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Myriad People Open Source Software for New Media Arts

Benoit Baudry, Erik Natanael Gustafsson, Roni Kaufman, Maria Kling

TL;DR

The paper addresses the underrecognition of software contributors in new media art by compiling Myriad People, a dataset of 124 open source GitHub repositories used across 9 artworks, with 14,797 logged-in and 54,379 anonymous contributors. It presents an artistic research methodology built around a public open call, three credit categories (artist, software, other contributions), and qualitative selection, culminating in detailed contributor documentation. The dataset enables analysis of software roles, contributor networks, and exclusive tool usage for individual artworks, and it is operationalized in the loam installation to visualize the developer community behind art. This work advances methods for crediting in digital art, offers a resource for software research, education, and inquiries into OSS governance and diversity within artistic contexts, and lays groundwork for future studies on the impact of open source software on art creation and reception.

Abstract

New media art builds on top of rich software stacks. Blending multiple media such as code, light or sound , new media artists integrate various types of software to draw, animate, control or synchronize different parts of an artwork. Yet, the artworks rarely credit software and all the developers involved. In this work, we present Myriad People, an original dataset of open source projects and their contributors, which span various software layers used in new media art installations. To collect this dataset, we released an open call for artists and eventually curated 9 artworks, which use a variety of software and media. In October 2024, we organized a collective exhibition in Stockholm, entitled Myriad, which showcased the 9 artworks. The Myriad People dataset includes the 124 open source projects used in one or more of the Myriad's artworks, as well as all the contributors to these projects. In this paper, we present the dataset, as well as the possible usages of this dataset for software and art research.

Myriad People Open Source Software for New Media Arts

TL;DR

The paper addresses the underrecognition of software contributors in new media art by compiling Myriad People, a dataset of 124 open source GitHub repositories used across 9 artworks, with 14,797 logged-in and 54,379 anonymous contributors. It presents an artistic research methodology built around a public open call, three credit categories (artist, software, other contributions), and qualitative selection, culminating in detailed contributor documentation. The dataset enables analysis of software roles, contributor networks, and exclusive tool usage for individual artworks, and it is operationalized in the loam installation to visualize the developer community behind art. This work advances methods for crediting in digital art, offers a resource for software research, education, and inquiries into OSS governance and diversity within artistic contexts, and lays groundwork for future studies on the impact of open source software on art creation and reception.

Abstract

New media art builds on top of rich software stacks. Blending multiple media such as code, light or sound , new media artists integrate various types of software to draw, animate, control or synchronize different parts of an artwork. Yet, the artworks rarely credit software and all the developers involved. In this work, we present Myriad People, an original dataset of open source projects and their contributors, which span various software layers used in new media art installations. To collect this dataset, we released an open call for artists and eventually curated 9 artworks, which use a variety of software and media. In October 2024, we organized a collective exhibition in Stockholm, entitled Myriad, which showcased the 9 artworks. The Myriad People dataset includes the 124 open source projects used in one or more of the Myriad's artworks, as well as all the contributors to these projects. In this paper, we present the dataset, as well as the possible usages of this dataset for software and art research.
Paper Structure (11 sections, 4 figures)

This paper contains 11 sections, 4 figures.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Methodology
  3. Artistic research methodology
  4. The curated new media artworks
  5. The Myriad People Dataset
  6. Collecting Myriad People
  7. The Myriad People dataset
  8. Possible usages of Myriad People
  9. The loam art installation
  10. Further Usages in Software Research
  11. Conclusion

Figures (4)

  • Figure 1: Average number of contributors and number of repositories, per category
  • Figure 2: Users contributing to multiple projects (no bots)
  • Figure 3: Number of repositories exclusively used in each artwork
  • Figure 4: The loam sculpture is an art installation that is fueled by the Myriad People dataset. The photo on the right shows the central loam sculpture from above, displaying thousands of contributor names on historical computers; the photo on the left is an e-ink display showing non-developer contributors for an artwork.