Two online projects that embrace the ephemeral nature of the digital sphere are art-domains.com and GWEI – Google Will Eat Itself. Through the website art-domains.com, Dutch artist Peter Luining sells domain-name addresses bearing the names of famous artists, art movements, theoreticians, philosophers and the like. You may contact the artist to inquire about purchasing gillesdeleuze.info or jeanbaudrillard.info. Derrida.info has been crossed out, indicating it was already sold; however, jacquesderrida.info is still up for grabs. If you are in the market for futurism.info or cubism.info, you're out of luck, though minimalism.info is still available. Art-domains.com is conducting a cultural clearance sale of sorts. Starkly set in black and white, this solemn-looking conceptual inventory seeks to point out the overlooked bond between idealized notions of intellectualism and the market forces they sustain. The still-available domain names, when clicked on, appear as white type over a black background, reminiscent of On Kawara's Today series, an ongoing historical inventory of sorts, as well as Felix Gonzalez-Torres' series of white-on-black writing chronicling both historical and mundane events.
Felix Gonzalez Torrres (left) On Kawara (right) Peter Luining (center)
Art-domains.com urges the reconsideration of the traditional art domains of the museum and the gallery, wishing to transfer the axis of the realm of representation from its exclusive physicality to an inclusive immateriality, from an institutional art domain to the public domain. The formal space transforms into its informal counterpart, allowing art to flourish via the most mundane objects-a computer monitor, a cell phone, an office printer-while not resisting the institutional notion of representation. Thus, this inclusive mode of operation is not meant to simply counteract the art world's establishment but rather to interact with it and operate parallel to it.
(Not so) secretly plotting to takeover the Google Corporation is Hans Bernhard and Alessandro Ludovico's GWEI – Google Will Eat Itself. The plan is simple–create a website that will feature Google-generated ads. Then, with the money paid by Google for hosting the ads, the artists will purchase Google shares, eventually becoming the rightful owners of Google. Employing familiar mechanisms of consumerism in a subversive manner while engaging themes of materialism and metaphysicality, GWEI suggests using the capitalist system to takeover the system itself, turning trickle-down theories upside-down, transferring power from the corporation back to the little guy.