A significant objet d'art
We’ve mentioned a few other art projects that use eBay as a platform or medium. The idea-based artist Caleb Larsen’s A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter is a fun one. It’s a significant object — a sculpture, supposedly, though it looks pretty much like a black box with wires running into it — that forever attempts to auction itself on eBay.
From Larsen’s website: “Every ten minutes the black box pings a server on the internet via the ethernet connection to check if it is for sale on the eBay. If its auction has ended or it has sold, it automatically creates a new auction of itself. If a person buys it on eBay, the current owner is required to send it to the new owner. The new owner must then plug it into ethernet, and the cycle repeats itself.”
A Tool To Deceive And Slaughter is listed on eBay this week with a starting price of $6,858.00.
Going once, going twice...
Joshua Glenn is an editor, publisher, and a freelance writer and semiologist. He does business as KING MIXER, LLC.
He's cofounder of the websites
HiLobrow,
Significant Objects, and
Semionaut; and cofounder of
HiLoBooks, which will reissue six Radium Age sci fi novels in 2012. In 2011, he produced and co-designed the
iPhone app KER-PUNCH. He's coauthored and co-edited
Taking Things Seriously,
The Idler's Glossary,
The Wage Slave's Glossary, the story collection
Significant Objects (forthcoming from Fantagraphics), and Unbored, a kids' field guide to life forthcoming from Bloomsbury.
In the '00s, Glenn was an associate editor and columnist at the
Boston Globe's IDEAS section; he also started the IDEAS blog
Brainiac. He has written for
Slate,
n+1,
Cabinet,
io9,
The Baffler,
Feed, and
The Idler.
In the '90s, Glenn published the seminal intellectual zine
Hermenaut; served as editorial director and co-producer of the pioneering DIY and online social networking website Tripod.com; and was an editor at the magazine
Utne Reader.
Glenn manages the
Hermenautic Circle, a secretive online community. He was born and raised in Boston, where he lives with his wife and sons.
Click here for more info.
Hmm, I feel like I read about that in January. Where was it? Oh yeah:
http://www.murketing.com/journal/?p=4508
Sorry, I missed it on Murketing. I heard about it last week from someone who no doubt heard about it from Murketing!
I think it’s a really interesting experiment, but when I posted about it on the Consumed FB page (thinking it could be a good column topic at some point) it got very little reaction. I expected to see it written up a lot, but to my knowledge it hasn’t been. Maybe its time has now come?