Accept & Work

A.I.’s secret is human intelligence

Hosted by Merijn van Moll & Ruben van de Ven

This project is now archived and was part of DDW21

This project is part of
Art Tech Fun Robots eGirls Manifestations

Paulus van Dorsten

SETUP presents Accept & Work by Ruben van de Ven & Merijn van Moll: a triptych of installations about the hidden workforce behind AI. Dive into the world of Mechanical Turk: Amazon's online marketplace for human click-workers training AI by doing 'micro-tasks'.

Guest Worker

Guest Worker automatically hires people across the globe through Mechanical Turk to trace a pen-drawing of a square. Every drawing is made by giving the worker control over a physical pen in real-time, resulting in a new picture for the next worker. This creates an ever-changing version of the square. The morphing pen-drawing visualizes the feedback loop between man and machine that is established through platform work.

Auto-accept

This curious looking office-desk provides a kaleidoscopic experience of repetitive, simple clickwork. It is designed to zone out into a meditative flow-state, which workers experience when they are on an ‘auto-accept HIT streak’.

Exhausting MTurk

What are the tales of ‘Mechanical Turk workers’ behind the screens? Tales of solitude and comradery, profit and rejection, gratefulness and frustration. Fragments of impressions and experiences retrieved and structured by issuing assignments on the platform itself, draw an embodied picture of functioning in the world’s largest workshop.