Kindle’voke Ghost Writers - Annotation

"The author was and is an aggregate filtering and reassembling of particles out of the cultural sphere"

The digital publisher Traumawien and the artist Bernhard Bauch have created a digital book publishing project entitled Kindle’voke Ghost Writers. The project is centered on the creation of books based on comments left by users on popular youtube videos. To accomplish this task the artists has employed bots that scrape youtube comments, compile and arrange them into a book, and ultimately upload the resulting books to Amazon store, where these can be purchased. As described by the authors: “The results are self-published, human-readable ebooks in form of classical dramas ready to be sold and enjoyed by a multitude of global readers, defining a new generative genre of digital literature: the ‘slang of YouTube’ – a digital Esperanto that emerged out of millions of users worldwide”Digicult. (A quote from the book A Lot Was Been Hard can be read at buttom).

This artistic intervention touches on several interesting points. Namely it approaches audiences' labor on the Web 2.0, by taking and re-purposing user generated responses to a video. Interestingly the comments are not the epicenter of user generated content, but rather a side product triggered by the videos. And it creates a short-circuit resulting from selling books made from user generated material, create on the territory of one internet giant - Google - (curiously also highly involved in the digital books business) in the lands of another - Amazon.

Questions concerning publishing in our current era also seem possible to be raised by the project. When ephemeral content, such as youtube comments, is transported into a book, it is not only the ephemeral nature of the content that is being questioned, but also the immutability of the container - the book - begins to shake. If a book can be produced through automated processes and already existing content, not only the time needed for production decreases, but also several versions (or updates) of the same book are easily produced. The profusion of similar, but identical objects might begin to open a few crack in the perception of books as immutable. We might begin to see them as objects in constant change, although once we have our printed copy, it will remain unchangeable, however if we buy the same book one week after it might be different, it will contain a different "snapshot" from the first. [The digital infinitely reproducible is also infinitely changeable].

But does the content also suffer a change? Is it ask for more attention and reverence than when in its original container? Does the authority of the book diminishes, when readers understand what they are reading is not the fruit of hours of intense and reflected labor of a writer, but phrases put out to world without much thought?

My opinion from reading a sample from Kindle'voke, by itself, the book is unable ask such questions. One reason it seems to fail to do so has to do with overtly exposed text origin. The way the text presented in the book reveals immediately its source, cutting short the possibility of perceived as a "serious" literary work to which readers would be willing to devote their attention. Of course this remark begs the question: What makes a literary work? Perhaps by finding out what are these characteristics the book could be assemble in a more crafted way, giving readers the chance to be drawn and intrigued by it. Then perhaps the fore-mentioned questions could begin to appear to readers.

sample

		K0000448LLEYRO

		Janetlw Bauie
		Alot was been hard

Do Not Read!!!!!! Well now that you've started you cant stop. One day a little girl name Maria was walking through
the woods and spotted a face and thought about it for a while. After that the face ripped her face of and tore her a part
limb by limb with its teeth. If you dont copy and paste this to 10 vids in 48 hrs the face will come to ur house and kill
you

Actors

Wakur
Yildiray
Tugba
Gita
Song
Alia
Melvin
Adelheid
Milo
Farahani
Amali
Mara


Scene 1

Tugba: 2:19 sooooooooooooooooooo funny

Song: gay gay gay so gay. I like Davedays way better. HeHe =^.^= . I like Davedays'es cat better then your thing
you play with. Haha

Tugba: i remember my cat was running around the house so i cought him and ate him, btw i AM asian so he was
tasty

Yildiray: Couldn't be more racist and stereotypical there.

Tugba: well i am asian :/

Wakur: lol this is so cute!

Adelheid: rofl

Farahani: the kitty is so CUTEEEEEE OMG!!!

underdeveloped thoughts

it tell us something about the psychology of users and the dialect employed, which can be a valuable resource for decoding our era, but do we something more form it?
a new literary genre / a new language
defying notions of authorship and literature

SEARCH: Reuters article about ebook spam