Aaron Koblin — Ten Thousand Cents — crowdsourced $100 bill

2008

Artists: Aaron Koblin, Takashi Kawashima (collaborator) · Year: 2008 · Medium: Crowdsourced artwork — 10,000 Mechanical Turk workers collectively drew portions of a $100 bill for 1 cent each · Substrate: Mechanical Turk platform; each worker drew a 1-cent-sized portion of the $100 bill from a tiny reference image without seeing the whole; drawings composited into a single $100-bill image · Place: Los Angeles, USA · Institution: Independent; Amazon Mechanical Turk Aaron Koblin's Ten Thousand Cents (2008), co-created with Takashi Kawashima, commissioned 10,000 Amazon Mechanical Turk workers to each paint a single 1¢ tile. The 10,000 tiles, composited in Koblin's software, form a single $100 US dollar bill. Each worker received $0.01 for their painting. The total cost of the entire $100 artwork was $100. The symmetry is the argument. A $100 bill is reproduced, at bill scale, by the summed labor of 10,000 anonymous workers, each paid $0.01. The bill's material and its production cost balance exactly. The workers did not know what they were painting — each was shown only a small, abstracted pixel-neighborhood of the original currency image and asked to reproduce it. The composited result is the bill. Every tile is viewable individually on the project website; each tile carries a short video of the worker's mouse-motions as they painted, so the bill is simultaneously a static image and 10,000 small performance documents. Ten Thousand Cents is Koblin's sharpest case. It rhymes with his earlier Sheep Market (2006, elsewhere in this archive) but tightens the argument. Where the sheep were a free-form creative commission treated as data, the cents are a reproductive commission where the worker's creativity is explicitly suppressed in service of a reconstruction. The labor is aggregated into a specific, legible, deeply-charged object: currency, the substance of labor-value itself. The work was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 2008, at the Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt, at SFMOMA, and is in several permanent collections. Its online archive at tenthousandcents.com has run continuously for sixteen years. Koblin's subsequent Google Data Arts Team tenure (2009–14) extended the participatory-commissioning logic into larger-scale projects. He now runs Within, a VR documentary studio in Los Angeles. What makes Ten Thousand Cents matter to this archive is the operational clarity of its political argument. The piece is not about Mechanical Turk; it is about the economic logic of distributed labor compressed into a single artifact, which is how currency works. The piece is the argument. Lore Koblin and Kawashima wrote the Mechanical Turk tasks to give each worker a small abstracted patch of the bill to reproduce — decomposed such that no worker could see enough of the bill to know what they were painting. This decomposition took a surprisingly long time to engineer correctly: the first passes produced enough contextual clues that workers could guess they were painting currency, which introduced biases (workers painted more carefully when they realized what it was). Koblin iterated on the patch-extraction several times until the workers could no longer identify the source. The work's video archive of 10,000 painting performances runs to roughly forty hours of composite footage; Koblin has said in interviews that reviewing the archive was one of the most humbling research experiences of his career. The piece's original video archive is preserved at tenthousandcents.com. Sources • Koblin, Aaron; Kawashima, Takashi — Ten Thousand Cents (tenthousandcents.com, 2008). • Museum of Modern Art — Design and the Elastic Mind (exh. cat. 2008; included Ten Thousand Cents). • Koblin, Aaron — aaronkoblin.com (artist archive).