Amazon's Mechanical Turk is a crowdsourcing marketplace - people who need something done can go there and pay those who are willing to do it. The vast majority of work available is for small tasks (labeled HIT: Human Intelligence Task) - such as transcription or simple market research like counting certain words as they appear in website comment sections. Payment can be $0.05 a word transcribed, or similar compensation. Critics call it an virtual sweatshop, as much of the work is repetitive and the pay is quite low.
San Francisco-based artist Aaron Koblin decided to use Mechanical Turk to harness the power of the crowd's creativity instead. He created the following HIT: in exchange for $0.02, users are to ‘draw a sheep facing to the left’. Koblin received 10,000 sheeps which he then combined into one art piece, The Sheep Market. Inspired by the Mechanical Turk system, and drawing on the last Industrial Revolution and the artistic response it illicited, Koblin created a custom drawing tool that captured not only the finished sheep drawing but the process. The Sheep Market is a website, that looks like a bar code initially but once the viewer zooms in s/he can make out the individual sheep caricatures. The viewer can click on a sheep, and above the collective picture a window displays the drawing process. Click here to view The Sheep Market.
San Francisco-based artist Aaron Koblin decided to use Mechanical Turk to harness the power of the crowd's creativity instead. He created the following HIT: in exchange for $0.02, users are to ‘draw a sheep facing to the left’. Koblin received 10,000 sheeps which he then combined into one art piece, The Sheep Market. Inspired by the Mechanical Turk system, and drawing on the last Industrial Revolution and the artistic response it illicited, Koblin created a custom drawing tool that captured not only the finished sheep drawing but the process. The Sheep Market is a website, that looks like a bar code initially but once the viewer zooms in s/he can make out the individual sheep caricatures. The viewer can click on a sheep, and above the collective picture a window displays the drawing process. Click here to view The Sheep Market.
Video Interview: Aaron Koblin for Wired.com
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