Crónica 043
Release: 1 May 2009
Crónica is delighted to present the 1001 Songs of eBay, its longest ever release, running to a total of 2 days, 3 hours, 41 minutes and 26 seconds, or over 4 GB of generative funkiness.
Forget the technology, it’s lustful entertainment, baby!
The Sound of eBay is an UBERMORGEN.COM project with Stefan Nussbaumer, online at www.sound-of-ebay.com since July 2008. Using eBay user data, The Sound of eBay generates unique songs. By simply entering any eBay username and clicking “generate”, the robots sprawl out into the net to collect data, bringing it back to the SC3 Supercollider sound-generation engine. The complex software-machine starts generating a score-file which is then transformed into a unique song.
The Sound of eBay transforms a role-model of individual commodities market in an “ARTitude” of robotic configurations and strings, swapping personalized and compositional business dreams with sound designs from secure client accounting. Using the concept of creative destruction, this entertainment-aggregation is tuning in a mind-blowing cutup, pushing the contemporary lifestyles over the edge and combines it with transformable delays of post-realistic business-analysis.
First there was silence…
Then there was data…
But there was no story…
Just images and sounds…
Cities were built and a grid was laid on top of the topography. Within this global grid a company named eBay became the largest marketplace, with very local marketspaces. eBay is romantic and seductive, not like the local fleamarkets in Paris, but sexed up a million times bigger and spherically transcended, much more effective and thoroughly commercialized. We love it! “The Sound of eBay” is the affirmative high-end low-tech contribution to the atomic soundtrack of the new peer-to-peer hyper-catastrophic shock-capitalism.
The sound is cool, the machine produces masses of songs and replicates millions of times throughout the networks – flooding the net, a bubbling sea of artifical songs visualized in CONTEMPORARY teletext — a continental drift within a macromusic universal urban scape. Trash-Radio.
The eBay-Generator is an application that translates data from arbitrary eBay useraccounts into little music pieces. A first prototype — using the South American eBay-clone Mercadolibre — was presented in September 2007. Experiences with this first version have led to the current version of the eBay-Generator, which produces “songs” on request which are then published at www.Sound-of-eBay.com.
We love it! The Sound of eBay is an affirmative low-tech contribution to the ATOMIC soundtrack of the peer-to-peer hyper-catastrophic shock-capitalism.
Bringing the Unlimited Release series to an almost encyclopedic scope of depth, Crónica presents 1001 of the generated songs, selected by UBERMORGEN.COM and Stefan Nussbaumer. The 1001 songs are available to download in a single, gigantic, .zip file or in 67 smaller subsets of 15 tracks each — you are invited to get them all or to collect the subsets of this collection of automated sound aggregation, directly developed out of highly sensitive, inaccessible and unreachable data.
The Sound of eBay project is supported by Rhizome.org commissions, BM:UKK (Austria), City of Vienna (MA7/Netznetz.net), The Austrian Embassy in Mexico, net culture lab, eine Innovationsinitiative von Telekom Austria, Jan Lauth, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid, lo-res.org, Black Box Gallery Copenhagen.