Today, Slate asks "Just how inventive can an anonymous group of people be" (Art Mobs)? "Collaboration is old hat," as the author says but, "until now it's been limited to a small handful of people, usually face to face. The Internet lets thousands of total strangers collaborate to produce a truly hivelike result" (I'm not sure about that "hivelike" adjective. Why would virtual collaboration be any more hivelike than collaboration face-to-face? How many people work together to make a movie? Is a movie "hivelike"?).

In any case, the article looks at some interesting experiments in internet-based collaborative art. Some produce pretty good results, others not. The article goes on to ask why, and one conclusion is that "Truly huge artistic collaboration on the Internet seems to work only if the gang has a well-defined objective." And this is different from face-to-face collaboration, how? Whenever you have a group of people trying to achieve a subjective goal, the more subjective it is, the more they're going to need direction.

Actually, I think we need to match means and goals. Some forms of collaboration suit certain types of art better than other types of art, whether that collaboration is face-to-face or anonymous. It would be more useful, I think, to distinguish which forms of collaboration are handled better face-to-face as opposed to anonymous collaboration and why.

Strangely, the article goes off on a tangent at the end:

One day, it's likely that an artist will discover the right mix, or some Web designer will invent an online engine that elegantly channels a million contributions into a single compelling artwork. So far, the closest we've yet come is with music, which, thanks to the influence of hip-hop, techno, and applications like GarageBand, is increasingly a cut-and-paste art form. [link in original]

But this sort of music isn't an example of massive collaboration, except in a very broad definition. It is an example of individuals remixing existing works, which isn't really collaborative in the sense the article had been talking about. However, if that is the definition of collaboration, than computing and networks have enabled all sorts of fantastic group collaboration (i.e., machinima, video mashups, game mods, etc.). Heck, blogs in general are an example of remixing.

This is an interesting article, but I'm not sure it has the right focus.

An aside: the article did bring one thought to mind. GNU/Linux as art. Eric S. Raymond famously described the process of open source vs. closed source as a distinction between The Cathedral and the Bazaar. However, though the process of development may be different, hasn't GNU/Linux become a cathedral of sorts? Like the great cathedrals of Europe, isn't Linux a cathedral of code, both functional and beautiful?