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Entertainment

Crowdsourced Sketch Reflects Internet's Tendency For Rebellion

Artist Clement Valla asked thousands of people to precisely copy a line drawing—some of them did, some didn’t. The results are fascinating.

Expecting the internet to correctly do something you ask is an exercise in futility, but artist Clement Valla asked anyway. In his crowdsourced drawings, this apparent internet-wide disregard for rules and authority was part of the experiment. Using the online labor marketplace Amazon Mechanical Turk, Valla asked participants to copy a simple line drawing which formed part of a larger, grid-based structure. As one drawing was completed, it was reproduced by another worker, all without any prior knowledge of what the larger work, called a Seed Drawing, looked like.

However, this human algorithm produced anything but the uniform pattern you’d expect. Instead, some of them did whatever the hell they wanted, conforming only in their collective choice to rebel, creating a wonderful abstract hive-drawing with individuality expressed as a unit in the context of the larger collaborative work. The fact that it was built by workers on Mechanical Turk gives an insectoid air to the whole generative process, like ants (albeit expressive ones) toiling away in a virtual colony. To see the structure take shape, and give further proof to its insectoid nature, watch it unfold in the time-lapse video above.

[via Fastcodesign.com]