Summary
Brooklyn artist Clement Valla asked thousands of people online to copy small, simple line drawings on a grid to create a larger artwork. Using Amazon's web-based labor marketplace Mechanical Turk (the same service popularized by pioneering digital artist Aaron Koblin), Valla issued the following directive: “The drawing must be as similar as possible to the neighboring drawings.”
Description
The iterative process of copying produces growth-like structures in which different patterns of influence and large-scale structures emerge. These larger drawing characteristics are purely the result of local interactions; beyond the writing of the algorithm, no single individual is making larger decisions for the group.