Clement Valla drew a line. Then he asked 500 people to trace it, one after the other. The below video is the result. This lovely video art illustrates how individual differences can compound changes in perception over time, even when starting with the simplest of designs.

He also did it with a circle:

I can’t help but wonder if the results were affected by how the 500 people were chosen: They were paid 2 cents each using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk marketplace. At first I thought the quality would be worse from paid workers, but then I realized that if this was in a museum or art show some idiot would sign his name or draw a smiley face and screw the whole thing up. (via)