A Million Penguins

On the website for A Million Penguins, Penguin publishing asks the question many ask today, "Is the same [wisdom of crowds] true in artistic fields?" Obviously, collaboration already commonly exists in artistic fields - film and television writers work in teams, theatrical projects are almost always assembled by a team of artists, and even those works that are seemingly individual (Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons) are actually the end product of a team. But can you crowdsource for content? Can a collective (as assembled a la Web 2.0 - a large group of people, geographically dispersed, without knowledge of one another) produce a work of art?

Penguin Books writes, "So is the novel immune from being swept up into the fashion for collaborative activity? Well, this is what we are going to try and discover with A Million Penguins, a collaborative, wiki-based creative writing exercise. We should go into this with the best spirit of scientific endeavour - the experiment is going live, the lab is under construction, the subjects are out there. And the results? We’ll see in a couple of months."

Fast forward (the project launched February 2007 and closed about a month later) - What's the answer? Can a novel be written by a crowd? Although Penguin doesn't release a definitive Yes or No, I think it's safe to say A Million Penguins is not an easy read. Here are the stats:

• 1030 pages of text in total
• 75,000 people visited the site during the free editing period, with 280,000 page views
  
• 1,500 people contributed to the novel, editing the wiki 11,000 times

So what does this mean? As Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher for Penguin, blogs, "As the project evolved I think I stopped thinking about it as a literary experiment and started thinking about it more as a social experiment."

And in April 2008, the Institute of Creative Technologies of De Montfort University published A Million Penguins Research Report:

What today appears not to be a novel as we know it may in time come to be seen as one, just as work once judged not to be poetry is often later brought into the critical fold. But for the moment at least the answer to whether or not a community can write a novel appears to be 'not like this'. Our research has shown that "A Million Penguins" is something other than a novel and, thereby, opened up new questions and avenues for exploration. It has treated the final product not as a variation of a printed novel or something which could be turned into one, but as type of performance. The contributors did not form a community, rather they spontaneously organised themselves into a diverse, riotous assembly. We have demonstrated that the wiki novel experiment was the wrong way to try to answer the question of whether a community could write a novel, but as an adventure in exploring new forms of publishing, authoring and collaboration it was, ground-breaking and exciting.

Maybe crowdsourcing for traditional artistic categories in this manner doesn't necessarily work under our current definitions of the end product? Maybe this concept opens up new avenues for new categories, or work that can't be categorized? I think one definitive statement that can be made regarding A Million Penguins is this - there are a lot of people out there, looking for channels in which to express their creativity and point of view. And there must be opportunity in that!