[thingist] Art Books with stolen YouTube comments up for sale on Amazon Kindle. KINDLE'VOKE GHOST WRITERS Press Release.

Sat Jun 9 18:45:12 UTC 2012

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&qid=1339225192&sr=8-1&keywords=sparta+my+have
http://www.amazon.com/Wierd-song-you-cute-ebook/dp/B007MMCYIU/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1339146252&sr=8-1
http://www.amazon.com/Wierd-song-you-cute-ebook/dp/B007MMCYIU/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1339146252&sr=8-1

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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