Can social networks produce art?

Can crowdsourced art actually produce high art?  Of course, take a look at Leroy Brothers’ BDRtist.  But how about other net projects.

The Johnny Cash Project (2010)  Aaron Koblin, Chris Milk and Radical Media

A unique crowd-sourced music video project honoring the legacy of Johnny Cash.  The Johnny Cash Project took the music video for Cash’s last studio recording “Ain’t No Grave” and invited artists to recreate it, frame by frame. Anyone can contribute at the Web site. The project basically asks participants to redraw every single frame of archival footage of Johnny Cash–thus building up a personalized, living portrait of the man.  As more and more people contribute, frames are constantly being redrawn–meaning that the video always changes. No two viewings are ever the same–”a visual testament to how the Man in Black lives on.”

Pretty neat result, don’t you think so?

 Bicycle Built for Two Thousand (2009) – Aaron Koblin and Daniel Massey

Bicycle Built For 2,000 is comprised of 2,088 voice recordings collected via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk web service. Workers were prompted to listen to a short sound clip, then record themselves imitating what they heard.
 

Ten thousand cents (2007) – Aaron Koblin and Takashi Kawashima

Ten Thousand Cents is a digital artwork that creates a representation of a $100 bill. Using a custom drawing tool, thousands of individuals working in isolation from one another painted a tiny part of the bill without knowledge of the overall task. Workers were paid one cent each via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk distributed labor tool. The total labor cost to create the bill, the artwork being created, and the reproductions available for purchase are all $100. The work is presented as an interactive/video piece with all 10,000 parts being drawn simultaneously. The project explores the circumstances we live in, a new and uncharted combination of digital labor markets, “crowdsourcing,” “virtual economies,” and digital reproduction.