Do It With Others and Experimental Interaction

Do It With Others (DIWO) is a variation on Do It Yourself (DIY) where activity is now shared through participatory media.

In this approach, peers connect and collaborate, creating their own structures, using either digital networks or shared physical environments, making an art that is both made and distributed across a network.

Do It With Others (DIWO): Participatory Media in the Furtherfield Neighbourhood, Ruth Cathlow and Marc Garrett, Furtherfield

DIWO is practiced in Furtherfield, where the focus is now drawn on collaborative effort through emerging social technologies. In art, the role of the artist and the spectator is blurred. Those who come as audience usually play a part in influencing the outcome of the artwork, while the artist lift his own directive authority on the piece. A commonly known example of this is Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece, whereby Yoko stays completely still and allows the audience member to curate how her clothes are cut.

In this Experimental Interaction module, we explore the concept of DIWO through micro-projects.

Our fourth micro-project titled “The Collective Body” is a feed of our body parts combined on a Flickr group to create what is a metaphysically diversified body. The technology of a Flickr group feed enables us to each contribute to the composition of this piece through our personalised frames and augmentations on our photos.

Another micro-project that works on DIWO is our first micro-project, whereby we stream on Facebook Live concurrently as we walk through our school. The streams are the aggregated onto a wall in a grid. The collaborative stream of events creates a metaphysical collage of space and time, moments we experienced together.

DIWO means exploring the potential to share visions, resources and agency, through collaboration and negotiation, across physical and virtual networks – maintaining a critical consciousness and hopefully, somehow having a decent life at the same time…


DIWO plays an integral part in interactive art since the media is largely dependant on audience activity and collaborative effort. An artwork is deemed interactive when the audience can expect to participate and even play a part in the outcome of the artwork. It could even be said that art is not interactive without DIWO.

DIWO embodies ability to aggregate work in collaborative curation, allowing any person to create art, and this has revolutionised our contemporary art scene.