Uneven Distribution.

Art.

November 20th, 2008

Before I moved to Sydney I had a shed. It was a great shed. Lots of tools, an air compressor, big metal shelves with all sorts of mechanical junk on it. I was (very slowly) restoring a 1956 Volkswagen and I also built a bit of furniture. I originally studied industrial design, and I’ve always liked creating real, physical stuff. Which is, obviously, in stark contrast to what I do now.

I don’t have a shed any more. So I don’t get to create real stuff. But a few months ago I got an email asking if I could possibly put together some ‘art’ to show in an exhibition. So I took this as a sign that I should actually be creating something that isn’t advertising.

So I did.

Building on insights from Clay Shirky (which I talked about in For Love or Money and Getting a piece of the cognitive surplus), and a 50 year-old economic theory, I created something which has no immediate, obvious, commerical or tangible value. Which I think is art, isn’t it?

The work ran on an LCD for the entire 10 days of the exhibition. It now lives on at nichodges.com/forloveormoney. The little plaque next to my work read as follows:

Artist: Nic Hodges
Title: For Love or Money
Blurb: Online social media tools allow us to communicate and collaborate in completely new ways, on a global scale. In the past, big things happened for money and small things happened for love. Today, big things happen for love. And the biggest thing we as a society have created out of love is Wikipedia, with it’s 10 million articles in 236 languages. ‘For Love or Money’ is a continuously running script that watches for changes in Wikipedia articles, displaying any sentence containing ‘money’ and replacing it with ‘love’, questioning the role money has played in the past, and the role love will play in the future.
Material: Adobe Flash, Actionscript, PHP, MySQL, Wikipedia’s ‘Latest Changes’ RSS Feed.
Price: $love