Will Google Eat Itself? On the activist project "Google Will Eat Itself", which looks at the monopoly held by the highly remunerative search engine.
Intro: >>The friendly-looking search engine and advertising company is again under attack by activist artists. The »Google Will Eat Itself« project, which critically explores the relations between the new click-based economy, technology and society, has recently succeeded in gaining the attention of a larger audience and was also nominated for the Transmediale festival award at the start of the year. Hans Bernhard, Lizvlx (both UBERMORGEN.COM), Alessandro Ludovico (Neural.it) and Paolo Cirio (epidemic) do not like the label »hacktivists« – they tend rather to call themselves »digital actionists«. The idea of the GWEI project is sophisticated, but at the same time simple: for every click on ads on registered partner pages of Google, both the company and its partner get a micro-payment from the advertisers. By hosting Google ads on many of their own hidden websites, the creators of GWEI are earning money with which they automatically buy Google shares. It will take a long time but, in the end, artists will own Google – a growing information and advertising monopoly that, due to its power and attitude, is becoming a dangerous element in our information society.
When the Google company found out about this endeavour, it cancelled some of the partner accounts and erased the GWEI website from its database. However, the other accounts remained untouched and the project continues: from now on, it will take 3,443,287,037 million years until GWEI fully owns Google.
From its early days, net.art has functioned as a kind of parallel counter-movement to the traditional art scene. Now, the situation is different: besides the online version of GWEI, the team has also put on several exhibitions in galleries (Johannesburg, Berlin, São Paolo, Sydney). It seems as if we are entering a period of »complex art«, where the manifestation of an idea can take on many forms, using various media.<<
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posted by johannes,
Friday, May 12, 2006
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