I'm interested in how the web can bring together people from around the world, to work on creative projects together. It might be visuals, sounds or stories; but I've yet to find a website that does a good job of supporting and encouraging creativity, particularly when it is collaborative in nature. Can a group of people, who might not know each other, and speak different lanuages, without a central idea of what they set out to achieve, produce worthwhile and meaningful art?

To answer that question, I developed a image montage tool that allows anyone on the web to collaborate, contributing images that get 'mashed-up' together to form a collage. The idea is that someone would start the image, providing the canvas on which others can build, towards an image that evolves as it is constantly skewed, altered, re-hashed. But no one person would be the image's author, hence no single concept or agenda can permeate through it. Its an early work-in-progress; but I wanted to push it out early to get some feedback and see it in action.

I added some basic image manipulation features to help make the images more interesting, and added a link to Flickr that lets you pull-in photographs associated with a given search term. For now, these mashups are free-for-all; so anyone can add, edit, re-position, delete or otherwise mangle these images. Eventually, I'd look to bring some calm to the chaos by allowing authors to set privacy settings: ranging from anarchy to invite-only guest-list. I'd also like to add revision tracking so that authors can see changes in the image, and revert to a previous image if it becomes a graffiti wall.

There are plenty of ideas for what the mashups could be used for. Perhaps all of the photographs from a gig can be posted together to form a collage? Maybe these mashups could provide backgrounds for calendars, cards, desktops. I'd like to have a mashup for each of my tracks on this website, so people can upload images they associate with the music. If you think of more, please leave me a comment.

Aims

I am not sure what to expect from this social experiment. I doubt that it will throw up incredible works of photo-montage: but it might create some visually appealing images that have different meanings for different people, in a way that challenges the artist/audience relationship, or at least erodes the boundary. What if an artist began a photo-montage, allowing others to complete the work? Could it be like the final chapter in the unfinished novel, or the imaginative remix that takes the work in a different direction?

I have always been interested in photo-montage, such as the anti-nazi propaganda of John Heartfield. The curious property of photographs, that they are instantly perceived and recognised as being real, is a stark power when used in photo-montage; directly altering concepts that are perceived as more realistic than hand-made imagery. It is said that the camera never lies; when a photo-montage takes a photograph out of its context and places it into another, an altogether different truth can emerge.

I've thrown-together this very basic image of some usual suspects from our plutocratic ruling class using images from the web. Each might have originally been in a news article, depicting some propaganda about how such-and-such puppet leader spoke-out about peace or the environment or whatever; but here I'm showing them in a different light. Maybe someone else will add some more, or radically change the image to something else. If they do, I will be interested to see how, if at all, the concept of the image changes; for when art becomes too conceptualised, I think it becomes bland. If multiple people collaborate on images, perhaps concepts such as my satirical image here will generalise into more perceptive things and hence have more value as a piece of art.

If by collaborating with others, we perceive things differently, moving from stubborn concepts to fresh perception, then maybe this little gimmick would have proven worthwhile.

As I mentioned, it is a very early work-in-progress, so there are bugs and user-interface annoyances. Rather than give-up or lose your temper, please contact me or leave comments so I can implement your new ideas and fix problems. If it proves popular, I will branch-out these mashups onto a seperate website, so I would be grateful for your feedback. Don't forget to rate, and social-bookmark!

If you would like to give it a try, or see some of the images already made, follow this link.