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Faceless patrons
‘Faceless patrons’ is an installation that documents stories used by Internet scammers in so called ‘overpayment check scams’. Scammers use scripted stories to reach their victims, yet when correspondence continues story worlds start to evolve. We wanted to take a closer look on these ‘419-fiction’ cybercrime stories, ‘419’ relating to the criminal code in Nigerian law that deals with fraud. While we were aware of the fact that we are dealing with scammers, we use a fictional character and narration to investigate how the scammers react to various turns in the plot. The story takes the form of e-mail correspondence where two characters are involved; one art patron created by the scammers and our fictional artist ‘Anna Masquer’. The scammers posed identity is often based on either identity theft or a confusing mix of several existing individuals, giving them the opportunity to remain faceless and anonymous. The installation setup consists of five photo-frames hanging on a wall. Each frame connects to a correspondence with a scammer and holds a photograph and a fake check that was received as an advance payment for Anna Masquers’ photos.
Andreas Zingerle - 05.03.2015 - 14:25
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Death of an Alchemist
Death Of An Alchemist is a multimedia novel written by Big Data—a detective story generated in real-time from live online content. The installation consists of an 8m wall displaying 128 pages of projected text, symbols and charts. This content is generated by scraping Twitter, Google and social platforms for today’s headlines, social media conversations, memes and more. The text flickers and updates as new data is received, yet still creates a coherent narrative that can be read from beginning to end. This is thanks to a bespoke technique we have termed the “poetics of search”: using a combination of search operators and algorithms to mine data, then string manipulation to fit it cohesively into a new plot. In the story, readers investigate the death of 16th century alchemist Trithemius. He has left behind a supposedly magical book, Steganographia, said to reveal the “clavis magna”: the idea from which all knowledge flows. Readers must decode the book to find the clues to Trithemius’ murder.
Hannah Ackermans - 10.09.2015 - 10:16
