I was looking at the International Photography show on Sunday - by accident - in Dumbo. I went to visit a friend, Janice, who rented a studio space nearby and wanted to see the space in case I want to have a studio space of my own in Dumbo, sometime in the future.

But I also saw a lot of other stuff - and I put some of it on YouTube (below), including Jane’s Carousel

Here’s a record of some of what I saw yesterday:

I met Jeff Howe of Wired Magazine tonight at ApexArt Gallery in Lower Manhattan.  I saw the notice for this show in www.Artcards.cc a couple of days ago and made the decision I’d show up.  The public notes for this show are below and my comments and transcript follow.

Most of the content of this talk is contained in Jeff Howe’s CrowdSourcing article on Wired.com earlier this year.  Here are my notes and a few thoughts afterwards:

Notes:
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Started with Converse Gallery sent out a viral campaign of why people love their Converse Sneakers…all user generated.  Jeff became a little obsessed with the idea …. outsourcing to the crowd sourcing…term was picked up and widely adopted.   Went from 3 results to 2.2 million results in Google in a couple of weeks.

Crowdsourcing is when a company outsources a job previously done by an employee and gives it to a stranger.

How does it work?  Cambrian House had ideas that are voted on and anyone who has passed the voting gets developed and there’s royalties. (note: I wrote about Cambrian House’s PR stunt bring 10,000 Pizzas to Google for Lunch a couple of months ago - very successful stunt)

Why do they do it?  Average cost of providing amateur verses professional television…great savings result.

If the crown helps build your product then the product will probably appeal to the crowd.

Threadless.com   (shoe design done by social media).

InnoCentive…crowd sourcing science..  Correlation between distance
from problem is better prediction of ability to solve problems …. Krim Lakhami research paper.

Second Life…while Linden Labs built the infrastructure rhe crowd built
the world..the meta verse.

Crowdsourcing can cause economic destruction in areas like stock
photos…. 300 dollars for stock photographer vs 3 dollar for a
crowdsourced photographer.   The quality is almost indistinguishable.
Make up profit in volume.

People who shoot for iStockphoto don’t really do it for the money.

The crowd has many talents and is dispersed, has a short attention span..work is broken up to micro chunk.

Mechanical Turk …Amazon created..human intelligence tasks.  Micro
chunk labor.  Article ii CSM a month ago.   Crownd is full of specialists.  90 percent is junk but 10 percent is good.  Digg is a
crowd filter.

Gannet started a crowd sourcing project.  Line between work and play
have blurred.  Hypoposos  …3 million band profiles o Myspace.

Wired.com  …old media is frozen in time.  We’re never done telling the
story.

1997 ….yellow 3 corner room….viewer is part of it (at either MOMA or Whitney)

Pew Study show majority of 11 to 16 get their news from Digg - sites like that.

Myspace home page can actually be a work of art.

Search for community ….boundary between player and viewer dissolving.

Makers of intellectual properties.

Crowd as creators and professionals as packagers..a lot of jobs are
being eliminating.

Thesheepmarket.com  community

But also.there’s need for an audience.  Internet provides

Wiki books …why are you here now?

Swarm of angels …British film based on getting 1 million pounds to
produce a movie that they can also contribute to.

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I took a look at the Phantom Captain: Art and Crowdsourcing curated by Andrea Grover  - who was in the audience and spoke with Jeff Howe for a couple of minutes tonight - I also looked briefly at the http://www.thesheepmarket.com/ video that was playing in the backroom.

Once I left, I had dinner next door - a glass of Red Wine, bowl of soup and some fresh fruit for dessert - and about 40 dollars later - I was on my way home - feeling fat, dumb and happy - and hopefully not crowdsourced!

Having Dinner and Red Wine after ApexArt.

As I was on my way home I passed by the World Trade Center last night and saw several photos posted on the gates around the crater - which used to be one of my favorite places to hang out before 9/11.

After 9/11 - I don’t enjoy going to what was the WTC, though I often pass by, usually on a Bus looking out the window. 

Of all the photos I saw last night - this one touched me the most.  Sorta reminds me of the saying of Nostradamus - the one with the King of Terror coming from the sky - 1999 - but it’s 2001, so maybe Nostradamus was off by two years (space time continuum distortions?)