ten thousand cents digital artwork

‘ten thousand cents’ is a digital artwork that creates a representation of a 100 USD bill. the people behind the project, takashi kawashima and his partner aaron koblin, divided a 100 USD bank note into 10,000 sections. next they recruited participants using amazon’s ‘mechanical turk’, to reproduce one of the sections each, using a custom drawing tool, each participant was paid 1 cent. after five months of waiting, kawashima and koblin received all their digital reproductions.

the finished 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. kawashima and koblin are currently selling prints of each section for 100 USD apiece via paypal – all proceeds are going to ‘one laptop per child’.

‘ten thousand cents’ website: http://www.tenthousandcents.com

takashi kawashima recently spoke to creativity-onlineabout the project