{poem}.py aims to critique ‘linguistic capitalism’ by means of artistic intervention. The work makes visible the tension between the aesthetic value and the exchange value of words in online environments, where frequently used keywords are worth more than less commonly used vocabulary. Pip Thornton breaks down famous poems to their constituent words and ascribes the monetary value applied to each word by typical search engines. In William Wordsworth’s poem I wandered lonely as a cloud, the words ‘cloud’, ‘crowd’ and ‘host’ are relatively expensive. These values relate not to Wordsworth’s vision of a Cumbrian landscape, but to cloud computing, crowd funding and web hosting. We begin to see what happens to words when, taken out of their communication or descriptive context, they are allowed no other meaning but the most economically lucrative.
The process:
Thermal receipts, poetry, Python software
😹 LMAO
2018 at the Open Data Institute
Causal, Commercial, Identifiable, Open, Processed, Retrieved, Shared, Static, Temporal
Pip holds a PhD in Geopolitics and Cybersecurity from Royal Holloway, University of London. With a professional background in the police and the military, she holds BA degrees in History and Politics (Liverpool) and English Literature…
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