New media art builds on top of rich software stacks. It can be pure digital art, such as net.art or NFTs, or blend multiple media such as code, light, sound or interactions with the audience. New media artists integrate various types of software to draw, animate, control fixtures or synchronize different parts of an artwork. Yet, the artworks rarely credit software and all the developers involved.
In this work, we present Myriad People, a comprehensive dataset of open source projects and their contributors, which cover the 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. We organized a collective exhibition in Stockholm, in October 2024. The audience could appreciate all the artworks and had the opportunity to reflect on the vast network of software components and open source contributors involved in the operation of these diverse artworks. In this paper, we present the Myriad People dataset, as well as the possible usages of this dataset for software and art research.