MURKETING

Pictures of Stuff, cont’d: Shoppingcart-full

Via JunkCulture:

Taizo Yamamoto. Click for more.

Part of a series.

“Another Tool To Deceive and Slaughter”

If you recall the May 3 Consumed on the artwork that sells itself on eBay, which was titled, “A Tool To Deceive and Slaughter,” you may enjoy this:

‘Another Tool To Deceive and Slaughter’ G.E. (2007)

Hi so to begin with please do not confuse this work with Caleb Larsen’s interesting installation A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter.

However, this sale is for a somewhat similar item, in that it is shaped like a box, although the color is white not black, and it will, once installed, perform the exact same function every time its turned on – namely it will shake violently and flood your house. It is a menace in every sense of the word – we are afraid to leave the children alone with it, in fact its eying me aggressively right now, if you ask a question and don’t hear back, assume the worst and send help. It is designed to look exactly, I mean exactly, like a General Electric washer model WHDRR4418G1WW, serial number zm185532G, in fact it so closely resembles a GE washer, that when GE sent a couple of technicians to look it over they assured us it was in fact a GE washer and that it was working perfectly, and that the flooding and shaking were due to our unspecified user error, although they did acknowledge that this model was prone to the symptoms we described. In fact this simulacrum was so effective they even offered to sell us an additional warranty extension on it, which I considered purchasing, but once again this is not a washer, it is device to slaughter and deceive, because if it was a GE washer model WHDRR4418G1WW, serial number zm185532G, then it would actually wash clothes, linens and such, and not flood my house every time we used it.

Terms of sale: you must promise to install this in your home, work, museum, or art gallery and install it exactly as described in an appropriate GE manual. You then must promise to use it on a regular basis. We are not responsible for any damages caused by the flooding and or violent shaking, that is what this item is suppose to do. You may not return it. You may not complain to GE or to anyone else, like Lowes Hardware, but you may resell it so long as the new buyer agrees to the terms of this sale as described above.

Full ebay listing here. Buy It Now for $50k; or “make offer.”

So, there’s an interesting mixture of referencing (and maybe poking fun at?) a Web-discussed artwork in order to, basically, slam a corporation’s apparently flawed product. Neat!

(Thanks, Garth!)

Linkpile

• New Google Phone Service Whispers Targeted Ads Directly Into Users’ Ears: Onion video.
• Here Comes The Only Real iPhone Killer: Specifically, it’s an elaborate hammer. Ha.
• the liberation mythology of the internet.: “This mythology is founded on a sweeping historical revisionism that conjures up an imaginary predigital world – a world of profound physical and economic constraints – from which the web is now liberating us. We were enslaved, and now we are saved. In a bizarrely fanciful twist, the digital world is presented as a “natural” counterpoint to the supposed artificiality of the physical world.”
• Judith Shulevitz on the Radical Idea of the Sabbath: “Q: Is Twitter killing God’s idea?”
• Advertising and pharmaceutical prices: “The classic Chicago School result was that advertising for eyeglasses lowered prices, due to increased competition. It doesn’t seem the same is true for pharmaceuticals.” Research cited.

These links compiled via delicious, and repurposed here with plug-in Postalicious. Not enough stuff? Not the stuff you wanted? Try visiting unconsumption.tumblr.com, murketing.tumblr.com, and/or the Consumed Facebook page.

The online creativity potlatch

Further thoughts on the gift glut from Rob Horning:

In The Gift anthropologist Marcel Mauss gave some examples of gift-giving potlatches that culminate in the sheer destruction of value in obligatory ritualized sacrifices: “Sometimes there is no question of receiving return; one destroys simply in order to give the appearance that one has no desire to receive anything back.”

I wonder if something like that happens in social media, where the possibility of reciprocation is destroyed by a surfeit of competitive sharing. Because of the ubiquitous ranking possibilities, gift-giving online can escalate into the destructive orgy of the competitive potlatch, in which participants try to outgive everyone else into submission in order to secure a particular identity. On social media, the potlatch takes the form of outtweeting and outsharing the field, overloading the network with fragments of oneself as seek a ranking. The result is that gifts proffered through social media stop seeming like gifts at all. They become referendums on our identity as we are configuring it in that particular instant. The gifts no longer seem reciprocal; they seem narcissistic. Even though we don’t do it for money, we are still back to producing content, not giving.

But the network is now also supposed to be the space in which non-competitive gifts are to be exchanged. The potlatch preening—the produced content—threatens to crowd out those kinds of gifts. So the gifts don’t get recognized and appreciated in the spirit in which they are given, which may lead to a desperate offering of more of them—at which point they become content. This creaties self-reinforcing destructive spiral. In other words, if everyone is oversharing, everyone has to overshare to try to be heard, but in such an environment no one has the time to listen. Paradoxically, sharing destroys gifts.

Horning, by the way, has previously made great points — see here and here — about how online sharing can be considered a form of immaterial labor that benefits the various entities that aggregate our online gifts/creativity/content/data, and monetize it in various ways.

In the New York Times Magazine: What’s a gift worth?

VALUING $0
Measuring creative gifts, from worthless to priceless

Think not just of written words but of images, artworks, videos, songs, craft how-to pages and on and on. Surely it’s the case that never before have so many creators offered so much to so many for $0. A result, in effect, is a gift glut.

Read the column in the May 16, 2010, New York Times Magazine, or here.

Discuss, make fun of, or praise this column to the skies at the Consumed Facebook page.

Linkpile

• Inventor Saul Griffith learns the limits of technology: Shame the full text isn’t online: Great article on “the inadequacy of addressing complex societal issues with technological ingenuity alone. Nowhere is this problem more apparent than with Griffith’s main preoccupation these days: energy use and global warming.”
• Reverse engineering the perfect (or worst) TED talk – Boing Boing: Somewhat amusing talk is based on “analyzing data” from past Ted talks to isolate the phrases, words, themes, even slide-color-schemes that are and are not effective with the TED audience. My favorite observation is that “it’s okay to fake intellectual capacity,” which can be achieved, for instance, by saying “etc., etc.” instead of “I don’t understand.” Haw.
• Bad writing: What is it good for?: “The secret weapon of many writing workshop: Students often don’t get much helpful advice from critiques of their own work, as more than one teacher has confided to me. Instead, they learn the most from identifying the mistakes made by others.”
• The hunt for universal music: “Psychologists are putting universality back on the agenda, and are investigating whether certain elements of music are hard-wired into the brain.”
• For musicians, economy is the mother of invention: “Enterprising music makers are turning to the Internet and micro-financing through donations.”

These links compiled via delicious, and repurposed here with plug-in Postalicious. Not enough stuff? Not the stuff you wanted? Try visiting unconsumption.tumblr.com, murketing.tumblr.com, and/or the Consumed Facebook page.

Books, the idea: Words that read you back

Waaaaay back in March, Elliot Van Buskirk of Wired.com posted about “Text 2.0.” A video from a Swedish technology company demonstrates what this means: Basically, eye-tracking technology monitors how you read, and the text itself reacts. Somehow it senses if you want to know how a word is defined, or pronounced, or translated, and it tells you. If it concludes that you’re just skimming, it “fades out irrelevant information” in order to “streamline your reading.”

I have zero interest in this as a reading person. I envision triangulation against databases that cross-matches my eye movements (and thus, by implication, my mind) against some “norm,” thereby sacrificing idiosyncracy and individuality to the fabled CloudCrowd yet again. I also have zero interest as a writing person. I happen to think textual communication with an engaged reader is a truly singular thing, and the idea of some tech firm’s supposed expertise monkeying around in the middle of that connection is depressing. Moreover, in both scenarios, I’m fundamentally skeptical that the real-life quality of the technology will be remotely proximate to the sales pitch. Stuff like this makes me think of a future in which some sort of Clippy equivalent informs me that I don’t actually like Milan Kundera after all.

That said, as someone compiling an occasional series on the idea of the book, I’m very interested in this concept. If something like this somehow compiled individual reader data, straight from the eyeball, it could be another layer on the stuff that Amazon is tracking and broadcasting with its “Kindle highlighting” information. People who believe they need a mass of personal-behavior data to tell them who they are might want to know which passages this tracking software has concluded they like (as opposed to which passages they thought they liked, by highlighting, or simply by, you know, thinking.) Those who like the results might then have an interest in “sharing” them — Text 2.0 could automatically tweet its conclusions (“Turns I out I don’t like Kundera”), per your settings.

As Van Buskirk notes, the appearance of something like Text 2.0 is highly plausible, as the iPad and other e-readers evolve to include cameras; his reporting indicates that many of the relevant patents and business deals already seem to be in motion. (Here’s another link to his writeup.) He also makes the case that eventually this sort of technology could “reinvigorate the written word,” basically giving ebooks a fresh way to compete in the attention economy. Maybe he’s right, and in any case he’s saying what you would probably expect a Wired.com writer to say. But he also says something you probably wouldn‘t expect: At the moment, he’s not really into ebooks:

I should admit that I have yet to make the leap to an e-reader. Having grown up a bookworm in the ’70s and ’80s, I prefer the feel and even the smell of paper books — and the fact that I can just chuck one in my bag for whenever I have a spare moment, without worrying about batteries, theft or breakage.

Probably there are rationally convincing response to these points that any e-reader enthusiast could make — surely paper-book-smell technology is in the offing!

But that’s just the thing — the idea of the book isn’t strictly a rational thing. If it were, there wouldn’t be much interesting about it, now would there?

Unconsumption update

I’m pleased to say we’ve added another member to the Unconsumption Tumblr team: Molly Block, who describes herself as design-savvy marketing and business development geek, based in Houston. Speaking of Houston, those of you who know the Space City, and who are Foursquare users, ought to be mightily impressed to learn that she is also the “mayor” of the Rothko Chapel (among other spots). How cool is that?

I’d still be happy to have help on improving and beefing up the Unconsumption Wiki. Please get in touch if you’re interested.

Books, the idea: “Simulated book subscription service”

Conrad Bakker — mentioned earlier in this series, in this post — tells me (well, me and everyone on his mailing list) about his interesting contribution to Hand+Made: The Performative Impulse in Art and Craft. At the Contemporary Art Museum Houston: May 15 – July 25, 2010

Hand+Made: The Performative Impulse in Art and Craft is a dynamic group exhibition that explores the innovative means by which artists continue to expand the traditional boundaries of art and craft.

Others in the show include friend of Murketing Sabrina Gschwandtner, and Unconsumption-featured soundsuit creator Nick Cave, among others.

Bakker says:

My contribution to this exhibition is Untitled Project: Book-of-the-Month-Club — a simulated book subscription service involving hand- carved and painted sculptures based on paperback books from the 1960s and 1970s, whose subjects range from social issues and existential philosophy to DIY crafts and self improvement. This project examines the way books and their networks of distribution produce a specific gathering of persons, things, and ideas.

Untitled Project: Book-of-the-Month-Club brochures/membership forms are available at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Lora Reynolds Gallery (Austin, TX) and by email request: bookofthemonthclub@untitledprojects.com (if you would like to receive an actual brochure, please include your mail address)

A PDF of the brochure complete with membership agreement and important details in very small print can be found here.

Pictures of Stuff, cont’d: More (global) people and possessions

Following the recent post here about people in China photographed with their possessions, reader Jay D. hipped me to photojournalist Peter Menzel’s 1990 project Material World, which involved photographs of families around the world and their possessions, and became the basis for a book, and a PBS Nova episode. Some images from the Nova page below. This post is part of an occasional series. (THX, Jay!)

Japan. Photo by Peter Menzel. Click for more.

China. Photo by Peter Menzel. Click for more.

U.S.A. Photo by Peter Menzel. Click for more.

Books, the idea, cont’d: Interesting end

By Art Ori. Click for more.

Via Bookshelf blog. Not so practical, but interesting. Earlier bookends here. Part of a series.

Linkpile

• Scholarly essay nails Gilligan’s Island’s hidden subtext – Boing Boing: “The tragedy of the tale is not that they can never go back. The real affliction is the wish itself. They are all so preoccupied with the notion of going back that they never realize they are already in paradise.”
• Disquiet » Quote of the Week: The Cassette of Memories: “Rewind is such exquisite torture, don’t you think?”
• Performance Journalism: “Pop-up Magazine” (described a live performance in magazine-ish form) actually sounds pretty cool. I agree with the point made in this post about it, regarding urgency, and I’m interested in the point about the attraction of the ephemeral (“no digital record”).
• The Power of Lucky Charms: “New research coming out in June suggests that a belief in good luck can affect performance.”
• The Limitations Of Today’s Soundproofing Magic & The Perennial Noise of Marketing: A note on trying to buy quietness.

These links compiled via delicious, and repurposed here with plug-in Postalicious. Not enough stuff? Not the stuff you wanted? Try visiting unconsumption.tumblr.com, murketing.tumblr.com, and/or the Consumed Facebook page.

Books, the idea: Here’s comes the data; what to do with it?

As you may know, Amazon is now compiling and making available to the public information about the “most highlighted” books among Kindle users, and even the “most highlighted” passages. A Dan Brown book, the Bible, and a book I’ve never heard of called The Shack are the top http://pted.org/Propecia.php three most-highlighted works as I type this. In general, the books on that list are religious/spiritual titles; self-help stuff; business-advice books; or some combination of those categories. This is not exactly a surprise, but it’s interesting to see.

It’s more interesting to parse the most highlighted passages, which you can do here. Below the jump, I’ve listed the top ten passages (as of the moment when I’m typing this), without naming the authors or books. I think it’s more fun to read them without that context. And also to wonder about the people who did the highlighting. Perhaps, inspired by David Shields, someone could ativan build an essay, or even a whole book, out of these mostly platitudinous word clusters.

That’s a joke (sort of). But of course this is just the sort of techno-driven development in reading/books that has, in a sense, inspired this entire series. As many have noted:

• books are containers of readable information or stories and so on
• but also: books are display objects (on shelves, or simply being read in public)

Earlier I suggested that if  books are going to migrate into digital-only form in time, then perhaps people will need a flat-screen “shelf” that displays the digital spines of whatever we’re reading — or want people to think we’re reading.

I’m not completely serious about this stuff … but I’m not completely kidding. What could be done with the information that Amazon is gathering from Kindle users? Possibly your favorite highlighted passages could be a screensaver or something? Or run a as a kind of news ticker beneath the digital renderings of bookspines or the virtual shelving unit described above?

Anyway. Here are those top highlighted passages. See what you make of them: Please continue…

Books, the idea: Shelf expression

By Oscar Nuñez, click for more

“Not available for Kindle,” is the headline on a MetaFilter item: “There may be more ways to shelve your books than there are books.” It links to four posts on a site called WebUrbanist, each of which rounds up multiple examples of unusual (innovative? weird?) bookshelves or bookshelf variations or comments on the form of the form of the bookshelf.

Some examples are things that have come up in this series before, like the “curated” bookshelf, and the work of Jim Rosenau — though here’s one more image of Rosenau’s impressive work anyway:

Bookshelf made of books; By Jim Rosenau; click for more.

I’ve had the passing thought in my ongoing excavation of the previously mentioned Bookshelf blog (actually the source of the top image on this post; it just seemed appropriate) that physical books are going to survive for a very long time, if for no other reason than to supply the demand for something to put on the rather astonishing number shelf solutions designers and artists seem to be dreaming up nonstop.

“Bibliochaise” on WebUrbanist, click for more.

DIY types, too:

Via WebUrbanist; click for more.

Via WebUrbanist, click for more

On the other hand, the second comment to that MeFi post counters: “Only point is, no real book lover would spend so much money on something that has so little to do with reading. Most of the cases linked are for people who buy their books by the colour of the covers.” [UPDATE: The picture below, not attributed on WebUrbanist, is by Flickr user chotda, and can be viewed (with annotations) here. (Thx Cybele).]

Via WebUrbanist

Ah, but on the third hand, with books and shelves on the brain I couldn’t help but be amused by this comment in a Mindhacks link roundup: “Why Humans Have Sex. A podcast for the The New York Academy of Sciences oddly fails to mention wanting to check out people’s bookshelves. Maybe that’s just me?”

Via Web Urbanist; click for more.

Pictures of Stuff, cont’d: Chinese families and their possessions

By Huang Qingjun, click for more

The inexhaustible Junk Culture:

Huang Qingjun and Ma Hongjie … project ‘Family Stuff’ [aims] to portray rural Chinese families and their possessions …. A series of 20 images has been compiled that were exhibited at the 798 Photo Gallery in Beijing in 2007… . In 2011 the project is scheduled to end with a total of 50 pictures and a book.