Justin Blinder

In 1973, while on his deathbed, Pablo Neruda penned 316 questions as 74 poems posthumously published in The Book of Questions. 

The Book of Answers is an anthology of responses to each of Neruda’s poems. These poems were compiled using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk), a utility that allows anyone to submit jobs to a global online workforce. The project attempts to (re)humanize this de facto dehumanized anonymous workforce by engaging workers with Neruda’s seemingly unanswerable questions.

Each of Neruda’s questions were embedded in a different menial survey answered by online workers. For example, after answering whether they strongly agree, agree, disagree, or strongly disagree with a statement about climate change, a worker is asked “What do they call the sadness of a solitary sheep?” 

What happens when these two very different practices of labor and poetics collide, in an online marketplace? When, in the midst of menial labor, do we find poetry?

Year: 2013-2018

Publications

Ritual & Capital, Wendy’s Subway + Bard Graduate Center.
The Hoosac Institute