User:10000BL/H4-Descriptions of work

H4: Descriptions of previous/ongoing work

TE KOOP

TE KOOP (For Sale) is an online project in which I investigate the meaning of promotional images, means of looking at images and the communication between me and potential buyers on sites like Craigslist.org and Marktplaats.nl. In this project I take photos of carefully arranged spaces where at first sight the subject of the photo is a bike or a piece of furniture (e.g. a sofa or a desk). I choose bikes and pieces of furniture because the hold a certain size and second they are common objects for sale on commodity markets. The details in the photos are of importance and these details range from little hints to my past, previous works I made or are chosen because they fit the colors of the other items in the image. The composition is finalized by including myself for the photo in the set in such a way that it might be difficult for viewers to notice. The final photo together with a short description of the object are then turned into advertisements. Intentionally I prohibited potential buyers from placing bids. I also did not include my phone number or my address in the advertisement. Instead, the only way potential buyers could reach me was by sending an e-mail.

The advertisements serve as a bait for potential buyers. I speak of bait because the intention of the advertisements is not to actually sell the objects I, instead the advertisements are online to investigate how people respond and communicate on commodity markets. The advertisements look like any other advertisement on a commodity market. That means, it contains an image of the object I offer and a short, minimal description of the product.

For TE KOOP I made fake accounts on commodity markets in different countries around the world. Specifically I stated in the accounts that I was living in cities like New York, London and Berlin. The countries I infiltrated were choses because I mastered the language of the respective country. When this was not the case translators were helping me to reply the potential buyers. To reply is important because it is my intention to stall and to keep the conversation going on. I do this by answering just the question a potential buyer asks. For example, when asked about the dimensions I just give the dimensions, nothing else. By doing this the potential buyer needs to ask at least one more question that of availability or if he or she can come by to collect the object. The minimal information I give back might also serve as a sign that this advertisement might not be as real as it looks. Sometimes I asked the potential buyer a question too, to spice up or twist the conversation. I might for example ask about a potential buyer's girlfriend when he himself mentions a girlfriend in his initial question. The conversation usually ends when the potential buyer aks to come by and collect the object. My answer to this question is that I promised the object to another potential buyer or that it is already sold. No potential buyer was then mad or disappointed on me, the could only blame themselves not be more aggressive (spot on) in the conversation we had. In any case I tried avoid situations where the potential buyer could get angry on me.

A positive consequence of the infiltration of different countries is that it gives an insight how people use and communicate on commodity markets. The amount and length of messages, the use of language and object preferences were some of the things that came out t be different for each country. This is something I did not foresee when I started the project.

The advertisements 'raised' hundreds of responses. Mostly the responses are about the object I offered. This counts for 95% of the responses. In 5% of the cases people noticed that the advertisement is not what it seems to be. Rarely people noticed me from the start, it mostly happened that people became suspicious after numerous e-mails send back and forth with no progression in obtaining the desired object. TE KOOP is a project that is about the (lack of use of) senses. Online the only senses you can use and must trust are your eyes. That means when it comes to advertisements online I expected people to look very good if they can trust the advertisement by its appearance. The project proved that this is most of the time not the case.

(What I hoped/wanted is) TE KOOP exist of two parts. One is making the actual photo and second the performance part online. When making the photo I had to keep in mind how potential buyers would perceive the photo when turned into an advertisement and to which extend my physical appearance is visible or not. Too visible would for example fail the specific advertisement. This is off course difficult to conclude, because what is exactly a failure? Is that no responses at all or the fact that the object won't sell? The latter is not applicable in my project, because I never sold the object listed. In my project it was all about the responses and the more the better. Because of that I was very conservative in the position I took in the photos of the objects. In 95% of the responses it was all about the object. Of those 95% I don't know how many actually saw me, but ignored that in the conversations. In 5% of the responses people saw me from the beginning or after a while during our conversation, but I don't know how many people saw me, but never responded with a message.

The different advertisements raised different amounts of responses. First, this might had to do with product preferences in general, racing bikes were more popular overall then for example a sofa. Second, differences also emerged because of the popularity of commodity markets in the countries I infiltrated. For several years commodity markets are in The Netherlands an established medium, yet for China this is somehow different. Third, an advertisement of a bike raised less responses when bikes in the respective country are less in use over another country. And final, economic status of the inhabitants of a country might have been influenced the amount of responses/the project. When I was performing online in 2013 significant more responses came from Spain on advertisements of sofas. In 2013 it was crisis in Spain.

inspirations

TE KOOP is inspired by....... artist+ref

What succeeded

What followed from it

note:

what is the differences between a pic, image, photo?

use the word Elicit (The advertisements function as bait and elicit responses)

Unboxing

Unboxing is a project that shows similarities with TE KOOP. In Unboxing I use again the medium of commodity markets. The differences with TE KOOP

Rejected

In 2011 (or 2010) I went to a reunion of my former elementary school Veeest. School Veeest was about to move to a new location and the reunion was part of the farewell process. The school set up an exhibition of old school photos that they throughout the years saved. Clearly they didn't had everybodies picture, but it gave a good insight in the history of the school.

School photos are portrait pictures that are made yearly. In the United States of America they are know as yearbook photos and the day that they are taken is often seen as an important day where children and young adolescents dress up nicely. The photographer usually also takes classroom pictures and pictures together with your siblings. This yearly ritual gives an interesting document of somebodies early development. I personally never liked the day the photographer came to take my picture, yet when I saw my pictures in the exhibition it was kind of pleasant. I asked the janitor if it was possible to digitise my own pictures for my personal archive. They allowed me to digitise my pictures and gave the whole collection compressed in three archive folders (boxes?) to me after the exhibition was finished. When I opened the boxes at home I immediately discovered pictures I didn't saw at the exhibition. The pictures that were excluded were all marked with a pen. A closer inspection revealed that the children on those pictures had actually two pictures in the collection. A marked one and a picture without the mark. When placed next to each other you could see why there was a unmarked and a marked picture. Clearly the person who marked the pictures (the photographer?) did this to indicate the marked pictures was rejected oppose to the other unmarked picture. The intention of school photos is to show happy, smiling children. For several reasons this might go wrong the first time. A possibility is that the photographer's technique or interaction is lacking (failing), another plausibel reason is the child itself. I myself was not a good model for picture taking, I remember oen occasion that I bursted out in tears feeling uncomfortable with a big camera and flashlights pointing at me, and this can be the case for many other children. Children being uncomfortable or blinking there eyes when the picture was taken or looking away are just some examples.

The collection revealed 101 pairs of marked and unmarked pictures and 8 pairs of group pictures of siblings. This total amount accounted for les than 10% of the collection School Veeest had, but gave an good insight of how a photographer used (or missused) images of children.

is a collection of school pictures (in the United States of America better known as yearbook photos) I encountered in a collecting of my former elementary school Veeest.

- self-evaluation

What is it? [descriptions of work (from previous) ]

What did you want?

What succeeded?

What followed from it?

Why did you do it?