consumerism

Kalfarlien 18, a home on Fløien designed by Einar Oscar Schou in 1909 and now in need of restoration, could have been refurbished into a facelifted historical showpiece: Schou also designed the National Theater, and the Bergen Kommune recognizes the villa’s cultural heritage. But the villa’s owners resist a vision of history that obliterates traces of natural decay. RestOration: Kalfarlien 18 reimagines the decaying villa as an eco-home quietly rebuffing the rigged hunger for new stuff. RestOration: Kalfarlien 18 recreates aspects of the villa even as its purview stretches far beyond the villa. An ambient soundscape creates a “lived in” homey feeling and moves guests through our interactive installation, to be located in UiB’s Humanities Library. At the center is an e-waste sculpture built on the myth of Narcissus and Echo that triggers aleatory poems when guests touch the trash. A tablet game features the villa’s original architectural drawings and decorative design elements. RestOration: Kalfarlien 18 is an e-lit ecopoem. Whether it’s the faint singing of a woman in the shower, or the functional e-waste, or the satisfying click of an actual Kalfarlien 18 doorknob unlocking pieces of the tablet game—RestOration juxtaposes the care economy of a home with the dizzying pace and alarming toxicity of technologic obsolescence. (source: ELO 2015 catalog)

Drive a thousand miles from the left/right coasts and you reach the sporadically populated plains, the supposed heart of the United States. But this flatland organ is sick and leaking, the young are fleeing, and consumerism, the addiction to purchase, has replaced the pride of working the land, growing crops and communities. And exploring these small American towns, reaching into the houses and malls and streets, is a modern harvest. This interactive digital poem harvest those objects from the living room gardens, the acres of shopping centers, picks the gaudy attachments of our lived environments. Through five sections, the living room, the bedroom, the kitchen, the garage and the mall, readers can harvest these modern croplands, the trinkets and objects filling our surroundings. And in the heart of the US, “to purchase” replaces “to create”, a crippling harvest of plastic and ceramic. (Source: GalleryDDDL description)

Google reads our emails, garners information from our personal messages and uses that profiling strategy to select “relevant” ads. It then displays those ads on the screen next to the very emails from which the information was initially taken.American Psycho was created by sending the entirety of Bret Easton Ellis’ violent, masochistic and gratuitous novel American Psycho through GMail, one page at a time. We collected the ads that appeared next to each email and used them to annotate the original text, page by page. In printing it as a perfect bound book, we erased the body of Ellis’ text and left only chapter titles and constellations of our added footnotes. What remains is American Psycho, told through its chapter titles and annotated relational Google ads.We were most curious how Google would handle the violence, racism and graphic language in American Psycho. In some instances the ads related to the content of the email, in others they were completely irrelevant, either out of time or out of place. In one scene, where first a dog and then a man are brutally murdered with a knife, Google supplied ample ads regarding knives and knife sharpeners. In another scene the ads disappeared altogether when the narrator makes a racial slur. Google's choice and use of standard ads unrelated to the content next to which they appeared offered an alternate window into how Google ads function — the ad for Crest Whitestrips Coupons appeared the highest number of times, next to both the most graphic and the most mundane sections of the book, leaving no clear logic as to how it was selected to appear. This "misreading" ultimately echoes the hollowness at the center of advertising and consumer culture, a theme explored in excess in American Psycho.

(Source: Mimi Cabell's project page for American Psycho)

"CATALOGUE: Nothingness" uses description, image, email and javascript to interrogate some of the cultural and mechanical forms that operate in online shopping. The work is designed to exist on a parallel plane with commercial shopping sites and to offer a menu of small interventions that extend outward into the world. The theme of nothingness was chosen for the catalogue in order to defamiliarize common structures found in online shops by substituting imaginary objects, states of being, and existential drama for regular items and marketing strategies.

(Source: Author's description from the Electronic Literature Directory)

“i made this. you play this. we are enemies.” is an art game, interactive digital poem which uses game levels built on screen shots from influential community based websites/portals. The game interface drives the poetic texts, the colliding and intersecting images, sounds, words, movements, a forever changing, reader built poetic wonderland. And using messy hand drawn elements, strange texts, sounds and multimedia layering, the artwork lets users play in the worlds hovering over and beneath what we browse, to exist outside/over their controlling constraints. Your arrow keys and space bar will guide you, with the occasional mouse click begging for attention. Each day the internet is humming with a million small interventions. From the humoresque mocking of community content sites like Fark, to the net gate keepers Yahoo and Google, partisan political portals like Huffington Post or the open source/file sharing ‘priates’ of Mininova, the web is an easy tool/weapon for meddling/influencing and sharing/forcing/alluring your opinion on whomever clicks. And yet this digiscape is a deceiving and uneasy place, with continual streams of generic expression/content, cute dogs and accident clips, knocking against an incredible range of political/social beliefs hidden beneath the screen. Even short sequences of words, titled links or blinking ads can reveal the strange, wondrous and treacherous.