Crowdsouring: Where You Least Expect It

I'd developed the hypothesis that crowdsourcing would be unlikely to affect artistic mediums that rely heavily on a single artist's vision. Thus, while it made sense to me that 20,000 fans of Showtime's   The L Word could create a viable "fanisode," as scripted television is generally a collaborative art form, I'd come to doubt we'd soon see the crowd produce a good novel or work of visual art. How wrong I was. An MFA candidate at UCLA's Design and Media dept. named Aaron Koblin used Amazon's Mechanical Turk to create The Sheep Market. I don't want to spoil the elegance of its conception and realization by giving away too much, but let's just say we've found another application for Mechanical Turk. This is no glib celebration of the creativity in the crowd, though there's an element of that there, but a critique of "the massive and insignificant role each plays as part of the whole," according to Koblin's notes on the project. Sounds right to me. MT has the potential to become a very powerful tool, but the thought of Turkers bent over their home computers clicking their way through some skull-crushingly rote task sounds downright Dickensian.