Wikipedia Art logo
Is Scott Kildall a troll? Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales, thinks so. In an article by Jason Lee Miller, published in Web Pro News yesterday morning, chronicling the story, Wikipedia made a lot of hoo-ha about Kildall’s new site, Wikipedia Art, published last Valentine’s Day (02.14.09). Wales stated that Kildall is a troll ‘dedicated to vandalizing Wikipedia as a publicity stunt.’ Kildall’s site, Wikipedia Art (created in collaboration with fellow tech aficionado and internet artist, Nathaniel Stern), defines itself as a site that ‘documents performance art work that promotes critical analyses of the nature of knowledge and Wikipedia’ and it clearly denounces all affiliation with Wikipedia. That doesn’t sound troll-ish or like vandalism to me.
Who is Scott Kildall? Accused of being financially well endowed, he’s a Second Life citizen, and yes, a true-blue academically inclined working artist. A peek at Kildall’s resume reveals degrees in political philosophy (Brown University), fine art and technology (School of the Art Institute of Chicago), along with contemporary (mixed media and conceptual) exhibitions in Ireland, San Francisco, New York and Chicago, among others. Working at what he calls ‘the intersection of media culture and human memory’ Kildall describes his work as a collaborative effort to appropriate events that bend a few rules of consent, yet allow interaction between the artist and the viewer. The artwork grows from things past and new, relies on the viewer’s active participation, and transforms the viewer into a vital component of an interactive and highly personalized artwork.
To meet Scott Kildall, he looks like an average guy. Trim, neat, with very lively bright blue eyes and a genuine warm smile, he’s approachable and friendly. He’s quick to let you know he’s smart too, possessing a respectful and attentive demeanor. When discussing his work, he articulates a wide range of ideas with a few rapid verbal strokes, encompassing computer generated media, video, print making, sculpture and performance, expressing a desire for a human connection.
So what is the hoo-ha about anyway? Kildall created a Wikipedia page inviting artistic interventions, or change. Interventions are an aspect of performance art that have become fun and popular as the 21st century progresses. They take place in public arenas generally, from quiet interventions in San Francisco’s North Beach to flash mobs in Antwerp, Belgium, New York’s Grand Central Station to public squares in Singapore, and are created by quiet artists working alone, collectives of artists or multinational corporations advertising a product. The point is that public interventions invite public dialogue in a surprisingly approachable and forthright manner, and enjoy an artistic life well beyond the narrow confines of traditional conventions of fine art.
In the case of Wikipedia Art, the original idea was to present an artistic intervention online on Wikipedia site, and allow that art to be editable by anyone. The rules were identical to Wikipedia’s posted guidelines, while the goal was to add another dimension to performance art, via the internet (as Wikipedia is a highly successful internet site with a multitude of users at any given time), synthesizing Wikipedia’s ever changing definitive and encyclopedic format with concepts of artistic interventions. Wales complains that it was ‘disappointingly easy’ for ‘a group of trolls’ to manufacture a publicity stunt for the media. And while he and his attorneys have said they weren’t threatening Kildall; Kildall and his attorneys think they were threatening, as did lawyers from Public Citizen and Electronic Frontier Foundation. It seems there is a consensus - Wikipedia did threaten Kildall and the Wikipedia Art intervention effort.
When I first announced Kildall’s Wikipedia Art intervention effort, I received a handful of inquiries from artists in Europe and the US, who were attracted to the novel opportunity to participate in a public internet forum (I only received a handful of inquiries because Wikipedia shut down Kildall’s site with incredible speed). The inquiries had nothing to do with Wales’ accusations of vandalism and cyber squatting. The artists viewed Kildall’s effort as an opportunity to contribute to a public event in an interesting and artistic manner. This is an internet world, where we post and tweet and share our lives with countless nameless strangers. People want to participate.
Miller wrote that Wikipedia itself is a continuously evolving art form that thrives on continuous public information and updates, and closer interpretation of his and Wales’ statements lend to the only difference between the two is that Kildall’s work is so subjective it might defy the narrow boundaries of Wikipedia’s guidelines. It seems that’s what art is all about anyway – how does one define art for a collective whole? The discussion on what constitutes art will continue, as Kildall’s intervention morphs from an audience driven interactive internet site to an esoteric discussion on authoritarian hegemony and public interventions and on to other matters. Wikipedia Art’s goal of public intervention was met, although much differently than what I thought, to a developmental forum addressing social commentaries of political philosophy, in this case, internet politics. And, it does seem a real shame that Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales, failed to appreciate the interactive nature of Kildall’s effort as another development to his own effort involving the public, and an enhancement to his site. Collaboration with Kildall could result in a fabulously thriving stream of traffic to Wikipedia where artists worldwide create and continue to develop Wikipedia Art. As an internet rube, I can’t help wonder, what is the worth of that kind of traffic in crass financial terms anyway?
So, Kildall is not anymore a troll or cyber squatting vandal than the reader who edits his Facebook page, or comments to a favorite blog or online news story. If anything, this whole thing is beginning to smell like a selfish little publicity stunt by Wikipedia to exclude and dismiss an internet phenomenon – public intervention – demonstrated by the huge successes of YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Flickr, and it’s own format – the world of Wiki. Kudos to Kildall and his band of tech visionaries Nathaniel Stern and Patrick Lichty for the discussion.
For more thoughts, please go to the following links:
http://kildall.com/, http://nathanielstern.com/, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Wikipedia_Art,
http://rhizome.org/discuss/view/41713#54671, http://rhizome.org/editorial/2360
Comments
Thanks to Micaela for drawing the parallels to these great public interventions.
I just want to clarify that Nathaniel Stern is 100% a collaborator on the site and project. I was the target of Wikimedia's legal claims because I was the registrant of the domain name <wikipediaart.org>, but the project is truly a collaboration between the two of us (and everyone who has written or discussed it).
I guess we at the Akahele.org blog (Akahele means the opposite of "wiki" in Hawaiian) have been "trolled", being that one of our directors has written about this subject, too.
Look, I have been called several different names by none other than Jimmy Wales.
He once e-mailed me: "I am going to recommend that all of your previous contributions be deleted. I am still undecided as to whether to blog about this to warn people away from you."
He also said: "You are inappropriately using our trademarks in commerce, and this must stop immediately. You are not telling your potential customers that you have been banned from editing Wikipedia."
And, when one of his favored administrators publicly declared that I had given misleading information to journalists, without providing a shred of evidence to support that falsehood, Wales dismissively said: "Saying that someone gave 'misleading' information to a reporter is hardly libel."
Eventually, after a couple of years, Jimmy Wales finally publicly apologized to me, on an obscure "Talk" page about the Arch Coal company, on Wikipedia.
Maybe one day, Wales will likewise issue the apology to Scott Kildall that he is owed, even if it might be tucked away on an equally obscure "Talk" page about Postmodern theater.
P.S. Micaela, you are trolling civilization by labeling Jimmy Wales the "founder" of Wikipedia. Have you not heard that that itself is a piece of PR puffery foisted on the world by Wales? Just do a Google search for the following words:
Wales Sanger open letter
You'll find the results illuminating, at least regarding the character of Jimmy Wales.
Gregory - Thank you for your comments. The Google search you suggested is too narrow, but if you put in a string such as, "Wikipedia founder" the first 5 pages all name Jimmy Wales. I did see your site's (akahele.org) name in the comments section of an article I read about Wales' imbroglio with Kildall, and haven't yet read your blog. I did not troll your blog or site for my article. What I wrote is purely based on my friendship with Scott Kildall. We discussed Wikipedia Art in early February, a few days before it was deleted from Wikipedia. My focus is Scott Kildall and the effect of his intervention, including whatever Wales, or anyone, has to say about Wikipedia Art. Nothing more. I'm not writing about Wales' character. It seems it was a successful intervention. Bravo, Scott and his colleague, Nathaniel, for putting it together!
See, that's the genius of Jimmy Wales' ploy to get himself called "founder" by the media. Since Larry Sanger was a respectful guy, he only ever wanted to be recognized as "co-founder". Because Sanger didn't even think to lay claim to "founder", it was ripe for the taking by Jimbo. Indeed, Jimmy even asked his minions to call him "sole founder" for a while, but even they saw how ridiculous that was.
Micaela, I wish you had a bit more moxie. Did you read Sanger's "open letter" to Jimmy Wales? I can't link to it, because your employer won't allow HTML links here. Find it. Read it. I'm not saying you need to author a piece about it, but it will change the way you think about Jimmy Wales and anything that ever comes out of his mouth again.
Micaela, apologies for the lack of context for the comments you see, but there's longstanding objections to Jimmy Wales's marketing campaign to remove co-Founder credit from Larry Sanger, and to assign sole Founder credit to himself. Part of the strategy seems to be to use his (Wales) high public profile to spread his self-promotional history rewrite. The idea is apparently that if it is repeated enough, it'll eventually become conventional wisdom, simply because so many people in the media repeat it. For various reasons, this is morally repugnant to many different types of observers of Wikipedia.
The issue has become more prominent recently in that Larry Sanger has written a harsh Open Letter criticizing this conduct, which can be found at:
blog.citizendium.org/2009/04/08/an-open-letter-to-jimmy-wales-copy/
"I resent being the victim of another person's self-serving lies.
This matter is relevant to your article itself for considerations of motive, with regard to the business (trademark) aspects of the wikipediaart.org dispute. That is, it provides background information that helps fill out why Jimmy Wales may be taking the approach he has done here, because of the various unobvious commercial issues involved.
"Wikipedia shut down Kildall’s site"
I have a problem with every word in this phrasing. To work backwards...
No, it was not a "site", it was a Wikipedia article.
No, it was not Kidall's, as Wikipedia articles are not "owned" by their creator.
No, it was not "shut down", it was deleted.
No, it was not deleted by Wikipedia, it was deleted by a Wikipedian.
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