SwarmSketch taps Web's 'collective consciousness'

Edmunds' Web site randomly selects one of the most popular search terms from a couple of major search engines and uses that word or phrase as the topic for a collaborative drawing project for the week. Anyone who wants to can peek at the latest stage of a drawing, add a tiny bit to it (about an inch's worth, if you draw a straight line) and even erase other people's lines, or at least vote to lighten them. Best of all, you can watch an animated version showing how the picture has evolved.

The first collective drawing, back in early September, was "Shark Attack." People from around the world contributed to it, but the picture hardly changed. In its final form, composed of only 90 lines, it looked like a child's drawing of a shark chomping one person's arm while the limbs of another floated nearby.

It wasn't until early October that the swarming really began. For the drawing "Low Fat," there were more than 400 lines on the canvas by week's end. Contributors became bolder. Some ventured to the edge of the page. Some made meaningless marks. The drawing started with a pot and spoon and the letters SKI, which evolved into SKIM, then SKIM ME, then SKIM MILK. But by the end, the letters didn't matter. They became ever fainter, until they had almost been upstaged by mysterious squiggles. The pot and the spoon both survived intact.

Edmunds said one of his favorites on the site is the "Faces of Meth" sketch. "I have no idea how 1,200 people agreed that the face should be looking into the distance at three-quarter perspective," he said in an e-mail message. He said he also likes "Python Eating Alligator," partly because "the sketch seems to be the wrong way around--an alligator eating a python."

Apparently, the collective consciousness is quite literal-minded. Almost all of the drawings begin with something figurative in the middle. And no matter how much scribbling and erasing there is along the way, the central figure usually remains. "The basic outline of the sketch becomes clear in the first few hundred lines," Edmunds said, and "it's hard for the users after that to change the direction of the image."

The site is now so popular that the drawing topic is changed not weekly but whenever 1,000 lines have been recorded. At last, the name SwarmSketch, which Edmunds called an "exercise in alliteration," has been justified. People from all over the world buzz and worry over one little canvas, adding to it, subtracting from it and building it like ants. You can see what the masses really draw like when they draw together.