The Sound of eBay – an UBERMORGEN.COM project
http://www.Sound-of-eBay.com
Forget the technology,
it’s lustful entertainment, baby!
ABSTRACT
How does it really work?
We generate unique songs by using eBay user-data. You simply enter any eBay username (your own or someone else’s) and add your email address so we can notify you as soon as the song is ready for downloading. Then click „generate“ and our robots sprawl out into the net to collect data. Then the robots bring back the data to our sc3 supercollider soundgeneration-engine. Finally, the complex software-machine starts generating a score-file which is then transformed into your unique but uniform song and presented in teletext porn style! We sell out your human needs digitally…
STORY
First there was silence…
Then there was data…
But there was no story…
Just images and sounds…
Cities were built and a grid was laid on top of the topography
Within this global grid a company named eBay became the largest marketplace, with very local marketspaces. eBay is romantic and seductive, not like the local fleamarkets in Paris (Le marché aux puces de Saint-Ouen) but sexed up a million times bigger and spherically transcended, much more effective and thoroughly commercialized. We love it! “The Sound of eBay” is the affirmative high-end low-tech contribution to the atomic soundtrack of the new peer-to-peer hyper-catastrophic shock-capitalism.
The sound is cool, the machine produces masses of songs and replicates millions of times throughout the networks – flooding the net, a bubbling sea of artifical songs visualized in CONTEMPORARY teletext – a continental drift within a macromusic universal urban scape. Trash-Radio.
Forget the technology,
its lustful entertainment, baby!
EKMRZ-TRILOGY
UBERMORGEN.COM is attracted by the surface of Google, Amazon and eBay, the three historical e-giants brilliantly surviving the dotcom boom and the legendary crash at the end of that era. Back then and still today the three kings form the powerful spearhead of e-commerce (EKMRZ). By creating the third piece – The Sound of eBay – we wrap up the trilogy we had started in 2005. Thanks to Alessandro Ludovico and Paolo Cirio for the GWEI – Google Will Eat Itself and Amazon Noir – The Big Book Crime collaboration
GWEI – Google Will Eat Itself, 2005/06
http://www.gwei.org
Amazon Noir – The Big Book Crime, 2006/07
http://www.amazon-noir.com
The Sound of eBay, 2008/09
http://www.Sound-of-eBay.com
SONGS
We love it! The Sound of eBay is our affirmative low-tech contribution to the ATOMIC soundtrack of the peer-to-peer hyper-catastrophic shock-capitalism. Reference: Peter Weibels Song “Sex in der Stadt” (Sex in the City) from 1982 – Hotel Morphila Orchester, where PW “raps” (sings) sex-ads from a newspaper.
Here some sample songs from the SoE-Database:
TECHNOLOGY
eBay’s concept is based on transactions between buyers and sellers – transactions between human beings, not consumers and companies. The eBay-Generator software reflects this concept in a way that it does not only generate your free personal song. The black box will be released a standalone application published under gnu public licence – written in supercollider (sc3). A free application that any user can install on her/his Computer to produce an endless stream of bubbling eBay-grooves. Each song has a SoE-MD5 key of authentification.
Every user has a signature which corresponds with another users signature. Chains of transactions, a swarm of bots, each song has a memory and therefore has it’s own history. Steganography of songs… can you reverse engineer the string? The robots run into the bazar of fraud (eBay.com), grab sensitive (creditcard information, bank details, passwords, etc if available) and non-sensitive user-data (bought and sold items, prices, comments, ratings, etc), recontextualizes them and creates new, individual and unique profiles. In-depth tech description:
http://sound-of-ebay.com/pdfs/SoE_Technology.pdf
THEORY
“…As part of their sustainable trilogy the critical level of “UBERMORGEN.COM”’s media-integrated storytelling has reached the coastline of business-island “eBay”. Braking the waves of cyberspaced e-commerce tsunamis by transforming singular binary micro-transactions of homo oeconomicus into auditive vortexes and granular compositions by pirating privacy….
…By discovering this undetected entropolis, the colonization of data-hungry network-crawlers and blackboxed info-transformers is feeding a suspicious synaesthesia within the neatly structured columns of profit-orientated socio-technological networks…”
Theorycoding by Grischinka Teufl
http://www.Sound-of-eBay.com/700.html
http://sound-of-ebay.com/pdfs/SOE_UBERMORGEN.COM_grischinka_teufl.pdf
VISUALCODING
Visualcoding by LIA
http://www.sound-of-eBay.com/visualcoding.html
The visualcoding by LIA – http://www.strangeThingsHappen.org – is created in „Director“ and viewed with shockwave, proprietary software – with restrictions on use or private modification. The Free Software Foundation issued the rule that we cannot install any proprietary program on our computers except temporarily for the specific purpose of writing a free replacement for that very program.
STYLE
Teletxt-porn by lizvlx: by working with the three main EKMRZ (e-commerce) web-sites Google, Amazon and eBay, the last target was approached with an antique but royal discipline: TELETEXT. Now teletext has to appear in full glamour and with it`s highest visual attraction: PORN. lizvlx scanned thousands of porn pages of austrian cable television to come up with the finest pixel-boobs & pixel-pussies. Please see also „The Teletext Babez“ video by drx/Bodenstaendig/Maarten Ploeg, 2001:
http://drx.a-blast.org/~drx/projects/teletext/index.en.html
AUTHORS
UBERMORGEN.COM [A/CH/USA, *1999], UBERMORGEN.COM is an artist duo created in Vienna, Austria, by Lizvlx and Hans Bernhard, a founder of etoy. Behind UBERMORGEN.COM we can find one of the most unmatchable identities – controversial and iconoclast – of the contemporary European techno-fine-art avant-garde. Their open circuit of conceptual art, drawing, software art, pixel- painting, computer installations, net.art, sculpture and digital actionism (media hacking) transforms their brand into a hybrid Gesamtkunstwerk. The permanent amalgamation of fact and fiction points toward an extremely expanded concept of one’s working materials, that for UBERMORGEN.COM also include (international) rights, democracy and global communication (input-feedback loops). “Ubermorgen” is the German word both for “the day after tomorrow” or “super-tomorrow”. http://www.ubermorgen.com
CREDITS
Soundcoding Stefan Nussbaumer
Visualcoding LIA
Theorycoding Grischinka Teufl
Scriptcoding Erich Kachel
The project is supported by Rhizome.org commissions, BM:UKK (Austria), City of Vienna (MA7/Netznetz.net), The Austrian Embassy in Mexico, net culture lab, eine Innovationsinitiative von Telekom Austria, Jan Lauth, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid, lo-res.org
http://www.sound-of-ebay.com/800.html
TEAMWORK
Networking is working… The different parts of „The Sound of eBay“ were compiled in various geotechnical-locations: The soundcoding by Stefan Nussbaumer was mainly realized in Vienna, Tyrol and Madrid, the Scriptcoding was realized in Germany and implemented in Austria, the visucalcoding by LIA was done in Portugal and implemented in Spain and the theorycoding was prepared in Berlin, written in Vienna and Tokyo and implemented in Madrid. Teletextporn by lizvlx was created in St. Moritz (Switzerland), the first interactive AV-installations were put together in Mexico-City and in Madrid, the web-server is located in the „crypta“ (VIVI Vienna, lo-res.org server) and the coordination, PR and web-implementation were realized in St. Moritz and Vienna… There was one real-life meeting in Vienna; all other communication took place in various skype-conferences, via email and through phone conversations.
CONTACT
UBERMORGEN.COM, Vienna (Austria), St. Moritz (Switzerland)
+43 650 930 00 61
http://www.sound-of-ebay.com/600.html
Mailing Address
THE SOUND OF EBAY
FAVORITENSTRASSE 26/5, A-1040 VIENNA / AUSTRIA