SwarmSketch is an ongoing online canvas that explores the aesthetics of highly distributed design. The aim is not to create the prettiest or most accurate image, rather it endeavors to produce an image that can be said to have been authored by the collective. SwarmSketch is a web interface that allows users to contribute a small amount of line and vote on the line contributed by others. Different users’ contributions are placed on a common drawing plane so that each image contains hundreds of lines from hundreds of different users.

SwarmSketch is fuelled by high quantity, low involvement online participation. There are two ways in which users can contribute to SwarmSketch: drawing and voting. On each visit the user is given one hundred pixels of line and fifty votes. Once they have contributed their line they are sequentially presented with a random line and prompted for what opacity they think it should be. Forcing users to vote on a random line, instead of having them select the line that they would like to vote on, makes it far more difficult for a single user to have a noticeable effect on the image.

Sketch topics are randomly selected from a regularly updated database of popular search terms. In this way, the collective is sketching what the collective thought was important each week. The automatic selection of sketch topics even further marginalizes the role of the author, who has no input into the ongoing functioning of the project. Once a sketch reaches one thousand lines a new topic is randomly selected and a new sketch begins.

SwarmSketch is an extreme example of participatory art that harnesses the vast connectivity of the internet to push the boundaries of what has been possible in this field. Each sketch embodies the input from approximately one thousand individuals and twelve thousand user interactions.