To produce outsourced views “Mechanical Turks”, low-paid workforce plying their services on the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform, were commissioned to take a photo or short video of the view from the window nearest to their workspace.

Amazon Mechanical Turk is a “micro-work” marketplace created by Amazon as an internal stopgap - AI and automated systems were unable to complete the image recognition tasks desired by the company for consumer facing features. This obscuring of human labor within the corporate machine was dubbed “artificial artificial intelligence” by Jeff Bezos at the time. The platform was later opened up as an Amazon service allowing anyone to post job listings for very small enumerations (usually sub US$1). Users can browse the available tasks and choose to complete any of them for the remuneration offered by the requesters.

The exact demographics of the workers on this global platform was a mystery, and terms and conditions of the platform forbid requesting personal information. The commissioning of these landscape images built a portrait of this digital labor network at that point in time, offering an insight into the locations on living conditions of the workers.