The artists of the “Xanadu Hijack”
are Curt Cloninger and Seth Johnson. The
two have come together to “Hijack” the word “Xanadu.” What they are trying to do by “hijacking” the
word is essentially trick Google Search into showing images that are unrelated
to each other contextually, but have a common connection by a watermarked logo. They want the images to be associated by the
word Xanadu. Some names and terms associated
with the word Xanadu, are: Kublai Khan,
Coleridge’s Poem “Kubla Khan”, Olivia Newton-John, Citizen Kane’s Xanadu
Mansion, and The Muses from Xanadu.
Curt Cloninger-
Cloninger
is an artist, writer and designer that uses video, performances and
programming. His works are focused on
words and the associations that are given with certain words.
Seth Johnson
“Seth
Johnson is a founding member of the multi-media collaboration called Carnal
Torpor. Carnal Torpor investigates ideologically motivated social structures
such as institutionalized religion, occult practices, and marketing
strategies.”
This being
said, the two’s works are closely related as show by the project Hijacking
Xanadu. They want the word to basically take
over the search engine and essentially become almost cult-like with the number
of images and associations that are given to the word
“We want
to hijack the word "Xanadu" and modulate it for a while. We will
create several visual images in dialogue with Xanadu's
residual history (Kahn, Coleridge, Kane, Kissimmee, Newton-John, Nelson,
Broadway, Las Vegas, New Jersey, etc.)”
This quote from the turbulence.com site really sums up the
purpose of the project:
“The difference between this project and branding is that we are not branding anything other than the process of branding. We are (re-)branding the word to nothing, to return the ownership of the word to the word itself. By making Xanadu a common noun rather than a proper noun, it becomes its own word again. Once a noun becomes a proper noun, it is owned by a particular immanent instantiation in the historical world. But lowercase "water" is just water.”
“ We want to play the entire network as a single
instrument, causing Google Images to "perform" a bricolaged visual
"score" we have composed.”
No comments:
Post a Comment