Takashi Kawashima + Aaron Koblin
Project date: January 2008
submitted 2009-01-13 17:37:33
Call: After the Net
Description:
"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.
Format: Installation, Online
Genre: Installation, Online art
URL: http://www.tenthousandcents.com
Artist Bio:
Aaron Koblin is a media designer and artist focused on the creation and visualization of human systems. He received his MFA from the department of Design | Media Arts at UCLA before undertaking visualization projects at MIT and Stanford Universities.
Takashi Kawashima is a designer and media artist living in San Francisco. Takashi received his BA in Environmental Information with a Dean's Award from Keio University in Japan and MFA in Design | Media Arts from UCLA in the U.S.