10,000 Cents Buys You $100: Awesome Crowdsourced Art Project
"Ten Thousand Cents" is a crowdsourced art project that led 10,000 artists, each paid one penny for their contribution, to recreate a US $100 bill one tiny section at a time. The brainchild of San Francisco artists Aaron Koblin and Takashi Kawashima, "Ten Thousand Cents" utilized Amazon's Mechanical Turk service and a bit of custom Flash software to lead 10,000 web workers in a coordinated, crowdsourced art project. The result is a rather impressive rendering of a US one hundred dollar bill drawn by an army of contributors.
Koblin and Kawashima first divided a high resolution scan of the $100 bill into 10,000 equal parts. Each part was then delivered to a turker who was paid a penny to duplicate it using a simple Flash-based drawing tool. Contributors didn't have any idea what they were working on while the were working on it.
The project took 5 months to complete and involved contributions from 51 different countries. Because some turkers participated more than once, there weren't truly 10,000 different artists contributing to the project, but it appears that most countries had unique visitor rates of above 60%. The end result was a reproduction of a $100 bill that cost $100 to create.
"The project explores the circumstances we live in, a new and uncharted combination of digital labor markets, 'crowdsourcing,' 'virtual economies,' and digital reproduction," according Koblin and Kawashima on the project web site.
The completed artwork is being displayed on the "Ten Thousand Cents" web site as an interactive video depicting all 10,000 pieces of the bill being drawn at once. A limited edition signed print (presumably signed by Koblin and Kawashima, not thousands of random turkers), is also available on the site for $100, with all proceeds going to the One Laptop Per Child project.
A video about "Ten Thousand Cents" is below.
Share
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteWeb posts
I am really happy this is featured on RRW, though I think it would be good to explore some of the read-write implications of the work; the capacity of networked tools to allow thousands of people to collaborate without organizing them at all has pretty broad implications for organizations. This is behind a lot of the apps that RRW covers, but is especially clear in the piece. Note: Aaron's name is misspelled, it's Aaron Koblin.
Thanks for the heads up on the typo. Now fixed. :)
Another project of Aaron Koblin utilizing Mechanical Turk is a href="http://www.thesheepmarket.com/">The Sheep Market.
"the capacity of networked tools to allow thousands of people to collaborate without organizing them at all has pretty broad implications for organizations"
Indeed, Ben, it does. But this isn't really an example of large-scale collaboration. This is about as top-down, centrally-directed a project as possible: Koblin & Kawashima came up with it, decided on the end state and success criteria, decomposed the work into defined tasks, and then reassembled the peices that came back from Mechanical Turk. Adam Smith would recognize his famous pin manufacturing process here; it's as old-fashioned a production line as I can think of. (What's sort of innovative is that it enables simultaneous production--in theory 10,000 workers could have produced the final outcome in one instant.)
Also, Turkers did not really "collaborate" at all--they didn't communicate with each other during the work or see each others' results until the final project was unveiled.
Contrast this with much of the "peer production" activities elsewhere on the internet: open-source software or wikipedia editing is a much more truly collaborative and bottom-up process. No one is specifying what wikipedia articles should be written, or what the final form of them should be.