thingist June 2012

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Art Books with stolen YouTube comments up for sale on Amazon Kindle. KINDLE'VOKE GHOST WRITERS Press Release.
by verlag＠traumawien.at 09 Jun '12

09 Jun '12

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/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8… http://www.amazon.com/Wierd-song-you-cute-ebook/dp/B007MMCYIU/ref=sr_1_1?ie… http://www.amazon.com/Wierd-song-you-cute-ebook/dp/B007MMCYIU/ref=sr_1_1?ie… 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 70 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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thingist June 2012