Open Source Art: Will There Ever Be Another Lily Chou-Chou?

All About Lily Chou-Chou is one of my favorites, and thanks to Youtube you can spend all day watching these dizzyingly beautiful clips. Shunji Iwai’s 2001 film somehow makes the activity on a message board about the fictional musician, just fascinating to watch.

It began as an online novel about two friends entering high school. Readers were allowed to post to the BBS alongside Iwai’s fictional characters. Before long there was a screenplay — one that’s uniquely nonlinear due to its unconventional creative direction. Some of the content in the film was taken straight out of their posts.

Fast Company’s Kevin Ohannessian, remarking on the film, once asked whether transparency could help creative writers:

Shouldn’t creative writing be as transparent as other steps in the process? Designers show mock-ups and various versions of projects to other team members; and we are always pushing transparency in leadership here at the magazine. Except for the editor, how many others see a story’s evolution? This is another place for innovation, letting team-members contribute to the copy writing in a project.

Yes in theory, but no in practice. Show me a confident writer and I’ll show you a bad one. While Lily Chou-Chou’s success owes to its collaboration, it is a rare case.
Indiana University cognitive scientist Robert Goldstone might know why, “It turns out not to be effective if different inventors and labs see exactly what everyone else is doing because of the human tendency to glom onto the current ‘best’ solution.”

This study used a virtual environment in which study participants worked in specifically designed groups to solve a problem. Participants guessed numbers between 1 and 100, with each number having a hidden value. The goal was for individuals to accumulate the highest score through several rounds of guessing. Across different conditions, the relationship between guesses and scores could either be simple or complex. The participants saw the results of their own guesses and some or all of the guesses of the others in their group.

In the “fully connected” group, everyone’s work was completely accessible to everyone else — much like a tight-knit family or small town. In the “locally connected” group, participants primarily were aware of what their neighbors, or the people on either side, were doing. In the “small world” group, participants also were primarily aware of what their neighbors were doing, but they also had a few distant connections that let them send or retrieve good ideas from outside of their neighborhood.

Goldstone found that the fully connected groups performed the best when solving simple problems. Small world groups, however, performed better on more difficult problems. For these problems, the truism “The more information, the better” is not valid.

“The small world network preserves diversity,” Goldstone said. “One clique could be coming up with one answer, another clique could be coming up with another. As a result, the group as a whole is searching the problem space more effectively. For hard problems, connecting people by small world networks offers a good compromise between having members explore a variety of innovations, while still quickly disseminating promising innovations throughout the group.

I tend to skip over co-authored books, even match-ups of my favorite writers. That is why I’m inclined to think A Million Penguins, the just completed wiki-novel, is more of an accomplishment in coordination rather than great literature. Is it, as James M. Larkin writes in The Crimson, “A Mere Novelty?” He finds the novel itself is terrible, but the accompanying research report makes for better reading:

First, it supports to some extent previous attempts to label the Web the angriest medium ever, also shored up by the majority of comments below this paper’s editorials. Take the example of ‘Pabruce,’ the most active contributor to the novel and its ready diva. Among other things, Pabruce introduced a non-lethal drug called strychnine that would become a “code word for global warming”. When another user wrote his theatrical voice into the novel, however, this Ms. Ross figure deleted all his edits, nearly scuttling the nascent work. Days later, he returned, chastened, as ‘Lewis Oswald.’

This degree of anonymous strife and petulance would certainly threaten any great novel’s composition: Imagine if Melville and Hawthorne had been sniping at one another out in antebellum Western Massachusetts, instead of spending spring days together. There might be no Moby Dick, no Scarlet Letter. High-school reading lists would, frankly, become much more tolerable.

No, the old folks never had to deal with spiteful “trolls,” the progeny of a device that allows the dispatch of hateful, threatening messages to others without any spoken or visual contact—risk-free. But they also lived in an age bereft of the neurotic self-awareness of our own; this is drawn into stark relief by “A Million Penguins.” It’s not long before things become hopelessly meta, as in George’s mid-narrative musing: to Jim’s question, “So a community can write a novel?” he answers, “Yes, but only a humorous one…It is humor that is shared by a community.”

I am open to the possibility of another All About Lily Chou-Chou. But in almost ten years, I’ve yet to see anything that comes close. On the other hand, I’m excited to see how A Swarm of Angels progresses. This project isn’t just internet-created, it’s internet funded. Another successful project is Jesse Reklaw’s webcomic Slow Wave (via,) “a collective dream diary authored by different people from around the world.”

Posted by Joanne on May. 9, 2008 Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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