Category: Textual

I Feel Better After I Type To You

From Lot 49:

Within the third of the ten files of user search queries AOL mistakenly released, there’s a poem of sorts. Between May 7 and May 31 of this year, AOL user 23187425 submitted a series of more than 8,200 queries with no evident intention of finding anything – only a handful of the entries are paired with a search results URL. Rather, the author’s series of queries forms a stream-of-consciousness soliloquy.

Whether it’s fact or fiction, confession or invention, the search monologue is strangely compelling. It’s a uniquely temporal literary form in that the server time stamps make the passage of time integral to the storytelling. It could be the beginning of a new genre of writing, or simply an aberation. But it does beg further explanation. What circumstances prompted the author to converse thus with AOL’s search engine?

AOL user 23187425’s “stream of consciousness soliloquy” has now been turned into a book by Superbunker (Superbunker being “a framework for conducting and disseminating cultural research… operating as a cross between a think tank and a decentralized federation of neo-alchemical laboratories..”).

I want one.

Gabrielle De Vietri

(Via Freakley.)

Official site.

The Relationship Contracts (well, the two I’ve seen) are beautiful.

(If these existed outside the realm of Art, they’d make life a lot simpler. But much less interesting..)

Audio interview, mostly about the Ideas Catalogue.

From statement:

Through my work I aim to address common personal, social, and artistic problems. My source material originates in the overlapping codes of behaviour in social, professional and legal interactions and transactions. Departing from flawed givens, misleading texts, and habitual human behaviours, I attempt to locate alternatives, however absurd.

…While my works are mainly text-based, they often expand to incorporate their contexts in performative or sculptural ways…

My central interests lie in a desire to affect and redirect our social imaginary, which disciplines the way in which we lead our lives. I intend to communicate the purpose of my works to individuals rather than masses, broadening and diversifying the way in which their social imaginary functions, and in turn affecting the way in which they think and behave. This public outlook makes for artworks which are frank, moralising, social, and instructional.