1st Thursday at W+K with Aaron Koblin

Today was the opening of the Aaron Koblin exhibition at the Wieden+Kennedy gallery. Aaron Koblin (Technology Lead of Google’s Creative Lab) "is an artist specializing in data visualization. His work takes social and infrastructural data and uses it to depict cultural trends and emergent patterns." As it says so nicely on the W+K blog. My two absolute favorites were the ingenious Ten Thousand Cents and Johnny Cash projects. For both projects Koblin relied on people all over the world to participate and perform a small, online drawing task. Once brought together, all the little pieces lost their individuality and became one big piece.
For Ten Thousand Cents, thousands of individuals working in isolation from one another painted a tiny part of a $100 bill without knowledge of the overall task (Participants were paid one cent each via Amazon's Mechanical Turk distributed labor tool, making the total labor cost to create the bill exactly $100). See the end result and more info here.
Participants of the ongoing Johnny Cash Project are invited to create a single drawing (a still from the clip). When all these drawings are played in the correct order and form the full clip, they become part of a collective tribute to Johnny Cash, set to his song "Ain't No Grave." Inspired by the song's central lyric, "ain't no grave gonna hold my body down," it represents Cash's continued existence (even after his death) through his music and his fans. The work continues to change as more people participate. Check out an example video here.
The idea of all these people (no matter who or where) doing their little part (through the use of web based technology) and making a whole that they have no control over and yet they have all they control. Love it.
I became a big fan tonight, Aaron.