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'Seed Drawings' Crowd-Source Project Evolves as Living Artwork

by Warren Riddle on February 13, 2011 at 12:00 PM

clement valla 'seed drawing'
Writers and directors sometimes implore the public to submit brief, incremental elements in order to build a larger story or movie. Brooklyn artist Clement Valla recently embarked on a similar crowd-sourcing project, called 'Seed Drawings,' but her goal was to construct living, evolving artworks. Valla initially created artistic building blocks, and then asked the public -- via Amazon Mechanical Turk -- to contribute bordering pieces that needed to be "as similar as possible to the original drawings."

Over a three month period, thousands of contributors augmented those original drawings in order to create "large scale structures." Those resulting structures may not impress highbrow art fans, but this artistic progression immediately ranks ahead of previous schemes. Similar crowd-sourcing projects frequently fail because of the obviously fickle and sometimes inferior nature of fan submissions. These particular pieces, though, prove rather extraordinary to watch -- regardless of the actual artistic or aesthetic merits -- as they evolve into massive and chaotic amalgamations of publicly generated randomness.

Tags: amazon, amazon mechanical turk, AmazonMechanicalTurk, art, clement valla, ClementValla, crowdsourcing, design, mechanical turk, MechanicalTurk, seed drawings, SeedDrawings, top

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