| Abstrakt: |
With their Ghost Writers project, the Austrian artistic and publishing collective Traumawien flooded Amazon with e-books entirely composed of YouTube comments, presenting us with a satirical reflection on the system of production, distribution and reception of self-published e-books in the age of Amazon and Google. This essay reads the project as interventionist conceptual writing that not only appropriates the culture industry's materials, but also its means of production. The result is a type of "interface-specific literature" that is not only designed to integrate the affordances of Amazon's interface, but also uses the interface against its purpose in a digital détournement. The essay argues that the Ghost Writers project, with its author model of human-machine hybridization, offers a new way to think about writing literature as designing strategies of resistance to monopolistic platforms beyond outdated imperatives of originality and readability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
