Aaron Koblin — The Sheep Market

2007

Artists: Aaron Koblin · Year: 2007 · Medium: Crowd-sourced artwork — 10,000 sheep drawings by Amazon Mechanical Turk workers paid 2 cents each · Substrate: Amazon Mechanical Turk platform; web-interface for drawing submission; aggregate collection of 10,000 sheep drawings printed in catalog form · Place: Los Angeles, USA · Institution: Independent; UCLA Design Media Arts MFA project Aaron Koblin's The Sheep Market (2006) commissioned 10,000 hand-drawn sheep through Amazon Mechanical Turk, paying each worker $0.02 per sheep on the condition that the sheep face left. Koblin received 10,000 sheep over the course of several months and used them as the dataset for a series of gallery presentations — printed sheep arrays, animated mosaics, kinetic displays. The full dataset was deposited as a public archive at thesheepmarket.com, where it remains browsable twenty years later. Koblin was a UCLA MFA student when he made The Sheep Market, and the piece became the defining early case study for what Mechanical Turk — launched by Amazon in November 2005 — did to the conception of networked human labor. Turk had been designed as a "human API" for tasks that machines could not yet perform (image classification, transcription, translation quality-checking). Koblin's project treated Turk as a commissioning platform for an art project, which disclosed both what was possible in 2006 (10,000 unique creative micro-commissions at $200 total) and what was disquieting (the $0.02 rate, the anonymous workers, the aggregation of unrecognized labor into a single-author art object). What Koblin argued with The Sheep Market, and with his subsequent Turk-based works (Bicycle Built for Two Thousand, 2009, which crowdsourced a sung version of "Daisy Bell" in pieces from Turk workers; Ten Thousand Cents, 2008 with Takashi Kawashima, which commissioned 10,000 $0.01 paintings that composited into a single digital US $100 bill) is that the network had introduced new aesthetic categories — aggregation, crowdwork, the labor-as-material — that artists needed to understand. The ethical critique embedded in the work is real: Koblin has said, in interviews, that he was uncomfortable with the Turk labor-economics and that the work was partly a deliberate artifact to make the economics legible. Koblin went on to become the creative director of Google's Data Arts Team (2009–14), where he produced This Exquisite Forest (2012) and other collaborative visualization projects. He currently runs his own studio, Within, which has produced VR documentary projects including Clouds Over Sidra (2015) for the UN. Lore Koblin wrote the Turk job description in a single afternoon: "draw a sheep, facing left, receive $0.02." Workers completed sheep at a rate that fluctuated with Turk's background supply — some days yielded hundreds, some days yielded fewer. A small percentage of the 10,000 were rejected by Koblin for not facing left, or for being obviously a bot-generated placeholder; the rejected entries were published separately as The Sheep Market: Rejects. Several early Turk workers later wrote short memoirs about their participation in the project, published on blogs in 2008–09; Koblin has said that reading these accounts reshaped how he thought about the ethical weight of the work. He keeps the rejection database. It is not publicly hosted but has been exhibited as a secondary documentation piece. Sources • Koblin, Aaron — The Sheep Market (thesheepmarket.com, 2006). • Ross, Joel; Irani, Lilly; Silberman, M. Six; Zaldivar, Andrew; Tomlinson, Bill — "Who are the crowdworkers?" (CHI 2010; labor-critical context on Mechanical Turk). • Koblin, Aaron — aaronkoblin.com (artist archive).