The following projects examined and explored the territory of Amazon Mechanical Turk from 2016-2019.
Amazon Mechanical Turk is an online crowdsourcing marketplace founded by Amazon in 2005. The service, described as “artificial artificial intelligence”, provides micro-work in the form of atomized tasks that humans can perform better than computers.
Brett Wallace, AMAZING INDUSTRIES, Inside the Automaton. PDF. Published, January, 2018.
Brett Wallace, AMAZING INDUSTRIES, Inside the Automaton pf Mechanical Turk. Published, December, 2017.
Survey data from 609 Mechanical Turk Workers sent through a paid task on mTurk.com, December, 2017.
760 photographs from Mechanical Turk Workers of their workspaces sent through a paid task on mTurk.com, December, 2017
Brett Wallace, AMAZING INDUSTRIES, installation view, SPRING/BREAK Art Show, New York, 2018. Photo: David Riley.
Brett Wallace, AMAZING INDUSTRIES, installation view detail of sourced photographs from Mechanical Turk workers, SPRING/BREAK Art Show, New York, 2018.
Materials: Photographs of mTurk workspaces, mTurk performance, VR, video, custom beanbags, dog bowl, vinyl, 3D print, plant, laptop, folding desk, stool.
Brett Wallace, Mechanical Turk Worker Diary Entries, 2018-,
Brett Wallace, Mechanical Turk Workstation, installation view, 2019. Photo: Nicholas Knight.
Materials: desk with monitors, videos, custom flag, photos, clock, drawings, office supplies. Dimensions: 9′ (h) x 6’ (w) x 45″ (d).
Mechanical Turk Workers, video, 2 hrs., 36 min., 7 sec., 2019. Mechanical Turk Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs), video, 18 min., 27 sec., 2019. Written, produced and directed by Brett Wallace. Preview links here and here. One monitor plays a video of Mechanical Turk workers, an invisible labor force on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform, discussing their work. Workers were paid $2.00 for each 2 minute video submitted over Amazon’s platform as a work task. A second video shows work tasks, such as identifying images, which an artificial intelligence program could not do without human assistance.
Brett Wallace, Mechanical Turk Workstation, installation view, 2019. Performer: Mischa Ipp. Photo: Nicholas Knight.
Brett Wallace, Mechanical Turk Workstation, installation view, 2019. Photo: Nicholas Knight.