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Hans Bernhard and  lizvlx , aka UBERMORGEN.COM,together with Alessandro Ludovico and Paolo Cirio , have realized the project  GWEI – Goggle Will Eat Itself,
an internet piece with high impact on reality, that was nominated for
the transmediale Award 2006, per il Viper Award 2006,that has received
a special mention at Ars
Electronica 2005, and has got the Rhizome Commision in 2005.


LB: how did it born the idea for this recoursive project?
HB: in 2004 the net.art world was flooded with Google art projects.
They all dealt with the search engine results, the image-database or
other Google services. Our artistic strategy is to always search for
the weak-points within strong and large scaled systems and exploit them
agressively. Now Googles main revenue source is advertisment, and there
we targeted our research & activity. It took us more than 6 months
to adjust our focus on the core-principles of Google, to reduce and to
remove all interfering material. GWEI - Google Will Eat Itself is a
conceptual piece with a high degree of conversion into reality. The
simple step of understanding that we can build a simple model in which
the monopolistic giant becomes a cannibal of itself. It is a
self-referential game and a media hack of the new economic bubble. One
of our main tasks – parallel to running the online project – is to
transform material from and about the piece for gallery and museum
exhibitions. The visualisation of Google Will Eat Itself through
diagrams was practical – they explain the mechanism and represent the
whole project in an abstract & coded form. A minimalistic visual
approach to a minimalistic Business Art & Legal Art project.

http://www.gwei.org/diagrams
http://www.gwei.org/exhibitions

LB: is this a sort of hacking of a economy that is going just in one direction, money?
HB: Google's position is predominant in the same moment it enteres a
new business field with a new service. It's the Google effect: creating
consensus on a new business, even if it instantly gets the predominant
position. The greatest enemy of such a giant is not another giant: it's
the parasite. If enough parasitites suck small amounts of money in this
self-referentialism embodiment, they will empty this artificial
mountain of data and its inner risk of digital totalitarianism. By
establishing the GWEI model we deconstruct the new global advertisment
mechanisms by rendering them into a surreal click-based economic model.
Google Will Eat Itself is to show-case and unveil a total monopoly of
information, a weakness of the new global advertisment system and the
renaissance of the “new economic bubble" - reality is, Google is
currently valued more than all Swiss Banks together (sic). Google
earned 500 Million USD with advertisment in 2005 and is projected to
earn 1,5 Billion USD in 2006.

http://www.gwei.org/text

LB:did you get any feedback or sollecitation by google about this project?
HB: ee had direct contact with Google. They turned off 3 of our public
decoy Adsense accounts (Googles advertisment program)   - but
this was no harm to the integrity of our project, we have around 40-50
Adsense accounts spread around the globe. Google is highly sensitive in
all matters concerning advertisment fraud - because this is their one
and only revenue source.

http://www.gwei.org/googleletters

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