Superconsumer

And in other news of consumuption/art projects:

For several days now I’ve been trying to work out what I think of a project I read about on We Make Money Not Art: It’s called Superconsumer, and was created by Franz Alken and Karl Rueskaefer. Superconsumer is described as a “bot” that buys stuff “autonomously” on eBay, and a little while later re-sells each object it has bought. In between, the purchased items are exhibted in an art gallery.

While transfering ordinary objects from the mass-market to an art space, the bot enhances the objects to pieces of art. This enhancement is temporarily, the bot takes away the “art aura” by selling this pieces again via ebay.The installation gives an constantly updated overview on the mass market. The programming of the process makes the items the bot will buy unpredictable — a search on the topic “football” can respond items like fan-articles, computer games, books or sportswear.

There are elements of this that I like, particularly the conversion of random objects into Things Of Interest (if not exactly art) by some more or less arbitrary process. I happen to think that many of the Things of most Interest to us on an individual level also acquire their value in some idiosyncratic way — albeit linked to biography, not random computer software.

And I like the idea that eBay users are in effect “arranging the exhibition without knowing it,” as the official description puts it.On the other hand, I’m not really sure I that completely get the point of using a “bot” to make this happen. I also think it’s kind of a mistake that (despite the usual nods to tech “interactivity”) the gallery viewer apparently doesn’t have an opportunity to buy the object him or herself. (I guess one could bid for it on eBay.) Maybe nobody would do it, but so what? Art galleries don’t just exhibit aura — they sell aura. Maybe that’s beside the point in this case, but if you’re using the gallery setting to explore the nature of object-aura, that’s an element you ought to deal with.