[Networked optimization]:

Silvio Lorusso and Sebastian Schmieg’s three-volume Networked Optimization series is a physical reimagination as printed book of texts originally displayed on the Kindle e-book reader. At the same time, it is a kind of "crowdsourced [version] of popular self-help books" (Sebastian Schmieg,...

Ausführliche Beschreibung

Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Format: Buch
Sprache:English
Veröffentlicht: [Erscheinungsort nicht ermittelbar] [Verlag nicht ermittelbar] 2015
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:Ausführliche Beschreibung
Zusammenfassung:Silvio Lorusso and Sebastian Schmieg’s three-volume Networked Optimization series is a physical reimagination as printed book of texts originally displayed on the Kindle e-book reader. At the same time, it is a kind of "crowdsourced [version] of popular self-help books" (Sebastian Schmieg, website), produced - unwittingly - in collaboration with myriads of Amazon Kindle users. The artists use Kindle’s "popular highlights" feature, which allows to see the passages highlighted most often by all Kindle readers of the same book, along with the number of times they were highlighted. This data is possible to access because all highlighting by a Kindle user is forwarded to Amazon, where it is stored, processed, and used, for example for marketing purposes and market research. As the artists explain: "Among the books with the most popular highlights, there is a striking number of self-help books. This points to a multi-layered, algorithmic optimization: from readers and authors to Amazon itself. Harvesting its customers micro-labour, the act of reading becomes a data-mining process" (project website).