How to put a price tag on sin

If you could use your bank account to expiate for your sins, how much would you cough up for every act that sent you on a guilt trip?

Would you fork out more for lying to your mother or for watching silently as hoodlums beat up an innocent man? How terrible is it — in dollars or rupees — to watch as your country bullies another?

These are tough questions to answer, tougher still to frame as an artwork integrated with technology. Closeted in a room on the fifth floor of the New Museum at New York, artist Monica Narula and software whiz at Google Joshua Schachter tried to do exactly that in a project called Absolution Exchange. The deadline for figuring out ways to monetise guilt was 24 hours.

They had come together just on the morning of April 16, as had six other pairs of artists and technologists, to bind their skills together to create something totally new. Their only tools — laptops, digital cameras, maybe some brown paper and sketch pens.

“We had no clue about the nature of the project. I did not know I would be working with Schachter or the task we would be set,” says Narula back in Delhi and jetlagged after the show which brought in packed houses.

In their confab room at the New Museum, the going was not easy. Schachter, the techie, was lost without a whiteboard. So they used humungous strips of brown paper to work their ideas. Then, how does one get large amounts of data on guilt in a short window of time? They used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk: an online network of employable task-doers. They posted a bunch of 26 guilt hooks ranging from personal to global to 25 people at 10 cents a response. What they got at the end of the day-long experiment was 216 minutes of paid-for absolution.

Why pick on the concept of guilt and put it in the marketplace? “Guilt is one of the most plentiful resources in the world today and not without reason. We decided to push the idea — to say that it is not enough to feel bad, how about taking it further?” explains Narula.

The answers they collated to the question “How much is enough?” (How much money should they give to a charity to feel better?) were quite surprising. Rated highest on the list, at a cost of $2000, was guilt at the existential question, ‘is there a point to life?’ Among the least valued of guilt trips is ‘leaving office early’! Lying to one’s parents was high up on people’s agenda of expensive sins.

Incidentally, people had the option to just put a number to the guilt factor and leave, but some also chose to play agony aunts: a natural instinct among human beings, says Narula. Here’s a sampling of the counsel that came their way: “We always regret something which we did to our parents as a child. So better get rid of the ill feeling”, “Sometimes forgetting to let go results in unwanted problems”.

One rebel respondent refused to put a value to guilt: “I don’t understand the relationship between feeling better and giving money.”

The ideas seven other artist-technologist duos came up with were more application driven than the Absolution Exchange. Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress, and Evan Roth of Graphiti Research Lab, for instance, came up with the idea of a new function on WordPress, Surprise Me. Now available to bloggers, every time you hit the publish button a congratulatory message swamps the screen. The idea, they said, was to do something to counter the sense of loneliness every blogger feels when he sends a piece of content out into the cyberspace.

Then there was the umbrella sharing service created by computer scientist Hilary Mason and sculptor Marc André Robinson. This imagines a communal umbrella that several people can use and that would record its own history, using embedded cameras and GPS.

It was a demonstration of how a mixing of art and tech could create new possibilities.