2013
Webcam portraits, slideshow
Project Link
Collecton of JODI
The middle finger response
Crowdworkers of the world united in a gesture
Recently I’ve been intrigued by one of the new trend in art-making practices: it is the use of crowdsourcing applied to art.
It basically consists in paying (very small) fees to a crowd of online workers dispersed around the world wide web that have to individually complete small tasks in order to produce huge and amazing pieces for the art world.
So, I finally decided to make my crowdsourced art piece too and I posted a simple task on the Amazon Mechanical Turk.
I’ve just asked all the crowd/cloud/online workers (regularly paid with a fee reward of about 0.5 U$D per submission) to take a picture in front of their own web cam with some simple and specific requests: to show/reveal their face, their context and, ultimately, their middle finger response.
Basically the result is a curated selection of spontaneous self portraits of cloud workers and a travel around one of the most represantive crowdsourcing platform.
In the end, “The middle finger response” is the cynical but sincere attempt to establish a dialogue between the artist, the public and the crowd dispersed through the new frontiers of leisure, labour and exploitation in the age of the big cloud.
Hope you’ll enjoy it!
