Transcriber: Translate TED Reviewer: HK Sam
Thanks for having me.
So, we live in an interconnected world,
an increasingly interconnected world.
What you're looking at right here is a visualization of air traffic
of North America that I created a couple of years ago.
This isn't a system that's architected, this doesn't have a master plan,
but it's actually the result of hundreds of decisions
being made by people all across North America,
pilots, air traffic controllers,
all working together to create the system.
Communication technology's enabled
an unprecedented form of collaboration.
I create data visualization art like this,
and today I'm going to talk about a specific sub-set of the art projects
I've been working on that deal with methods of collaboration,
people working together to create
something larger than the sum of its parts.
My journey into collaboration
begins with this guy.
This is Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen's
mechanical chess playing machine.
And basically, this is a robot
that plays chess extremely well.
Except for instance, it's not a robot at all.
But as the matter of fact, there's a man
who sits at the bottom and controls this thing,
pretending to be a computer.
This was the inspiration for a web service by Amazon
called the Mechanical Turk.
If you can read up there, it says "artificial, artificial intelligence"
it's what they called it.
The premise of this is you can employ people through the Internet
to do small tasks,
in a completely distributed manner.
So, being about 50% artist and 50% nerd,
I was both completely intrigued and blown away
by the potential power of a system like this,
but also saw dystopic futures
in kind of thinking about the ramifications
for what this means
for work coming forward.
I decided to create a project to visualize the system
and begin experimenting with it.
So, I created a little drawing tool, and I said:
"draw a sheep facing to the left,
and I'll pay you two cents for your toils."
These are a few of the first drawings that came back.
A lot of sheep.
Tons of sheep.
And I took the first 10,000 sheep
and I put them in a website called "thesheepmarket.com".
And you can actually roll over each individual one
and juxtaposed against that huge grid
is the individual process
that each person went through when they drew it.
And you can actually see
the humanity of each individual
juxtaposed against this massive system.
On the website, I put all the sheep up for sale
in bundles of 20.
Although I had only paid people $0.20,
I sold them in blocks as a commodity for $20,
this is grossly an inflated price.
To begin a dialog about what it means to be working online
with intellectual property and also
with this idea of this distributed system
where nobody has any context,
they have no idea why they're drawing the sheep,
they were just participating in something larger.
There's a few statistics from the project.
There were 11 sheep per hour that came in
which makes an average wage of $0.69 per hour.
That means there are 662 rejected sheep that didn't meet "sheep-like" criteria,
and were thrown out of the mix.
The longest time spent drawing was 46 minutes
and the shortest time was 4 seconds.
So it gives you an idea of the different motivations
that were going into it.
There were 7,599 unique IP addresses.
That's about how many individual people participated in the project.
But from all those people, only one of them asked this -
"Why?"
So I expected a little bit more
of this kind of bizarre request.
There's a few reasons that I chose
to ask people to draw sheep.
One is that it's the first animal to be raised
from mechanic process byproducts
and also the first to be selectively bred for their production traits,
first animal to be cloned.
They're well known as being
a recognized symbol for being a follower.
And there's this reference to the book "Le Petit Prince"
where the prince asks the narrator to draw a sheep,
and he draws a sheep after a sheep,
and only when he finally draws a box
and says, "Use your imagination."
It's not about the scientific representation
but about being more creative an individual.
This is a frame
from a Charlie Chaplin's film, "Modern Times".
This is kind of a film about the last major changes
during the industrial revolution
when people were no longer shoemakers and tailors,
but people on assembly lines slapping soles on boots.
In this particular sequence,
Charlie Chaplin's being pushed through the gears,
talking about this changing relationship.
So, I took frames from the film and divided them in 16 pieces.
And I fed those pieces into Mechanical Turk
and paid people $0.05 for each piece.
And nobody has any idea what it is they are working on.
But they were building this rotoscoped video.
This inspired a project that I worked on
with my friend Takashi Kowashima,
where we used Mechanical Turk for exactly what it was meant for.
Which is making money.
I divided a 100 dollar bill into 10,000 pieces.
And I paid people the value of that portion.
So for $0.01, people were making these tiny little drawings
with no idea of what it was they were doing
and created this massive distributed forgery.
These forged bills were put online on this website "tenthousandcents.com".
Where you're actually able to exchange
real 100 dollar bills for these forged 100 dollar bills.
A donation of that goes to Hundred Dollar Laptop project
to get laptops to kids to potentially create more bills.
But as opposed to the Sheep Market
where there were rejected sheep,
here, everything that anyone drew
was included in the bill.
So you get a representation
of all the different types of participation,
included the person who wrote "$0.01? Really?"
and smiley faces and various other things.
This is a time lapse
that you can see on the website
of all the 10,000 people
creating this 100 dollar bill.
You can see each individual piece drawing in.
This is another project that I worked on
with my friend Daniel Massey.
It's called "Bicycle Built for Two Thousand".
This is a shot of Max Mathews at Bell Labs in the '60s
where he created the world's first singing computer.
Some of you may be familiar
with the song from "2001: A Space Odyssey"
at the end of the film when HAL's dying.
He sings the song which is kind of a nod to the moment
when the computers became human.
I was really interested in this idea of Mechanical Turk,
where people are pretending to be machines,
and here where machines are pretending to be people
and kind of what this all might mean.
So, we took the song, divided it,
resynthesized it, into individual notes.
You may be able to hear the synthesis
from the original song right now.
(Music)
So, we took that song and all the individual notes
and we fed it into a program on the Mechanical Turk,
where people would enter the request code from their task,
test the microphone -
(Voice) Hello? Hello?
receive a small sound clip -
(Sound)
just one individual note,
and then, recreate it -
(Sound)
to the best of their abilities -
(Sound)
And we collected these sound clips from all around the world
and reassembled them to be in making the song.
So, this is what the first batch of clips sounds like when put together.
(Sound)
So, basically, we took all those different variations
and we stacked them on top of one another
and assembled as distributed chorus,
so everybody was singing individual notes and sounds,
and we put that together on this website,
"Bicycle Built for 2,000".
Where you can listen to each individual contribution and the chorus.
I'll play a clip from it.
(Music)
So, I'll just talk very briefly about this project.
This is a music video that I worked on
with music video director James Frost
for the band Radiohead.
My favorite part of this project
was that we released this as an open-source project on Google Code,
basically I wrote a bit of computer software
that allows you to create your own renderings
from the data that we open-source and release to everyone.
There was a YouTube Channel and various other forums
where people were creating their own versions of the video
and sharing them with others.
These are two of my favorites.
This is the pinboard Thom Yorke and the Lego Thom Yorke animation.
Even more recently,
somebody even 3D printed Thom Yorke's head
from the data that we released.
I was really inspired about this,
this idea of people working together,
but not because there's a financial motivation,
and actually with a lot of context
understanding what it was they were working on,
working together to build something.
So, we've thought we could take this a little bit further.
I teamed up with my friend Chris Milk
to build a project for Rick Rubens' final album for Johnny Cash,
where there's a track called "Ain't no Grave",
which is largely about Johnny Cash's resurrection, this final track.
We thought, what better way to make a music video for this project
than to get people to contribute in build up a music video
as kind of his resurrection.
These are a few frames from the project,
different drawings by different people.
Kind of all working off the same base together to build up a video.
So, what you see here if you go to the JohnnyCashProject.com
you can watch the video as it grows and changes
because it's always being developed.
You can also contribute to the project.
What you'll see on the website
is the video on the upper portion of the screen
and then these stalactites begin to form as people submit new drawings.
So, I just want to close out with one quick video
that kind of summarizes this project,
because it's better seen than talked about.
(Video) Man: What'd be better way to pay tribute to the man
than to make something for one of his songs.
I felt really sad when he died
and I just thought it'd be wonderful
and really nice to contribute something to his memory.
It really allows this last recording of his
to be a living, breathing, memorial.
For all of the frames to be drawn by fans,
each individual frame,
it's got a very powerful feeling to it.
I've seen everybody from Japan, Venezuela,
to the States, Knoxville, Tennessee.
As much as it's different
from frame to frame,
it really is personal.
Watching a clip video and frame,
I could see me not understanding from the beginning of it,
I just worked and worked through problems
until my little [unclear]
I was fighting until the picture
all begun to resolve itself.
You can actually see [unclear]
when I know what I'm doing.
A light and a dark comes into it
and in a weird way,
that's what I actually like about
Johnny Cash's music as well.
The sum total of his life,
all the things that happened,
the bad things and good things that you hear about his life.
Aaron Koblin: Thanks very much. (Applause)