PIKSEL17 festival for elektronisk kunst og fri teknologi

It Was Fun At First

Jonas Lund, Sebastian Schmieg

It Was Fun At First is a botnet of Twitter Accounts with the goal to influence trending and influential topics on social media. IWFAF comments on our contemporary technological infused daily life, from the Blockchain and the Singularity to surveillance and loneliness. The botnet is made up of fake accounts and of real people. It delivers fake news that you want to believe.

Taking its inspiration from State-sponsored Internet propaganda troll offices like the USA’s “Operation Earnest Voice”, Russia’s “Internet Research Agency” or China’s “50 Cent Party”, the piece uses the visual template of memes and inspirational quotes in order to subvert the media landscape by creating rumours, memes, platitude statements and jokes.

IWFAF embraces automation to create an infinite amount of posts, and in doing so hijacks, trolls and clogs public discourse on social media. It takes serious the promises of technology so that it can make fun of it. And despite all the fun: there is the potentiality of creating one or two or three posts that gain traction, that explode, that go viral, that actually have a lasting impact. We want to believe.

The botnet consists of nodes that everybody can run in their browser. Each node is running its own neural network, each one appropriating different sources of quotes by philosophers, futurists and technologist, thousands of comments from communities like Reddit, and lastly headlines from popular tech blogs. By running a node you’re posting to a brigade of aged Twitter accounts that we bought.

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Jonas Lund

Jonas Lund is a Swedish artist that creates paintings, sculpture, photography, websites and performances that critically reflects on contemporary networked systems and technological innovations. He earned an MA at Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam (2013) and a BFA at Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam (2009). He has had solo exhibitions at Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2016), Steve Turner, Los Angeles (2016, 2015, 2014); Växjö Konsthall Sweden (2016), Boetzelaer|Nispen, Amsterdam (2014); Showroom MAMA, Rotterdam (2013); and has had work included in numerous group exhibitions including at Eyebeam, New York; New Museum, New York, XPO Gallery, Paris; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Witte De With, Rotterdam, De Hallen, Haarlem and the Moving Museum, Istanbul. His work has been written about in Artforum, Kunstforum, Metropolis M, Artslant, Rhizome, Huffington Post, Furtherfield and Wired.

jonaslund.biz

Sebastian Schmieg
Sebastian Schmieg examines the ways networked technologies shape online and offline realities, in artworks that range from shredded hard-drives from a Google datacenter to crowd-sourced versions of popular self-help books using Amazon’s Kindle. His output encompasses websites, videos, interface performances, lectures, online interventions, print-on-demand books or neural networks. His artistic practice currently revolves around digital labor, optimization and the amalgamation of humans and software. Previously his work has been exhibited at The Photographers’ Gallery, London, UK; Transmediale, Berlin, Germany; Art Center Nabi, Seoul, South Korea; and Bitforms Gallery, New York, USA. Sebastian Schmieg lives and works in Berlin.

http://sebastianschmieg.com