When a first saw this two years ago I though it was just another internet “waist my time hype”. In deed it can actually fall into this category if you aren’t interested in how collective creation can be achieved. The fact is that Peter Edmunds’ Swarm Sketch it’s actually damn good example of the collective power of the internet.

SwarmSketch uses the concept of a drawing task to visualize the power of collective organization. It does so setting the rules into which collective intelligent can exist.

This is how it works:

Every week a randomly subject is chosen to become the Drawing task for the week. Every visitor can contribute with a new line to the sketch. Following that, the visitor can vote for the relevance of the lines of other visitors, giving a opacity level to them. The darkness of each line represents the average of other visitor’s votes. In this way visitors help to moderate the direction in which the drawing is going (self regulation). After a week or when the Sketch reaches 1000 lines, the final result is shown and a new is started.

The gallery of the project shows every subject that was collective sketched since the start of it in 2005. A nice animation from the beginning to the end of each sketch can be seen along with all statistics about it.

Swarm Sketch of a Squid – Image source: swarmsketch.com

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