The Sound of eBay completes UBERMORGEN.COM’s trilogy that also includes Amazon Noir and Google Will Eat Itself (GWEI)(1). In order to understand the significance of this work, a brief look at recent Net.Art history is helpful.

Net.Art 1.0 –> ???

Net.Art has always faced challenges: attracting attention, finding a place (and surviving) in an art world focused on salable objects. Those have to do mainly with reception, but at least as early as 1999, problems with what was being produced were recognized when Alex Galloway stated that “Net-dot-art is dead” and cited Tilman Baumgartel announcing it was the end of an era. In 2001, Baumgartel published net.art 2.0, a collection of interviews that, among other things, speculate about what the next generation of net.art might be. (2) In 2002, Florian Cramer played a small trick on the Nettime list by posting excerpts from a 1989 communication between himself and Neoist Jon Berndt, calling for an Art Strike as the best response to the impoverishment of mail art but editing the re-post to comment on net.art. Five years later, Guthrie Lonergan made a chart outlining the aesthetics of hacking vs. those of “defaults” which he published on his blog in early 2007. Notably, many of the characteristics (excerpted below) refer implicitly or explicitly to net.art:

(3).

In an interview with Sher Doruff during the summer of 2008 about the state-of-the-art of new media, Net.Art, and so on, she expressed the view that this genre was facing a crisis. She felt that artists were, in a sense, paralyzed precisely because the tools made widespread in the evolution of Web 2.0 are so easy to use so that artists became too conditioned by this and could not imagine alternatives (4). Perhaps not everyone would agree that artists have been paralyzed or that it is difficult to imagine alternatives to defaults, but Web 2.0 technologies have certainly impacted all user expectations. Perhaps beyond anything else, we take for granted easy connections and easy, reliable applications to share text, images, audio or video files, and above all, mash-ups.

Considering this partial context, the Sound of eBay seems far more significant than it might at first glance. In this project, we see the artists’ efforts to get beyond the merely subversive, superficially interactive, and aesthetically crude work that typified earlier Net.Art. However, I decided to actually ask UBERMORGEN.COM member Hans Bernhard what they had been aiming to do:

After our GWEI and Amazon Noir projects were perceived as critical and political projects (tackling issues such as Google Advertisement system and earnings – the core of Google and Amazon book-selling platform and related Copyright issues), we just felt the urge to do something nice, to show that we are not interested in bold statements and smart subversive hacks but that our world is the experiment, the freestyle artistic experiment in the worldwide channels of mass media and p2p media networks (here we have machines and humans on the same level)…

So this time, we were looking at eBay, and we said, yes, what a nice and friendly company, what a cool thing they do, what a perfect marketplace – a global flea market – they offer us.. we want to do something nice, something positive…. we want to make it sound, we wanna write the soundtrack for this corporation, we want to contribute with music to this corporate epic which is currently being written…

The user is lured into a pseudo-participative environment by giving his/her eBay username and email address (plus we also retrieve date & time, IP address, operating system of computer etc) he/she gives up an enormous sum of data, but our data retrieval uses public and semi-public data and re-contextualizes this huge mass of data into a comprehensive song, this song carries all data we have about the user… but it can not be extracted again (practically, theoretically yes, it could be turned into ascii again)…

However regarding this interaction, we are not interested in giving the user an interactive experience. We want to entertain the user, to give him/her a full audio-visual experience packaged in a good, crisp story (5).

Recent scholarship about participatory culture has taken a more sceptical stance toward the notion that users can talk back to the culture and web industries (6). But it seems that UBERMORGEN.COM is taking a different tack, inserting their work into the space between producers and users, adding a layer that does not interfere with but calls attention to the naive behaviours of contemporary internet use. Bernhard describes it as:

Banality coupled with slightly schizophrenic emotion… the pop aspect usually carries a banal surface, but if you start getting into it on a consumer/user level, you feel the cracks in the story, and through these cracks, you can enter a psychotic universe of popularization of individual and very human existence, so through the cracks you can sneak into reality…

But what is the reality that might be revealed? Again, according to Bernhard:

I have no idea; that is part of the experiment, to create a setting within which we can find [or] produce results – or the users can individually go on the quest for corporate madness and global psychotics…so only after a certain time you can identify what the project actually reveals, the experience and the user-feedback (emails, statistics, songs) will tell us…

By leaving the experiment open rather than pre-selecting the possible outcomes, UBERMORGEN.COM follows the same route as other Web 2.0 producers that aim to leverage user participation. In this case, though, gaining more users doesn’t generate more revenue or, in turn, attract even more users or add value in any obvious manner. Instead, if anything, it makes more likely the revelation of patterns–if there are any, to begin with.

This piece seems to straddle the division between Net.Art 1.0 and what might come next, or perhaps represents some reconciliation between those earlier hackerish, subversive works and contemporary users’ slick, plug-n-play, naive activities. As Bernhard sums it up, “Sound of eBay is a mix of high-end technology to generate songs and pseudo-naive use of imagery (teletext-pornography)”, and this combination works to break the easy and comfortable relationship users are accustomed to having with Web 2.0 applications.

Taken as a whole, the EKMRZ-Trilogy embodies a transition from Net.Art 1.0, with its focus on hacking and piracy in Amazon Noir, to more overtly political subversion in GWEI, to the Sound of eBay, which depends on a symbiotic relationship with a web 2.0 company and uses the actual exchanges between users and producers as artistic material. While the experiment is incomplete, UBERMORGEN.COM’s work opens new areas for exploration and provides a fresh perspective for considering ongoing concerns with privacy, participation, and power.

(1) Google Will Eat Itself” and “Amazon Noir – The Big Book Crime” were both completed in collaboration with Alessandro Ludovico (Neural.it) and Paolo Cirio; “The Sound of eBay” is a project solely done by UBERMORGEN.COM (with sound: Stefan Nussbaumer, Theorycoding: Grischinka Teufl, visual coding: LIA)

(2) net.art Year in Review: State of net.art 99 http://switch.sjsu.edu/web/v5n3/D-1.html ; net.art 2.0“ Neue Materialien zur Netzkunst / New Materials towards Net art. translated by David Hudson, Verlag für moderne Kunst, Nürnberg 2001.

(3) “Hacking vrs. Defaults,” http://guthguth.blogspot.com/2007/01/hacking-defaults-hacking-nintendo.html

(4) Detailed notes on this conversation can be found on my research blog: http://kdevries.net/blog/?tag=sher-doruff

(5) Personal communications with Hans Bernhard, October 29th, November 3rd.

(6) Scholz, Trebor. A History of the Social Web, 2007 and Schaefer, Mirko Tobias. Bastard Culture: User Participation and the Extension of the Culture Industry, 2008. https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789089642561/bastard-culture