<nettime> Wi-Fi performance at the ReJoyce festival celebrating Bloomsday 100

["Christophe Bruno" <chris@unbehagen.com>]

Here is the report of my Wi-Fi performance in Dublin, at the ReJoyce
Festival, celebrating Bloomsday 100
http://www.iterature.com/bloodforsale

Since its origins, the Web has known a tremendous development around
libertarian ideas such as freedom of speech, sharing media, breaking
barriers between producer / consumer or between artist / audience. On the
other hand the core trend that is transforming the Web into one of the
spearheads of new capitalism in the “age of access” has brought a new
situation of conflict: words, the very roots of what we are as speaking
beings, have become a commodity, as described in one of my former pieces,
the "Google Adwords Happening": http://www.iterature.com/adwords

"Blood for Sale" is a wireless adaptation of my very first net.art piece,
"epiphanies" http://www.iterature.com/epiphanies (inspired by James
Joyce's definition of the epiphany). It features the pervasive invasion of
language by financial globalization. As James Joyce did 100 years ago, I
walk through the city of Dublin, but with a Wi-Fi PDA, recording
encountered advertisements of company logos or brands into an
administration interface via the wireless network. These inputs are sent
to a program on a server that uses search engines (Google etc.) to fetch
sentences related to the input from the web. These sentences are known as
"sponsored epiphanies".

The program then allows these "sponsored epiphanies" to disturb and
transform the text of Ulysses, by incorporating themselves into the text.
The real-time evolution of the text is displayed and graphically animated,
sentence by sentence, projected in different places in Dublin, as well as
the present website. By the end of the performance, carried out over
several days, the original text by Joyce (already partially encrypted for
copyright reasons) is almost entirely replaced by the "sponsored
epiphanies".

Christophe Bruno
http://www.iterature.com
http://www.unbehagen.com




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