I had this idea to get my friends together to create art. I created a simple tool which allowed them to draw on a small canvas. I gave them a small number of pixels each, but they could cooperate (and earn bonus pixels) or overwrite others' work.

I ran a small iteration of this project back in 2009 with my friends. People had fun so I decided to add a few new features. Currently, the tool has an ability to "mine" tokens directly on the page - with enough patience, you can earn free pixels just by staying on the page. I'm also trying to make it a little easier to draw and explore what others have done.

I hope to be done in a couple of weeks, at which point I'll give all my classmates a chance to contribute with a relatively large number of pixels each. In the meantime, you can play with the test run, by mining the pixels (you can also email me to get a token). The canvas so far is shown below. Click through to contribute!

This is the canvas of the current crowdsourcing art experiment.

To get all the details, you can read about this project here.

By the way, in the 2009 iteration, my friends came up with this:

This is the result of the 2009 iteration of the project.