10,000 Cents

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Ten Thousand Cents is a digital artwork that resulted in 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 made available for purchase were all $100. The project explores the circumstances we live in, a new and uncharted combination of digital labor markets, crowdsourcing, virtual economies, and digital reproduction. A collaboration with Takashi Kawashima.