collaborative art on the web

I'm a little bit in love with hitRECord.org, Joseph Gordon-Levitt's production company, which is basically a giant, wonderful, collaborative art project machine.  When I say "machine," I don't mean something along the lines of James Frey's fiction factory, I mean something far more organic, where each component part is entirely independent, victim to no one's whims but their own.  I think of it like a gigantic craft drawer, filled to the brim with buttons and bits of ribbon, just waiting for someone to come along and stitch them all together into something larger.

They've produced large projects, like Morgan M. Morgensen's Date With Destiny, which showed at Sundance and incorporated the work of over 180 collaborators, but personally I prefer the smaller pieces.  Take, for example, this video:

hitRECord user Tori accidentally played a recording of David Hyde Pierce reading "Sonnet 29" over a piece of music, and was inspired to pull the two together.  She found two videos on hitRECord which would work with the text of the sonnet and edited them all together.  All told, the above minute and twenty-seven seconds of film involved 5 things: the sonnet, Pierce's recording of it, Lizziemackie's music, Claranovich's film of the girl, and thatpeterguy's film of the guy.  Pretty bits and bobs on their own, stitched together into something else entirely. 

It's an enormously clever use of the interconnectedness of the internet at its best.  I look forward to seeing the things they continue to produce.