Crowdsourcing Humanity

Now that we’ve been living in the Information Age for over 50 years, it’s safe to say we’ve become quite proficient at gathering data. We’ve built elaborate systems to collect and transmit data. We’ve also built elaborate systems to protect and encrypt personal information so it can’t be misused.

Scientists are just beginning to understand the power of the people in gathering, processing and analyzing huge amounts of data. Peer to peer computing networks and citizen scientists are helping the scientific world gather an entire world of data. But automated systems are churning out more data than we know what to do.

Some clever artists are sensing that within each piece of data there is a single artifact of humanity. When pooled together, those data points become a catalog, documenting human moments. The patterns that can be derived from the information clearly document our culture.

It turns highly impersonal data into a very intimate portrait of humanity.

Artist Aaron Koblin gave a TED Talk at this year’s technology, art and design demonstration. The video is 18 minutes but is very powerful. Here’s some background on what he mentions during his talk.

“The 19th Century culture was defined by the novel.
The 20th Century culture was defined by the cinema.
The culture of the 21st Century will be defined by the interface.” — Lev Manovich, media theory professor of Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego

He sets the scene by saying, “Interface can be a powerful narrative device.” Marshaling the power of the Internet, powerful home computers running on a protocol that showcase the power of audio and video, Koblin puts an artsy twist on the hustle and bustle of modern life while leveraging the latest technology to help refine the information, tranforming it into art.

First he visually represents one statistic – there are 140,000 airplanes flying at any given time – and turns it into an art project called Flight Patterns. Then he creates a map with routing information, makes it come alive by color-coding different aspects. The overall image is a dynamic system that could just as easily be a snapshot of our brains in action as the U.S. flight system.

Working with the Senseable Cities Lab at MIT he maps international communication in a way that could easily appear to be a giant solar flare erupting on the sun. By visualizing tiny bits of information a story emerges and it is one where the digital world looks like a mirror image of the natural world, an idea that should comfort some.

Drawing on a computer program developed by Amazon.com called Mechanical Turk, Koblin exploited the system for his own artistic pleasure. Mechanical Turk creates human intelligence tasks that allows access tens of thousands of people to perform simple jobs, like rating an item, drawing a simple picture or just giving an opinion. The idea is that there are some things people can do better, faster and more accurately than a computer. For their small effort they are given a small reward. Each task takes just a minute and participants are paid in pennies.

For his digital sheep project, The Sheep Market, Koblin asked for people to give him their two cents by drawing a sheep. For that, he would in turn pay them two cents. He collected 10,000 sheep for his project and then sold the sheep as stamps on an open sheep market in blocks of 20. He did similar projects with asking people to draw portions of a $100 bill as part of his Ten Thousand Cents project. This was to measure accuracy rather than creativity. Then he built an audio task to collect voice recordings which he turned into a crowdsourced version of “Bicycle Built for Two.”

He also decided to demonstrate the power of the modern web browser by challenging people to create music videos without using a digital camera, or any camera for that matter. He again had people draw images which he then stitched together into 24 frames per second. And the result was a collective tribute to Johnny Cash, honoring the last song he ever recorded before he died.

In another music video project, he personalized the video for the individual viewers by having them enter their street address before playing the song, We Used to Wait by Arcade Fire. In this ongoing project, Google Earth and advanced web browser features help serve up personal childhood information in the context of the music, giving the video a more intimate feel.

Through all of his artistic exploration with technology, Koblin’s message is clear. The data that is out there is not to be feared. He says, “I think data can actually make us more human.”

Koblin works for Google, where he is currently directing the Data Arts team.

“As we collect more and more personally and socially relevant data we have an opportunity and maybe even an obligation to maintain the humanity and tell some amazing stories as we explore and collaborate together.” — Aaron Koblin, media artist