I have recently published an article on Repubblica.it (in Italian) on the work of Aaron Koblin, a young, brilliant Californian artist who has been crowdsourcing his art projects through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.
By collecting the contributions of thousands of MTurk’s providers Koblin realized a version of Daisy Bell sung by two thousand voices, a $100 bill drawn by 10,000 contributors (paid 1 cent each), and a very large flock of sheep all facing left.
In this video interview Koblin explains what inspired him to ask 10,000+ MTurkers to draw a sheep for 2 cents a piece:
After watching the video I emailed him a couple of questions. In particular I asked him whether aside from assigning the Mturks an unusual and aesthetic task such as drawing a sheep he had tried to involve them on a different level, for instance whether he tried to involve them in a discussion on possible future developments of the project. His first answer was:
[The Sheep Market] was a commentary on the alienation of the workers and they were not involved in any context or concepting.
I then clarified my question arguing that if the artist elaborates a concept and other people realize it on his/her behalf, the division of labor between conceptualization and execution (as well as the hierarchical structure which is embedded in the very notion of crowdsourcing)
remain untouched. His answer was:
This is exactly the point. There was no attempt to balance this
imbalance because the narrative and context of the project is to raise
questions about this relationship.The workers have no idea what they’re doing. They simple instruments
in a larger process. I wrote a bit about this context here.After all… does the shepherd ask his sheep where they would like to go?
Although I understand this answer in that it highlights the formal coherence of the project, I find it also symptomatic of some of the issues we run into every time we try to concatenate art and politics. As a matter of fact, conceptual artists generally place little value on the possible material effects of their projects. As Sol LeWitt famously wrote on Artforum in 1967:
In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work . . . all planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes the machine that makes the art.
From this angle, crowdsourcing art can only be a form of commentary uponremote workers’ condition but not something that tries to affect this condition by for instance engendering a non-exploitative model for producing and redistributing revenues. Since the concept is king, the concept cannot be contradictory and “disturbed” by a material practice that points somewhere else.
Conversely, activists generally value the material consequences of their actions (such as the organization of a successful campaign and the pursuit of concrete objectives) but do not focus on the larger implications that their interventions may have. To stick to The Sheep Market example, an activist would say that as long as the project does not affect the material conditions of the MTurks, its political value is close to nil.
The problem can be recast, however, when we provide an unconventional definition of aesthetics such as that provided by Jacques Ranciere for instance. As Ranciere writes in this text on “The Poitics of Aesthetics”
[Art] is political as its own practices shape forms of visibility that reframe the way in which practices, manners of being and modes of feeling and saying are interwoven in a commonsense, which means a “sense of the common” embodied in a common sensorium…
The artistic practices take part in the partition of the perceptible insofar as they suspend the ordinary coordinates of sensory experience and reframe the network of relationships between spaces and times, subjects and objects, the common and the singular.
In this respect, Koblin’s projects are undoubtedly political, and yet my impression is that they could be pushed even further to effect that transformation of the partition of the sensible addressed by Ranciere. In particular, what seems to be missing from crowdsourcing art is a thorough reorganization of the relationship between the common and the singular. While the producers are many, anonymous, and greatly underpaid, the author(s) are few and well-individuated.
In fact, there is no doubt that the cultural capital artists draw from such projects is definitively more valuable than the modest sums they disburse to outsource their execution to a crowd. My critique, however, is not of a moral nature, but exquisitely political-i.e. why not to think of art projects that rely on the MTurk to transform the very practice of crowdsourcing on a material level?
I’ll leave it here for now, hoping that these reflections on the horizontal concatenation between the cognitive function of art with the pragmatic function of politics will spark a conversation on the subject.
