‘The Sheep Market’ by Aaron Koblin is basically a series of ten thousands images of sheep drawn by online workers of AMT (Amazon Mechanical Turks). The visitors can view each sheep and buy them on stickers or have them fill their field of vision as part of gallery installation.
In my opinion, the project represents the bad side of capitalist society. What AMT workers do is to answer Amazon customer’s question rather than the machines answering them. They get paid a few cents for each answer and Koblin asked them to draw sheep facing left. Sheep is often used as a symbol of the pastoral in art. Pastoral illustrates the values of the sophisticated by the unsophisticated and reinforces the universal rightness of their audience's values and an immanent apologia for wealth, power and inequality. The project portrays the same thing and also foreshadows the grim future of effective labour.
===============================================
The Furtherfield Review
http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?From=Index&review_id=220
The Sheep Market
http://www.thesheepmarket.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment