Jonathan Liang – Looking Outwards – 07

The Sheep Market is a work by digital artist Aaron Koblin. Koblin payed 2 cents to 10,000 workers in Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to draw a sheep facing left in 105 seconds. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is an intelligence department within the company that employs people to perform and coordinate tasks that computers and artificial intelligence could not currently do. This project is a direct reflection of the values of the department, showing that computers could not generate the little differences from human experience and individuality. Only people could generate completely different sheep, a computer would computationally generate sheep that have different traits, but are fundamentally similar. The emphasis on human individuality and experience is what I appreciate about this particular project.

http://www.thesheepmarket.com/