I-Week Sneak Peek: Crowdsourcing Curator Andrea Grover on Finding the Crowd

Ever wonder how crowdsouced projects find their respective crowds? Or how the crowds find the projects? Lots of our contributors were curious about that, too. Contributor Leah DeVun asked Andrea Grover, founding director of the Houston-based Aurora Picture Show and curator of several crowdsourced art projects about selecting the crowd:

Q: You put together a group of artists using crowdsourcing for the show “Phantom Captain: Art and Crowdsourcing” at Apex Art last year. What can you tell me about the show and how you selected the artists in it?

A: I think all of the artists had this genuine interest in involving the general public in the production of the work and then sharing ownership of the work with the public, with the exception of Aaron Koblin, whose “Sheep Market” was a comment on the unwitting participation of people in corporate crowdsourcing and the lack of creative jobs available to the crowd. His particular contribution was more of a prank, while the others were more interest in exploring whether the crowd could create a greater work than the individual.

Q: How did Koblin solicit participants?

A: He used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, a website that uses humans to do things that people do better than computers. It’s mostly used by corporations for tasks like taking surveys, transcribing things, or sorting things. But now that Koblin used it for “Sheep Market,” it’s being used for other purposes. Other people are using Ebay to create artwork, such as John Freyer’s “All My Life for Sale,” which used Ebay to catalog and sell everything in his house, down to the Vidalia onion in his refrigerator. Then he followed his belongings to their new owners in their new locations and then wrote a book about it.

--tish grier