Laborers of Love

February 01 2013

Laborers of Love is a project focused on the relationship between online sex and online work, specifically how technology mediates desire and sexuality. We are interested in how online culture has transformed what we mean by labor, sex, gender, sexual preference and collaboration, as well as how we think of pornography in terms of production and consumption.

The project uses Mechanical Turk (mturk.com) to create your sexual fantasy. Mturk is an internet application that hires anonymous online workers to complete a set of tasks that are a few steps beyond automation - still requiring human intelligence. Workers get paid a small amount of money per task. Businesses list jobs and online workers get paid to fulfill the tasks requested.

This is an example of a video produced by Mechanical Turk Workers through the Laborers of Love site. You can check out the entire "stauts page" by clicking here.

For this first version of the project we want to find out how this global pool of anonymous workers interpret your sexual fantasy through image and video. You will be directed through a series of questions about your sexual preferences. It takes less than a minute. Your input will guide the workers as to what images and videos they should choose to represent your fantasy.

Once your input is submitted, it will be sent to MTurk. Through a division of labor, anonymous workers will interpret each one of your responses and search the internet for the image or video they feel best matches your response. When the job is complete your fantasy will be revealed. So why waste another minute - get started now!