Project»Keyword Art [tactical] [public] [art]

 



Found a site called Keyword Spy that algorithmically matches keywords to websites, for market research purposes. They had an entry for my site, and I am very proud to say that I am finally making headway in cornering the market on phrases like "i think my name is steven", "macaroni feets", and "eggshibition". In fact, to ensure my continued web dominance of these phrases let me list them all out with search links to my art:

i think my name is steven
macaroni feets
wait please
melvins buzz
eggsecutor
eggshibition
animated face maker
narcissus clip art
v clipart


This is partly what my blogging project was all about... to make art that seeded the Internet with strange and irrelevant information in order to find viewers, ANY viewers. It randomly spread on its own by relying upon bots which crawl the net for content, not upon the traditional art world hierarchies of skillfully managed relationships. So for the past year or so (2007-2008) I have not been asking the art world to help support or promote my art. Fellow artists, galleries, sites, zines - none were sought out in the traditional way. Perhaps this is part of a larger experiment of mine to be "publicly hermetic" on the net. Such an idea is likely doomed from the start, but I often like to find illogical uses for technology and communication.

In the end I made about a 100-150 or so spammish blog posts made up of primarily text and html/css layout code. Very few actual images were used, mostly because search engine bots do not yet crawl inside of images. Typically I used gratuitous, nonsensical words in the posts using an eccentric, handmade style instead of a more focused, efficient method. More like a sketchbook, less like an engine. Since I was often using generative software methods, I surely could have created much more viral keyword art than I did! A fully aggressive methodology would have been too destructive for my tastes.

The keyword dissemination did not usually target the traditional art viewing public, really just a impatient dumping of things inside my head. Very few art-minded folks out there are searching Google for "eggsecutor". But someone is, and that someone randomly found and viewed my art, for free, even if for just 2 seconds. Not unlike how street/graffiti art is usually experienced. This thought makes me very happy. In fact, it might sound strange but I still consider my art successfully 'delivered' if only a computer running a software program consumes it. So maybe I'm one of the first artists to made art to be enjoyed not just by humans, but also computers. (on that theme see also 8 Bits of Infinite Contemplation)

TODO: a more formal writeup of my spam-blogging and net-social experiments