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Love the Man in Black? 'The Johnny Cash Project' Needs Your Help

by Leila Brillson on April 21, 2010 at 08:20 AM


Crowd-sourced material is really hot right now, from choral productions to YouTube spots for the Grammys, and we have to admit that we're not sure whether we like it or not. Chris Milk and Aaron Koblin and @radical.media have recently launched The Johnny Cash Project, in belated memory of the The Man in Black, who died nearly seven years ago. The lateness of this endeavor notwithstanding, Koblin is setting out to recruit as many people as possible to trace over frames of archival footage featuring Cash. Those frames will eventually be stitched back together to form a music video for "Ain't No Grave," Claude Ely's famous gospel song that appeared on Cash's final album.

What will the results look like? We imagine it will be something along the lines of 'Waking Life' rotoscoping and 'Dr. Katz'-I've-had-too-much-coffee squiggles. Koblin's tried this crowd-sourcing trick before with his '10,000 Cents' project, in which he enlisted scores of people to reproduce 1/10,000th sections of a $100 bill in order to make... a $100 bill. You can check out the site yourself, and even contribute if you want.

Nothing quite says "Cocaine Blues" like crowd-sourcing, and this project in particular highlights a trend in authorship that we see exploding all over the Internet. The best multi-participant productions have one thing in common; the contributors collectively offer something that a single author could not have done alone (as in the case of a multi-octave choir). The line between rote re-tracing or creative, group interpretation is blurred, but an ever-evolving, constantly updating J. Cash (who's music, some may say, continues to unfold itself to new listeners) is a notion that can never go bad. [From: FastCompany]

Tags: AaronKoblin, AintNoGrave, art, crowdsourcing, design, JohnnyCash, music, MusicVideo, top

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