<videovortex> Art Books with stolen YouTube comments

[luc gross]

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Vienna, 9 June 2012.

KINDLE'VOKE GHOST WRITERS.

A project by TRAUMAWIEN and Bernhard Bauch. 2011-2012.


Our bots are compiling and uploading hundreds of ebooks on Amazon.com  
with text stolen from the comments on YouTube videos.

http://www.amazon.com/Sparta-my-have-ebook/dp/B007MLJZSS/
http://www.amazon.com/Wierd-song-you-cute-ebook/dp/B007MMCYIU/
http://www.amazon.com/Alot-was-been-hard-ebook/dp/B007MMF2CU/

We programmed the bots to be completely autonomous. They are working  
uninterrupted through dislocated, anonymized accounts. We are not even  
able to track the exact amount of generated books infiltrating the  
Amazon Kindle library. The results are self-published, human-readable  
ebooks in form of classical dramas ready to be sold and enjoyed by a  
multitude of global readers, defining a new generative genre of  
digital literature: the 'slang of Youtube' - a digital Esperanto that  
emerged out of millions of users worldwide.

The Internet slang of YouTube comments is treated as fresh dialogue,  
and sold through Amazon.com in the form of massive, self-generated e- 
books. In an auto-cannibalistic model, user generated content is sold  
back to the users themselves, parasitically exploiting both  
corporations: YouTube and Amazon.

The KINDLE'VOKE GHOST WRITERS project's aim is to address and identify  
pertinent questions concerning the digital publishing industry's  
business models, as well as to draw the lines of new trends for a  
possible new kind of digital literature, after the web.

The project wants to raise questions like: who do YouTube videos/ 
comments belong to? Where does authorship start and end? To what  
extent does the e-book format have to be reconsidered with regard to  
the traditional book form, and what are its most innovative  
opportunities? How could we act and work on it?

Furthermore, this project explores the idea of exploitation of labor  
on web platforms to create or comment on attractive content. So-called  
"user generated content" is a product created and consumed in the  
exchange of free labor managed with surplus information overflow.  
Giant Internet corporations exploit people's ingenuity by trading  
contextual advertising. Users are the workers of a communication-junk  
factory, whose bytes are consumed by the producers themselves. By  
manipulating this exploitation, our system will give fair fame to the  
authors of those texts that clearly deserve a fair piece of the pie of  
this nonsense economy.

The project will presented in Vienna, on June 26, 2012.
At Kandinsky Lerchenfelderstrasse 13 1070 Vienna 20h.
A discussion will follow.

http://goo.gl/maps/Xgyu

Thanks for the attention.
TRAUMAWIEN, Luc Gross

http://traumawien.at/ghostwriters
http://facebook.com/traumawien
http://twitter.com/traumawien


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