and put online for public display. I wanted to harness this data and use it as a means of expressing a community-driven form of cubism which I call "Social Cubism."

The most famous characteristic of Cubism is the combination of multiple points of perspective to create a single image. This can easily be seen in Picasso's Woman with Mandolin or Braque's Violin and Candlestick. What separates Collective Perspective from other Cubist work is the social characteristics used to create it. Cubist painters could only see from their eyes, and although they were painting from different points of view, it was all biased towards their personal perspective and their design decisions. Collective Perspective eliminates the biased nature of these painters because it gathers photographs of the same subject matter from multiple people and multiple perspectives. The internet, and Flickr more specifically, has acquired a huge library of images about almost anything you could imagine, giving near limitless possibilities to this artwork. A project like Collective Perspective could not be possible even just a couple years ago without the library we have today.

The application starts off the same way a painter would; with a blank canvas. An empty textbox is also present on the stage and represents a space to put the theme or idea for each painting. A user inputs their ideas as keywords into the textbox and the program searches Flickr for creative-commons images that have been uploaded with tags similar to the search query. It then picks 4 or 5 images and arranges them on the canvas, allowing parts of each image to be visible simultaneously. I have purposely eliminated my role as a moderator and implemented an element of chance into the work by using this approach, similar to the Dadaists.

The entire process involved in creating each image is based on the Dada and Surrealist approach of automatic creation and objective chance. The user has an idea and the computer seemingly pulls images from a hat based on the idea to create the outcome. In order to create different results I gave an option to the user to sort images either by the "interestingness" of the photos or the date they were posted. This is slightly different from the Dada approach of complete randomness but I think it was a necessary change in order to give better results. The most recently posted option will not always give the most attractive results, and although representation is not the entire focus of the artwork it is nice to have the option to display the most interesting images as well.

I want to improve on this project and build it into a web app. Java's security sandbox doesn't allow dynamic content from outside servers but there are a few workarounds I can try. For now you can download the application or the source code and check it out.

download
CollectivePerspective.zip

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