"Ten Thousand Cents" is a digital artwork that creates a representation of a $100 bill. Using a custom drawing tool, thousands of individuals working in isolation from one another painted a tiny part of the bill without knowledge of the overall task. Workers were paid one cent each via Amazon's Mechanical Turk distributed labor tool. The total labor cost to create the bill, the artwork being created, and the reproductions available for purchase are all $100. The work is presented as a video piece with all 10,000 parts being drawn simultaneously. The project explores the circumstances we live in, a new and uncharted combination of digital labor markets, "crowdsourcing," "virtual economies," and digital reproduction.
Who is the artist that reproduces currency, then uses that currency at say a restaurant, then presents the record of the transaction as his art work? I'm forgetting his name but this reminds me of what he does.
When I was looking at this a couple of days ago I couldn't help but feel a twinge of jealousy. They are selling 10,000 prints for $100 which would bring the total to $1,000,000
When I checked the site again today I was very happy to see that instead of the 2 guys making off with $500,000 they will donating all of the proceeds to OLPC. Very cool!
I like the idea behind projects like these, but I feel kind of weird (especially here where the output is then for sale) about the payout for the workers -- is this the sweatshop for the digital age? Figuring it takes ~10 seconds per image, that's a whopping $3.60/hr.
Granted, there are plenty of places where this would be a stack of cash, but there's something uncomfortable about this micropayment for macropayout.
When I read about this a few days ago, I didn't make the connection right away. It wasn't until I'd poked around at it for a few moments that I remembered where I'd seen those little rectangles of drab green computerized brushstrokes before - I'd been playing around on Mechanical Turk a week or so before, and had been paid a few cents to produce a couple of them!
And having done some volunteer work for OLPC before, I feel that I have albeit indirectly, furthered my support for their cause!
What's hard to believe? that the areas each person is assigned don't overlap? Or the 10,000 people? Or that they're all working on unique sections?
The number of people who could work on a project like this is only really limited by the resolution of the original you use to create the segments.
If the original is 1,000,000 pixels high and 7 or 8,000,000 pixels wide, that gives you sections 100x700 or 800 pixels with no overlap - probably even a bit large for this kind of project.
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Who is the artist that reproduces currency, then uses that currency at say a restaurant, then presents the record of the transaction as his art work? I'm forgetting his name but this reminds me of what he does.
When I was looking at this a couple of days ago I couldn't help but feel a twinge of jealousy. They are selling 10,000 prints for $100 which would bring the total to $1,000,000
When I checked the site again today I was very happy to see that instead of the 2 guys making off with $500,000 they will donating all of the proceeds to OLPC. Very cool!
I like the idea behind projects like these, but I feel kind of weird (especially here where the output is then for sale) about the payout for the workers -- is this the sweatshop for the digital age? Figuring it takes ~10 seconds per image, that's a whopping $3.60/hr.
Granted, there are plenty of places where this would be a stack of cash, but there's something uncomfortable about this micropayment for macropayout.
@noen: J.S.G. Boggs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._S._G._Boggs
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/egg/217/boggs/
When I read about this a few days ago, I didn't make the connection right away. It wasn't until I'd poked around at it for a few moments that I remembered where I'd seen those little rectangles of drab green computerized brushstrokes before - I'd been playing around on Mechanical Turk a week or so before, and had been paid a few cents to produce a couple of them!
And having done some volunteer work for OLPC before, I feel that I have albeit indirectly, furthered my support for their cause!
am a bit skeptical, 10,000 people, each working on a different area and no overlap?
What's hard to believe? that the areas each person is assigned don't overlap? Or the 10,000 people? Or that they're all working on unique sections?
The number of people who could work on a project like this is only really limited by the resolution of the original you use to create the segments.
If the original is 1,000,000 pixels high and 7 or 8,000,000 pixels wide, that gives you sections 100x700 or 800 pixels with no overlap - probably even a bit large for this kind of project.