Plan out a Complex System

James N. Sears and I created a Culture Machine:

1. Take a project from last week, and repurpose it into a different medium.

2. Repeat Step #1.

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We created the Google Image Writer. We took Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s Pledge (Prints), a reflection of “Chance Operations,” and reappropriated it into a web site, and tracked the anonymous users’ statements and the frequency of the Google Image Writer. It was interesting to see how popular terms came up, like “ITP” and “NYU,” as well as terms relating to random emails off the list “beans.” These popular terms are represented by the size of the word. One ITPer used the Google Image Writer approximately 25 times. It was a great social experiment on culture. We’ve attached a print of the inputs for our machine, and they are varied in size according to how many times they were submitted.

Link:

http://jamesnsears.com/imagewriter

http://digg.com/links/Google_Image_Writer

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I know our Culture Machine hit a nerve with some people because of the controversial topic of "idea ownership." There have been discussions about "Ideas vs. Execution," and the "collective ownership" of an influence or idea on the ITP thread.

Here's a great quote someone posted on the thread,

“Don’t worry about people stealing an idea. If it’s original, you will have to ram it down their throats.”

– Howard Aiken

"I think that it is ideas and execution(not vs.). The point about ideas
not standing on their own is valid in some sense because an idea must be executed at some point. The idea feeds the way we execute and vice versa, so you can't really have one and not the other.

As far as anyone being put out because they feel their ideas were
pinched they should get a larger view. Ideas exist in two minds, our own and also the collective mind. People work on things in parallel without even knowing it because they read the same books, hear the same professor speak and see the same other ideas."

-David Bamford