Collaborative web-based art

Something that sets the below projects apart, and that stems from their participatory nature, is the varying balance between the artist and collaborating participants in determining the polemic of the project (where/to what, etc it is directed).

When Huyghe and Parreno purchased AnnLee, when Oliver Laric created 50/50 or, more so, biceps, and particularly with a project such as sheep market, the artist or artists seem to be manipulating input from the (sometimes pretty nominally) 'collaborating' public. This is also quite apparent, and a bit more functionally transparent, in Sam Brown's Exploding Dog. In projects such as JacksonPollack and the collaborative sentence, the artist is in the role of enabling input from the collaborating public (not more definitively collaborating). Other projects fall in between: Man With a Movie Camera, The Continuum of Cute.

The obvious connection here is that degree to which a given project can be classed as an "oppositional device" (Holmes, 36) is directly related to how polemical the project is, and that this in turn is related to the degree to which the artist funtionally and directly intends and acts upon creating that polemic. However, I find a more perfect oppositional device in the simply medium-specific openess of JacksonPollack.

In some ways, and particularly with the internet, the artist's appropriation of images and content created by untwitting users is a sort of forgone conclusion: the artists 'subverts' the objects of images of the lives of 'ordinary people' in such a way as to make a statement while refusing to spell out exactly what that statement might be (link). And while the meaning (the point) of the work with both peel and with JacksonPollack is nominally evanescent, only in the latter case does this sort of 'nothing' thesis actually synergize in a self-consistent way with the work and the medium itself.