If enough people complete them, tiny tasks can accomplish great things. Companies like Yelp, for instance, have used the input of millions to create review databases. iStockPhoto pools images from a huge group of photographers to make a cohesive collection. Newer companies, like Waze, which leverages its user base's smartphones to create maps, are consistently coming up with new and innovative ways to use crowdsourcing.

The art world has also leveraged the power of crowdsourcing to create some stunning works. These seven projects involve many people coming together to contribute to a bigger picture.







Sticking to its crowdsourcing theme, SwarmSketch randomly chooses a popular search term as the topic of each week's collective drawing (this week, for instance, you can contribute to "Black Swan Movie"). Each artist can contribute just one short line per visit, after which he or she is asked to vote on how bold other users' lines should be.

To date, the crowd has drawn about 195,000 lines in 350 sketches.







The creators of this website call it a "snapshot of our global society." Their project is an online canvas composed of 1 million squares and they're hoping to get people from all over the world to paint pictures that fill them. The end artwork will be printed on a giant 80-meters wide by 31-meters high canvas.

"By working towards a common goal, but having the space for individual expression, we are hoping that a collaboration can evolve that communicates a single powerful message in its numbers, yet maintains the intimacy of the individual," the website explains.

There's a long way to go before the project is complete, but so far about 28,300 artists in 174 countries have completed squares.

3. Learning to Love You More







From 2002 to 2009, Learning to Love You More posted assignments from artists Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher. Participants who accepted these assignments — such as "repair something" or "interview someone who has experienced war" — turned in photos, Word documents, videos and audio clips of their completed tasks.

The collection of projects inspired a book and was presented at venues that include The Whitney Museum, The Seattle Art Museum, and the Wattis Institute. In 2009, the website was acquired by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.







Back when Amazon's Mechanical Turk was a new idea, artist Aaron Koblin used it as a way to hire workers who were instructed to paint "sheep facing left." Each sheep earned $.02. The resulting Sheep Market allows you to choose a sheep from a selection of 10,000 and watch how it was drawn.

In a paper on the project, Koblin wrote that "The inspiration for The Sheep Market project stems from the urge to cast a light on the human role of creativity expressed by workers in the system, while explicitly calling attention to the massive and insignificant role each plays as part of a whole."

The Sheep Market was the first of many pieces that Koblin has created using crowdsourcing.







In order to earn a place in the credits of this tribute to Johnny Cash, all you need to do is submit one frame of a video that is being created for his last studio recording, "Ain't No Grave." The website provides a reference image, which you can practically draw on top of using the site's custom tool, so there's no need to be shy about your art skills. The project then combined those frames to make a moving video.

The project is directed by directed by Chris Milk, a music video director who has worked with Kanye West, U2, and directed Arcade Fire's recent HTML5 video experiment. Aaron Koblin, who created The Sheep Market, is one of the creative directors.







Sam Brown puts pictures to titles submitted by the crowd. Some recent pieces include "I haven't seen land in days..." and "I'm still not convinced that I'm a robot."







Since 1996, artist Lorie Novak has been accepting family snapshots on her Collected Visions Website. Visitors to the site can search through about 1,200 submitted photos and put them together with their own text and other photos. Their photo essays are also displayed on the site.

Novak writes on the site that the project, which is sponsored by the Center for Advanced Technology at New York University, "explores the relationship between family photographs and memory."

Which projects spoke to you? Are there any that you love and would like to share? Let us know in the comments below.

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