Okay, but where's the profit going?
Great idea: Convince 10,000 digital artists to create a tiny piece of a US treasury note, then assemble it into a collage and sell the prints. Each artist received a penny for their time, and each print costs about $100. It is vaguely reminiscent of the widely publicized site "Million Dollar Home Page" of 2007. But Google isn't amused and they've removed "Ten Thousand Cents" from their legitimate ecommerce vendor list.
The project can be found here:
http://www.tenthousandcents.com/top.html
In their words this is a bold experiment:
"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 a 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.
Perhaps. But a good experiment is one that can be replicated, and we can't imagine anyone boondoggling 10,000 busy people to work 3 minutes for a penny - twice. Even Marx and his gang couldn't pull that off for very long. Perhaps this has merit as a structure for 'crowd-sourcing' and 'virtual economies' if its profits are channeled into deserving charities. And try something besides legal tender next time. Then we might see it become a popular means for fundraising on par with more old-fashioned bake sales and lemonade stands.