Smileys, stick figures and 10,000 cents reconstruct $100

A penny can go a long way on the Internet.

Aaron Koblin makes that point and questions the ethics of cheap online labor with tenthousandcents.com art that he jokingly refers to as "the world's largest distributed forgery project."

Koblin diced a US $100 bill into 10,000 itty-bitty pieces and used Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to contract an equal number of people to hand draw recreations of individual bits. He paid each of them a cent for the work and didn't reveal the bigger picture. Koblin put the drawn pieces together.