The entire flock of miniature sheep gazes to the left, like a setting from Karl Marx's toy farm. But "The Sheep Market" is neither toy nor farm -- it's an art piece comprising thousands of individual drawings by thousands of individual artists assembled by artist Aaron Koblin.

Koblin, who works out of San Francisco, is redefining mass media. Most of us visualize mass media as vast commercial communications that cost millions of dollars. In Koblin's world, mass media comprises the coordinated work of thousands of individuals paid a few cents each.

For The Sheep Market, Koblin commissioned 10,000 drawings of sheep by online workers, who were paid 2 cents per drawing. The work was later exhibited in galleries in Spain, Japan, New York, Australia, and the Netherlands. On The Sheep Market website, you can view each sheep being drawn, email a sheep to a friend, and -- true to the work's title -- even purchase one.

The project also served as the centerpiece of Koblin's 2006 MFA thesis at UCLA, which comprehensively covers his views of sheep, art, and the tool he used to create the project, Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk).

Koblin has uniquely tapped MTurk to crowdsource creative expression. Crowdsourcing usually drives websites like Wikipedia, which rely on an entire community to develop a single project. Koblin is a pioneer of crowdsourcing actual art.

Another Koblin project, "Bicycle Built for Two Thousand" (a collaboration with Daniel Massey), combines 2,088 short voice clips in a chorus of "Daisy Bell." (HAL, the singing computer of "2001: A Space Odyssey," would be envious.) The Bicycle Built for Two Thousand website enables you to listen to the entire piece and the individual performances by "singers" from 71 countries. For raising their voices, contributors were paid 6 cents each.

Then there's "Ten Thousand Cents" (a collaboration with Takashi Kawashima), the crowdsourced illustration of a $100 bill. The total labor cost was $100, which is also the price of each reproduction. All proceeds from sales of prints benefit One Laptop Per Child.

Koblin's most widely recognized work is not crowdsourced -- it's open sourced. He served as Director of Technology on the music 'video' for the Radiohead song "House of Cards" (directed by James Frost). The video is actually an interactive 3D work that enables viewers to rotate and dive into virtualized images of the performance. Launched as an Open Source project on Google Code, House of Cards received a 2009 Grammy nomination for Best Short Form Music Video.

Koblin continues to create art from pools of digital data, some crowdsourced, others compiled from airplane flight patterns or telecommunications. His vision has been recognized by a 1st Place Science Visualization Award from the U.S. National Science Foundation, and inclusion in Creativity Magazine's 2009 Creative 50, to name a few honors.

You can view a virtual gallery of Koblin's creations on his site www.aaronkoblin.com. Just be prepared: since these interactive works contain the voices and visions of thousands of individuals, you might lose yourself in the crowd.