Crowdsourcing Artworks - The Power Of Digital Collective Creativity

Nowadays, in the era of Web 2.0 where culture is influenced by multiple forms of digital participation, we are witnessing a general alteration in how we conceptualize the creative process. From the beginning of the XX century a paradigmatic shift has taken place: often artworks were the result of cooperation between an artist and his spectators. Thus the line between these two once separated worlds has become increasingly blurred. Over the last decades avant-garde art has been strongly charmed by the power of crowd insights, however only with the advent of the Internet this relationship has evolved effectively. Whereas before the introduction of the web collective artworks were tied to a physical space, now with on- line crowdsourcing there is a complete despatialization both in the creation and in the fruition moment. Furthermore it is now possible to connect on a global scale with the creativity of a multitude of people with different cultural backgrounds, producing a form of art fully mediated by technology. Consequently this new type of product has the potential of broaden the boarders of the contemporary art audience, engaging not only niches already highly alphabetize with this elitist world. Unfortunately the literature on this theme is scarce even though this new form of art is increasing in popularity. Therefore the paper aim will be to analyze not just the aesthetic implication of these hybrid cultural products, but also the consequence of digital collective creativity by leading an empirical study on three of the most celebrated on-line crowdsourced artworks.