Representing Labor: Ten Thousand Cents and Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

Representing Labor: Ten Thousand Cents and Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

[img]http://www.furtherfield.org/pics/p_3403.jpg[/img]

review by Madeleine Clare Elish
http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=376

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 (to charity) 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.

"Arriving at the homepage of Ten Thousand Cents, an Internet artwork by Aaron Koblin and Takashi Kawashima, a mottled image of a one hundred dollar bill slowly fades into view. Ben Franklin looks out sedately. Mousing over the large image, the cursor is replaced with a small red rectangle. And here lays the beauty of the project; with the click of each rectangle, a zoomed in portion of the one hundred dollar bill is revealed. On the left side is a high-resolution photograph of that tiny portion of the bill. On the right side, a real-time moving image plays, revealing how the image was drawn by a human hand in a drawing program created by Koblin and Kawashima. There are, in fact, 10,000 such rectangles and each was created by a Turker through Amazon's Mechanical Turk marketplace."

Aaron Koblin is a media designer and artist focused on the creation and visualization of human systems. Currently working out of San Francisco, California, Aaron transforms large abstract data sets into humanly contextualized information. In doing so, he hopes to raise at least as many questions as he answers. Takashi Kawashima is a designer and media artist living in San Francisco. His work explores the re-contextualizing of commonplace items to create new awareness of the mundane.

About Madeleine Clare Elish:

Currently studying as a Masters student in the Comparative Media Studies at MIT in Boston. Her thesis for the program is focusing on print and TV advertising about early personal computers. Madeleine is particularly interested in thinking through how material objects extend and sustain agency and social relationships, as well as critical studies of technological innovation and consumer culture.

Equally important is Madeleine's interest and research about the communities and practices of technology, research and activist -based art. She has a degree in Art History from Columbia University in New York. Worked at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the commercial art gallery, Gavin Brown's enterprise (as well as an assortment of other jobs!) Last year I was involved in Boston's Cyberarts Festival as a "correspondent." More recently, Madeleine spent the summer with the folks at the Medialab Prado in Madrid, working on a (still in process) research project about collaborative modes of artistic practice. Also currently involved in the planning stages of a digital archive project at MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies and Visual Arts Program.


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