Your Line or Mine

Your Line or Mine is an interactive installation comprised of three continually changing crowdsourced animations drawn entirely by museum visitors. The installation was created for and shown at the Stedelijk Museum.

Visitors are invited to take part by contributing with their own drawings. They grab a sheet of paper from the coloured stack, draw following the instructions on the paper, and scan their drawing. Once scanned, their drawing automatically becomes a frame in one of the animations projected in the space.

Because visitors draw and scan drawings on a daily basis, the animations exist in a continuous state of flux during the exhibition.

Above you can watch the final animations after over 50.000 contributions.

Each A4 sheet contains a number of black dots and instructions on how to connect them.

The instructions are short and straightforward allowing young and old to participate. The tasks vary in emphasis foregrounding different aspects of execution, handwriting and interpretation.

When the visitor scans the filled in sheet, the system reads the barcode on the bottom left and places it in the corresponding frame of the movie.

During the exhibition, the movies on the accompanying website yourlineormine.com were automatically updated on a daily basis.

Conscious objections, stoner drawings & wedding proposals. People love to leave a message behind.

Some contributions stand out even at 15 frames a second.

We believe in designing systems that entice people to follow the rules, but also allow for a bit of anarchy. Above are some examples of creative ways people found to hack the system.