More Rules

Cover art for The Information by Beck. Art direction and design by Matt Maitland/Gerard Saint at Big City Active with Beck. Sticker art by: Jody Barton, Beck, Juliette Cezar, Estell & Simon, David Foldvari, Genevieve Gauckler, Michael Gillette, Jasper Goodall, Mercedes Helnwein, Han Lee, Matt Maitland, Ari Michelson, Parra, Melanie Pullen, Gay Rie[***]aleksey Shirokov, Will Sweeney, Kam Tang, Adam Tullie, Kensei Yabuno, Vania Zouravliov, 2006.

Beck's new album, The Information, comes out tomorrow but the cover art isn't going to be quite done by then — in fact it will never be finished. Each copy of the album is packaged with a unique kit of stickers and a sheet of grid paper, out of which fans can create their own one-of-a-kind cover. There is a website where fans can upload their designs and plans for a contest to choose one for the second pressing of the album. The cover art is essentially a project for the buyer, bound by the simple rules of the template. Beck's decision to present a set of parameters as an album cover brings to mind the artist Sol LeWitt, who thoroughly explored the strategy of instruction-as-art decades ago. But now, as then, the gesture reveals a tension about where the creative act is situated: in making the work or making the rules.


Wall Drawing #146, Sol LeWitt, 1972.

In hindsight it makes perfect sense that LeWitt worked as a graphic designer (while serving in the U.S. Army and later in the offices of I.M. Pei). His radical stance toward the role of the artist was, in a sense, an appropriation of the art director's role — the articulation of directions and guidelines. But this process challenged the conventional notion of the artist as craftsman and LeWitt was often accused of opting out of the creative process. It still bothers some people that he gets credit for a work like Wall Drawing #146 when all he made was this list of instructions:

All two-part combinations of blue arcs from corners and sides and blue straight, not straight, and broken lines. September 1972. Blue crayon: dimensions vary with installation.

Yoko Ono experienced similar resistance to the book Grapefruit, which she released in 1970. The book is a collection of instructions, many of them only a singe line, including:

Draw a line/Erase a line.
Light a match and watch till it goes out.

In a 1971 interview Ono and John Lennon (who wrote the introduction) discussed the hostile response the book received. "I don't understand people who say they don't understand it because even a seven-year old could understand it," Ono complained. Lennon added, "People seem to be scared of being put on."


Sticker art for The Information by Beck, 2006.

It's hard to imagine such resistance to The Information even though it is playing to a much wider audience. There is a public expectation and even demand for interaction now. Audiences have a symbiotic relationship with media and the technology used to produce and distribute it. Fandom has become a mechanized process of blogging, programming playlists, shooting and distributing videos, file-sharing, and even remixing tracks. Beck's sticker cover is just one way that he has acknowledged this shift. He has also released mutliple versions of his recordings, made raw tracks available for remixing, and provided video elements online for fans to use as source material for their own music videos. In a recent interview in Wired he said, "The idea is to provide something that calls for interactivity and that's totally different from what you'll have if you just download the album."


Cover art for Show Your Bones by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, 2006.

The rock band Yeah Yeah Yeahs have also been experimenting with art directing their fans. The cover of their most recent album, Show Your Bones, is the result of a flag-making contest; another band-sponsored contest had fans voting on what outfit lead-singer Karen O should wear; in another, fans competed to play the bandmembers in a video for their song "Cheated Hearts." If Sol LeWitt left any doubt that there is an art to writing rules, consider these guidelines for the flag-making competition:

1) Whatever size you want.
2) Whatever colours you like.
3) Relative to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
4) Embodying the symbolic message that you have vibed off the band totally to the max.
5) Recognisable as above all a flag that can be stuck on a pole and waved around.

The language blends detached irony with reckless enthusiasm in a way that is instantly recognizable to a fan of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' music. Through these contests fans learn to interpret the rules more accurately and the band the learns how to give effective direction. The common language between musician and fan helps avoid the kind of trainwreck that Chevrolet recently experienced when they asked the public to shoot commercials for their Tahoe S.U.V. The contest was swamped with attack ads that focused on the truck's poor gas mileage, wasteful design, and negative social and enviromental impact.


Japanese trailer for Awesome I Fuckin' Shot That!, 2006.

The main challenge that artists face in designing these collaborative projects is how to engage their audience while still maintaining some level of editorial control. Beck does this by providing raw materials for collage, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs curate the results of their contests. Earlier this year the hip-hop group The Beastie Boys took another approach to this challenge when they made the concert movie Awesome I Fuckin' Shot That. The film was shot by fifty fans at a show in New York City and the resulting footage was edited together by Nathaniel Hornblower (an alias for bandmember Adam Yauch). The randomly selected fans were given a Hi8 camera and one rule, the blunt humor of which would be intuitively understood by a fan of the band:

You can rock out. You can do whatever you want. Just keep shooting!

The simplicity of this instruction underscores a technological sophistication in the audience that would have been unimaginable a few decades ago when few people knew how to operate a video camera. Now the dual role of cinematographer and extra is second nature. (Incidentally, fans got the thrill of participation but they didn't get a free camera: the band repackaged all fifty and returned them to J&R Electronics the day after the concert for a full refund.)

In his 1960 essay, Man-Computer Symbiosis, J.R. Licklider wrote that the primary obstacle to the fluid collaboration between humans and computers was the lack of a common language. Artists like Beck, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and The Beastie Boys are realizing that music may be that language and they are writing very elegant code for the human-computer hybrid that is their fan base. As Beck puts it, "In an ideal world, I'd find a way to let people truly interact with the records I put out — not just remix the songs, but maybe play them like a videogame." Every game needs rules.