commodification

Keith Obadike's Blackness for Sale was an eBay page advertising the sale of his blackness. The general format of eBay includes only the basic information about the product necessary to make it desirable for purchase. An item for sale typically includes a title or name of the product, a description of its uses, a starting price, and a photograph. In the case of Blackness for Sale, Obadike abided by this same format but replaces the description with a litany of pros and cons of blackness. Obadike focused on the selling points of blackness but then juxtaposed it with “warnings” of the drawbacks of owning a black identity. Although Obadike’s warnings were legitimate aspects of blackness, they were only issues of concern when inhabiting black flesh. Blackness for Sale Blackness for Sale furthered the notion that black people have been homogenized to the point where their experiences have become indistinguishable; to the outside world and the buyer, there is one black experience. Part of a person is advertised and valued much higher while systematically omitting the other elements that define their personhood. The most profitable aspect of black people is no longer their physical body but rather everything that encompasses their existence. Black culture becomes a new form of capital and the internet is where it is exchanged. Black culture can be taken from the internet without having to interact with or acknowledge the black body, thus erasing black people. Whereas before black people were only valued in capitalist societies for their physical abilities, they are now more so valued for their cultural capital.

(Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendi_%26_Keith_Obadike)

BEAST. The Web fosters, and depends on, utter transience of attention. Extending television's effects through its much-vaunted interactivity, it has reduced writing to "content" squeezed between gaud and flash and irrelevance. In Beast, the reader directs the progress of a single text by interacting with it and its interior world of fake-3-D images. Beast tries to tap the interactive possibilities of the medium while allowing the text to be seen as a whole; the eye is a hypertext engine more sophisticated than any we could devise. But Beast also subverts itself through jarring messages and the system's periodic takeover of its own functions. A nightmarish, superficially dehumanizing system, Beast decocts much that is terrifying and unpleasant about computer technology, and about society and ourselves as the computer has built us. But this monstrosity has a humanizing core, the text, that speaks to the anxieties the system produces. Beast attempts to highlight the dichotomy between the ugliness of computer technology and its almost medieval beauty, that archaic and authentically primitive quality of the Web-wide world that has erected itself among us so suddenly, and that rests on so little besides marketplace forces.

(Source: Author's description for 1998 Virtual Worlds conferenc)

"uConnect" is an attempt to deal with the materiality of digital commodities, commerce, and culture through a juxtaposition of simulation and the representation of materiality.

Artist Statement"uConnect" is an attempt to deal with the materiality of digital commodities, commerce, and culture. Mocking both museum and retail showroom aesthetics a computer display sits atop a pedastel exhibiting a stock tropical island screensaver. Interrupting this banal yet inviting simulation is a soundtrack made up of recordings of workers in the microprocessor industry testifying to the hazardous working conditions in so called "cleanroom" environments. As the testimonies unfold it becomes clear that "cleanroom" facilities are constructed to protect technological components from the contamination of humans, yet provide little to no protection to humans from the toxic effects of the dangerous chemicals used in the manufacturing process. The value of the human life and the decline of all of earths life systems (due in large part to "technological advances" of the 20th and 21st centuries) is continually eclipsed by the next wave of consumer gadgetry that offer endless ways to negate and disguise the real in favor of the virtual. The piece has a similar appearance and conceptual framework as many ready-mades or object appropriations yet seeks to make explicit the political economy of the object in ways often left out of common-object-as-art scenarios. Project by Mark Cooley and Ryan Griffis.

(Source: 2008 ELO Media Arts show)