About

About This Project Mechanical Olympics is an online, crowdsourced version of the Olympic Games, where anyone can perform an Olympic event and everyone votes for gold medal winners. During the Olympic Games, MechanicalOlympics.org hosts daily polls where viewers vote on YouTube videos of Olympic event performances made by Turkers from Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk website.

HITs (or jobs) on Mturk.com included simple rules: workers had to wear the Mechanical Olympics signage, perform for the country and event described in the HIT, and upload a 30 – 60 second video of their performance of an Olympic event to YouTube. Abstractions on the idea of each event was encouraged. The workers gave me the URL to their video. In return, they were paid $3.50 usd. All voting poll winners receive a bonus payment.

All of the videos can be viewed on the YouTube channel, MechanicalOlympics.

Why? This project offers the Mturk.com workers, or Turkers, a creative and physical alternative to HITs that usually appear on Mturk.com. Mechanical Olympics promotes independent thinking and interpretation, even while performing mundane digital tasks. The videos posted on the blog are an Olympic event for the masses, where every viewer has the opportunity to vote on gold medalists. Participants and viewers are reminded that amateurs are just as engaging and entertaining as professionals.

About Me xtine is a media artist, educator, and the co-author of Digital Foundations. Her work is informed by the history of conceptual art and practices in the era of social-networking. Using tools common to consumer web practices such as databases, search engines, blogs, and applications – often in combination with popular sites like Facebook, YouTube, or Mechanical Turk – she creates web projects and communities that foster interpretation and autonomy. She believes art shapes social experiences by mediating consumer culture and envisioning imaginary practices. As an educator, she is interested in the art of instruction. Contact xtine [at] missconceptions [dot] net.

Comments