The Amazon Mechanical Turk is a crowd sourcing marketplace where computer programmers (Requesters) post human intelligence tasks that cannot be performed by computers. Workers(Providers) then choose among existing tasks and complete them for a payment promised by the Requester.
The Sheep Market is based on this Amazon Mechanical Turk (Mturk) system to collect drawings from thousands of workers online. At request, workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk create their version of “a sheep facing to the left” and then submit it to the MTurk system. The worker responsible for each drawing receives two cents for their labor. The result is a massive database of drawings which look naïve when placed individually, but as a whole, it represents the ideology of bureaucratized and systematized human labor. This ideology has been establ shed long before the system was put to use and has progressed rapidly since the industrial revolution. Marx, Engels, and other early socialists discussed about the cultural and political ramifications of Mturk-like systems. Their discussions of the alienating impact of massively distributed employment facilities are also related to contemporary issues incorporating cultural objectification and intellectual property.
The Sheep Market is created to appreciate the human role of creativity expressed by workers in the system, while emphasizing how insignificant individuals contribute to form a massive whole.
The author of this project, Aaron Koblin, is an artist and designer specializing in data and digital technologies. He also leads the Data Arts Team in Google’s Creative Lab. His work takes real-world and community generated data and uses it to reflect on cultural trends and the changing relationship between humans and the systems they create.
