The  Sheep Market, Aaron Koblin

In this 2006 work, Aaron Koblin explores the communal potential of the internet. For 40 days, he collected drawings of sheep by random internet users; “the sheep market is a collection of 10,o00 sheep created by workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Each worker was paid $.02 *US) to ‘draw a sheep facing left.'”(thesheepmarket.com) While this piece doesn’t take itself too seriously, -they are just sheep, after all- the variety and mass of sheep is quite interesting. The variation and uniformity of people’s interpretation of a simple instruction highlights the way that we collectively understand ‘sheep’ while reasserting a sort of subtly individuality.

Average time4 spent drawing each sheep:105 seconds

Average Wage: $0.69/hr

Rejected Sheep: 662

Collection Rate: 11 sheep/hr

Unique IP addresses: 7599

Universe, Jonathan Harris

In this piece, Jonathan Harris has created a program which creates the ‘universe’ of any input. Through this work he questions “If we were to make new constellations today, what would they be? If we were to paint new pictures in the sky, what would they depict? These questions form the inspiration for Universe, which explores the notions of modern mythology and contemporary constellations. It is easy to think that the world today is devoid of mythology… In many ways, what we have today are personal mythologies, practiced by a world of individuals.” (universe.daylife.com/statement) What interests me most is the personal specificity of the project; you define your own universe. Universe allows for the creation of these personal mythologies, defining new constellations and locating and organizing the information that contributes to that universe. “Whereas news is often presented as a series of unrelated static events, Universe strives to show the broader narrative that contains those events.”(universe.daylife.com/statement)

Midimals, Georg Reil

Through Processing, Georg Reil created a water basin which is used as a multitouch table for music application. A fairly simple interface, the user touches the top of the water and corresponding lights and noise is played. Pulsing lights follow the trajectories of the lines that the user has traced. The duration of the sound is controlled by touch as well, the movement of the lights indicates something about the corresponding noise. Primarily, this is an aesthetic exploration; I find the elegance of the form to be very compelling. However, I am interested in the tactility. Does it function beyond the simple tapping on the surface of the water? What happens if the hand is plunged below the meniscus? Could a program be written which correlates sound to that movement as well?