An anthology curated by microworkers.

HARVESTED is based on found content, an arbitrary selection of adult films. It has been entirely fabricated by an orchestrated, fine-tuned set of scheduled routines, web scripts and task-based swarm intelligence. Material for this book was assembled from a decentralised network of peers and was filtered by an anonymous population of microworkers. The book has naturally become a coproduction by different publishers.

More than two thousand adult movies were bulk harvested from p2p websites directly to a server location. Following two separate scripts, the clips were automatically trimmed down to the first ten minutes and then broken into thousands of low-quality JPG snapshots awaiting to be filtered. The pool of images was later submitted to crowdsourced services that enable the coordination of human intelligence in the performance of tasks that computers are currently unable to do. A selected group of microworkers were assigned to filter these thousands of images according to a consciously vague instruction: as to whether or not they displayed contemporary art.HARVESTED brings to the foreground five-hundred found artworks from households, studios, movie sets and other heterotopias of the adult film industry. While this anthology underlines the importance for contextual, industry-specific art history, it posits by the same token, the need to activate peripheral vision in regard to scopophiliac practices. While IKEA paintings are pervasively dominant, one can find works from modern masters such as a rip-off from Fernand Leger, unknown Joan Miro works, Castle and Sun from Paul Klee but also contemporary works such as Quote, 1964, a print from Robert Rauschenberg, a series of paintings from Mark Rothko, School of Fontainebleau from Cy Twombly and even some replicas from Frank Stella and Lucio Fontana.