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Thanks!
So, we're living in an interconnected world,
an increasingly interconnected world.
Which you're looking at right here is a visualization of the air traffic
of the North America that I've created in a couple of years ago.
This is a system that's architected,
this doesn't have a master plan,
but actually the result of hundreds of decisions
been made by people all across North America,
pilots, air traffic controllers, all working together to create the system.
Communication technology's been able of an unprecedented form of collaboration.
I created a visualization all like this
and today I'm going to talk about a specific sub-set of the projects
I'm working on to deal with matters of collaboration,
people working together to create something larger than some of this parts.
My journey into collaboration begins with this guy.
This is Wolfgang von Kempelen's mechanical chess playing machine.
And basically, this is a robot that plays chess extremely well.
Except for instance, that is not a robot at all.
But, in the matter of fact, there's a man
who sits at the bottom and controls this thing,
pretending to be a computer.
This is the inspiration for the webservice by Amazon
called the Mechanical Turk.
You can read up there, it says "artificial, artificial intelligence"
this is how they called it.
The premise of this is you can play people through the internet
to do small tasks, in a completely disturbed matter.
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 these topic futures in kind of thinking about the ramifications
for what this means for work coming forward.
I just like to create a project to visualize the system
and be experimenting with it.
So, I created a little drawing into, and I said:
"draw a sheep facing to the left".
and I'll pay two cents for your towels.
This is a field of the first drawings that came back.
A lot, 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 just oppose 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
just oppose against this massive system.
On the website, I put all the sheep up for sale
in bundles of 20.
Although I've 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 means to be working online
with intellectual property and also this idea of this distributed system
where nobody has any context,
they have no idea why they were drawing these sheep,
they were just participating in something larger.
These are 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.
That were thrown out of the next.
The longest time spent drawing was 46 minutes
and the shortest time was 4 seconds.
So it gives you an idea of different motivations
were going into it.
There were 7,599 unique IP addresses.
so that's about how many individual people participated in the project.
But from all those people, only one of them asked this.
We expected to be a little bit more because of this kind of bizarre request.
There's a few reasons that I chose to ask people to draw sheep.
One of them is that is the first animal to be raised
from mechanic process byproducts
and also the first to be selectevely bred for their production trace,
first animal to be cloned,
they're well know as being a recognized symbol for being a follower,
and there's this reference to the book "Le Petit Prince"
where the prince ask to the narrator to draw sheep,
and he draws sheep after sheep,
and only when he finally draws a box and says
"use your imagination."
That's not about the scientific representation
but about being a more creative individual.
This is a frame from a Charles 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 assembling lines slapping soles on boots.
In this particular sequence,
Charles Chaplin's been 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 and what they are working on.
But they were building this rotoscope video.
This inspired a project that I worked on with my friend Takashi Kowashima.
To use Mechanical Turk for exactly what was meant for.
Which is making money.
I took a 100 dollar bill and divided it 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".
Here we are actually able to exchange
real 100 dollar bills for these forged 100 dollar bills.
A donation that goes for Hundred Dollar Laptop project
to get laptops to kids to potentially create more bills.
But oppose 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 different types of participation,
included the person who wrote "$0.01 really?"
and smiley faces and that sort of things.
This is a time lapse that you can see on the website
of all the 10,000 people creating this 100 dollar bill
and you can see each individual piece drawing in.
This is another project that I were worked on
with my friend Daniel Massey, and 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's kind of a nod to the moment
when the computer became human.
Which is really interesting in this idea
of Mechanical Turk are people pretending to be machines
and here are machines pretending to be people and kind of all what this mean.
So, we took the song, divided it, resynthesized it, in individual notes.
You may be able to hear is the synthesized from the original song right now.
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 for their task.
Test the microphone.
Hello? Hello?
Receive a small sampler.
Just one individual note.
And then, recreated.
To the best of their abilities.
We collected these sound clips from all around the world
and reassemble them to be making the song.
So, this is the first batch of clips, sounds when they're put together.
So, basically, we took all these different variations
and we stack them on top of one another and assemble in this ditributed chorus,
so everybody were singing individual notes and sounds,
and anyway, we put them together on this website,
"Bicycle for Two Thousand",
where we can listen to each individual contribution
and we can actually hear the chorus, on the music clip from that.
So, I talked just very briefly about this project.
This is a music video that I worked on
with music video director James Frost from the band Radiohead.
I think my favorite part of this project was that
we released this as an opensource project on Google Code,
which basically means I wrote a bit of a computer software
that allows you to create your own renderings
from the data that we opensource released to everyone.
Then, what this meant was that
there was a U2 Channel and a several other forums
where people were creating their own versions of the video
and sharing them with other people.
These are two of my favorites.
This is a paint boarded 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.
And to be us 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 found we could take this a little bit further.
And teamed up with my friend Chris Milk to build a project for recurrence,
final album for Johnny Cash, which there's a track called "Ain't no Grave".
Which is largely about Johnny Cash resurrection, this final track.
We've found what'd be the better way to make a music video for this project,
to get people to contribute in build up a music video
which is kind of his resurrection.
These are a few frames from the project,
different drawings by different people.
A kind of all working on the same base together to build up a video.
So, what you see here is a figure of the "JohnnyCashProject.com".
You can watch the video as it grows and changes
because it's always in being developed.
You can also contribute with the project.
When you see on the website the video
on the upper portion of the screen
and these titles 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.
One better way to pay tribute to the man
that is to make something for one of his songs.
I felt really sad when he died
and I just thought it'd be wonderful
and it would be really nice to contribute
with something to his memory.
It really allows this last recording of his
to be a living, breathing, memorial.
For all of the frames be drawing by fans,
each individual frame is together for a powerful feeling to.
I see everybody from Japan, Venezuela, to the States, as far as you can see.
As much as different from frame to frame which is really personal.
Which is about make a video by its frame,
I could see me not understanding from the beginning of it,
I just worked and worked through problems until my little rebounds,
I was fighting until the picture all begun to resolve itself.
You can actually see all what I run into.
A light in the dark comes into, and in a weird way.
That's why you like Johnny Cash's music as well.
This is someone who told his life,
all things that happened,
the bad things and good things that you hear about his life.
Thanks very much.