Myriad People Open Source Software for New Media Arts

2025-01-23

AI Summary

Open-source software and its developers remain critically underexamined in new media art scholarship. Method: This paper introduces Myriad People—the first curated, domain-specific dataset linking open-source software to contributors in new media art—constructed through systematic web crawling of 124 open-source projects underpinning nine physically exhibited artworks, followed by contributor metadata extraction, cross-layer software stack mapping, and empirical analysis of artistic installations. Contribution/Results: The dataset establishes the first empirically grounded coupling among software genealogies, developer networks, and artistic practice. It addresses a foundational gap in art–software co-evolution research, directly enabling the 2024 Stockholm exhibition “Myriad.” As the first structured resource of its kind, Myriad People supports scholarly inquiry into software archaeology, histories of art-technology entanglement, and contributor equity in creative coding ecosystems.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Crowd Sourcing and Human Computation
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Computational Creativity

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data visualization
• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Social Networks and Social Media: Computational social science

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.

Problem

• New Media Art
• Open Source Software
• Recognition

Innovation

• Myriad People
• open source software
• new media art