crowdsourcing as cubism: crowdfire.

I watch BoingBoingTV, usually on the subway as I head to work.  It's eclectic, and, frankly, has gotten a lot more watchable since they stopped with the 'German-French-Whatever Aspiring Action Hero' series, which was neither funny nor interesting.

The one I watched this morning was an in-depth look at CrowdFire, something the extended boingboing crew seems to have been involved in with backing from Windows, operating at the Outlands Festival.  CrowdFire, in short, is absurdly cool.

The quote from John Battelle was 'the idea is to give the crowd the tools to create the crowd's experience.'  In practice, this means giving the crowd a repository of crowd-sourced images, sound and video from the festival, to be remixed, re-edited, and broadcast during and after the festival itself.  To a creative commons geek like myself, this is already cool enough to warrant a blog post.  But it got me thinking about the project as a normalization, and communalization, of mediated experience.

CrowdFire is, in a way, about second memory as a communal action.  Photographs and video recordings are about sharing and preserving memories better than human equipment can do without assistance.  This is capturing something different though - the increase in scale makes it a recollection on a swarm scale - 60,000 snippets of a thing, as experienced by 60,000 people.  Opening this up not only to tagging, but to remixing and broadcast, makes me think of cubism.  Crowdsourcing something on this scale isn't a matter of photo realism, but experiential realism.  Looking at a compendium like this is seeing every facet, every angle at once.

And I can't help but wonder if this is the future of memory.