saAlthough fine artists have used crowdsourcing during the “Relational Art” movement in the 90s to produce works of art long before the word dsadsaState of Play,” “The Last King of Scotland”) solicited videos shot around the globe on July 24, 2010. From more than 80,000 submissions, they fashioned a 90-minute film representing a day in the life of the world — that part of the world with a video camera and an Internet connection, anyway.
It’s a hard movie to engage with or even sit through, despite the fact that much of the material is interesting in its own right. Oddly, but perhaps predictably, the problem is the resolutely conventional and soft-headed way in which that material has been assembled. Given the chance to do whatever they wanted, the filmmakers ended up with something resembling a sentimental credit-card commercial stretched to feature length: a chronological pseudonarrative that intersperses obvious montages — people getting out of bed, people making coffee — with more specific biographical passages and sets it all to a sugary, manipulative soundtrack. (There are some violent or emotionally difficult moments, but the overall tone remains gee-whiz.)
The most compelling scenes — a girl with a helmet-cam climbing to the top of a human tower at a circus; a man and his son saying morning prayers before a photograph of an absent woman — are like trailers for films we won’t get to see. Otherwise, “Life in a Day” is “Koyaanisqatsi” minus the consistent visual imagination that made that film bearable. But rest assured: several of the contributors knew how to do time-lapse shots of gathering clouds.

Although fine artists have used crowdsourcing during the “Relational Art” movement in the 90s to produce works of art long before the word even existed, more creative organizations are experimenting with it. This Movie is Broken, a film which recently