"Ten Thousand Cents" is a digital artwork that creates 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 available for purchase (to charity) are all $100. The 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.
+ DATA STATS
Collection Period: 2007/11 - 2008/03
Total paid labor: 10000 cents
Number of countries involved: 51
Country Avg. Time Spent/User Percent Unique Visitors
1 United States 00:02:48 83.35%
2 India 00:11:32 75.31%
3 China 00:23:52 10.61%
4 Canada 00:01:57 93.88%
5 Philippines 00:10:05 60.00%
6 Egypt 00:31:54 3.12%
7 United Kingdom 00:01:24 93.75%
8 Germany 00:01:51 76.92%
9 Netherlands 00:01:11 100.00%
10 Poland 00:02:29 75.00%