I was taking a look at this year’s Cannes award-winning TVC from DoCoMo and I couldn’t help but recall the Pong Game from that other clip we had a look at last week. The one about machine enabled group think and the Californian Hive Mind.
The DoCoMo ad is all about a network of crafts people to create a wooden sculpture of that creates music in linear time and space. The Pong Game all about how a network on people can work together to solve real-time problems in linear time and space within the context of a video game.
So what happens if we combine these ideas with Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule? Do you think we could create an experiment where 10,000 people donate 1 hour of their time to generate a short musical piece (say 30 seconds or maybe a minute) by simultaneously connecting to a keyboard that gathers all their collective choices of notes in real-time to create a musical journey that they can all experience as they are making it? And what would the music that is created by this method sound like? Would it be banal or would it soar to great heights?
Could we do the same thing with the written word or even images? Has it already been done? If so what were the results?
The pong game was purely an i/o navigational experiment. Music has basic 7 keys plus a myriad of octaves, chords and harmonies. The alphabet has 26+ characters but there a multitude of words and expressions that can be created. Images 16.1 Million colors before you even consider the canvas size or the brush tools. Is it inevitable that as the number of options are expanded that the results end up becoming more and more chaotic or is there a central “Hive Mind”, a realtime feedback loop, that easily navigates through the chaos to find the mediocre position that binds the experience into a recognisable and ultimately enjoyable experience?
I wonder…
Posted on June 29, 2011
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