Hey artists! Interested in doing a little free, crowd-sourced labor to promote the legacy of an American legend? Such is the proposition of The Johnny Cash Project, a collaborative online music video for Cash’s moving single Ain’t No Grave, from his final album, American VI: Ain’t No Grave, which was released earlier this year. The initiative is brainchild of video director Chris Milk, who put together a clip for the song, featuring the Man in Black wandering along train tracks, reading the Bible, holding a crow, smoking a cigarette while reclining on the grave of A.P. Carter, and other activities that reflect the song’s theme of death and redemption. 

The website lets visitors render frames from the film as drawings using an online tool, and submit them, to be reassembled together as a single animated clip for the song. Since the launch of the project three weeks ago, some 5,000 drawings have been submitted. The video is different each time it is watched online, as the site randomly selects which drawings to use for each frame.

The effect is undeniably spooky, something like the hand-drawn animations of William Kentridge, with halos, crosses and all sorts of other images suddenly appearing and just as abruptly disappearing. All the same, "The Johnny Cash Project" does seem to indicate that certain avant-garde tropes of collaboration, chance and digital collage have definitively passed into commercial video cliché – "The Johnny Cash Project" even echoes Paul Slocum’s You’re Not My Father, for which the digital artist solicited contributors from the internet to recreate a 10-second clip from Full House (although Slocum, ahem, paid his contributors).

As affecting as the Cash clip is, Milk didn’t originally envision using his idea for the song. "While he had originally intended to work with a living artist, I suggested Johnny Cash," says producer Rick Rubin in a press release. "He thought about it and realized that Johnny's passing changed the meaning of the project for the better, and The Johnny Cash Project was born."