»Collective literary and artistic production in new media ranges from works in which principal authors are equally conscious participants in all aspects of the work’s production, to those in which the contributors are not at all conscious that their activity is resulting in artistic production« (Rettberg 2005: 7). He distinguishes three types of participation a contributor might have in a collective narrative project:
- Conscious participation: Contributors are fully conscious of explicit constraints, of the nature of the project, and of how their contribution to it might be utilized.
- Contributory participation: Contributors may not be aware of how their contribution fits into the overall architecture of the project, or even of the nature of the project itself, but they do take conscious steps to make their contribution available to the project.
- Unwitting participation: Texts utilized in the collective narrative are gathered by the text-machine itself, and contributors have no conscious involvement in the process of gathering the material.
This might be relevant to all collaborative art projects also. Going back to The BlueaSfear Worm, their artists (or contributors) are fully conscious about their participation. They know the rules of the project, and therefore also know how the final piece of art will look like if they want to take part in it. Make Art, a youtube video made by guy using a nickname called "cheeckychen" is a contributively way of participation. His attempt was to open an art category on YouTube, so he encouraged people to send him art-like videos containing the words »make art«. In the end, he combined those videos into one that was uploaded on YouTube. The participants had not been told about how their clips should look like or about its length, not even if they will be included in the final complex for sure. The Longest Poem in the World, composed by aggregating real-time public Twitter updates and selecting those that rhyme, which is constantly growing at approximately 4000 verses per day, Twitter users probably did not intend to participate. Another example is Darren Solomon's site, inbflat.net, that “features 20 YouTube videos of musicians, many of whom don't know each other, playing various melodies in the key of B flat” (Sutter 2009). Still, some people might argue, that this is not a collaborative act at all since the authors were not agreed to participate (or moreover, do not even know there are a part of it!).
