Myriad People

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.

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, as well as loam, a sculpture built as the conceptual center of the exhibition, tying all the other pieces together. The Myriad People dataset includes the 124 open source projects used in one or more of the myriad artworks, as well as all the contributors to these projects.