Ebay Longing explores the potential of the auction website Ebay as an anthropological tool by performing search queries for Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran, countries that reflect three stages in the "war against terrorism".
In the case of Afghanistan, Waller noticed a shift in interest as soon as the war against this country began: before the war the posted items were blue lapis, burkas or stamps. After the war, the interest shifted to memorabilia, souvenirs and American made t-shirts with slogans supporting the war. Images from these searches will be collected and archived every day.
The resulting image database, paired with excerpts of various travel diaries and war blogs from the region, reveals hidden layers of consumerism, Orientalism, xenophobia and the effects of (American) mass media.
"Database Dilemmas" explores how artists have discovered the obsession with organising and archiving data in a database as a new domain for artistic, social and aesthetic experiments, developing different approaches toward its specific characteristics. Their dilemmas concern the narrative [how to create narrative from a static collection of data?], the formal/structural [how to change the specific indexical form of the database?] and the socio-political [how to change its character from a closed, controlled system into an open, public one?]. How do they approach the traditional model of the database? With which objectives do they transform its static form and encyclopaedic structure? What are their poetics, aesthetics and ethics?
'Database Dilemmas' was conceived by Deanna Herst for Impakt Online.
Angie Waller (USA) develops both video and web based projects. Her projects include: "Loading Animated Version" - a documentary about Hungarian web designer sweatshops, and "Clip.FM", a wireless messaging service derived from Mobile Communication. One of her recents works is the book "Data Mining the Amazon", a study on customers at Amazon.com. Her works have been exhibited internationally.
http://www.couchprojects.com
