Google legge le nostre emails ed in base al contenuto genera banner e messaggi pubblicitari che ritiene siano più “interessanti” per noi. Da questo assunto sono partiti Mimi Cabell e Jason Huff e, scambiandosi via mail il testo del libro di Bret Easton Ellis, hanno raccolto gli ads generati dalla grande G e impaginati nella loro speciale versione di “American Psycho”.
[quote style=”2″]We collected the ads that appeared next to each email and used them to annotate the original text, page by page. In printing it as a perfect bound book, we erased the body of Ellis’ text and left only chapter titles and constellations of our added footnotes. What remains is American Psycho, told through its chapter titles and annotated relational Google ads.[/quote]
[quote style=”2″]In one scene, where first a dog and then a man are brutally murdered with a knife, Google supplied ample ads regarding knives and knife sharpeners. In another scene the ads disappeared altogether when the narrator makes a racial slur. Google’s choice and use of standard ads unrelated to the content next to which they appeared offered an alternate window into how Google ads function—the ad for Crest Whitestrips Coupons appeared the highest number of times, next to both the most graphic and the most mundane sections of the book, leaving no clear logic as to how it was selected to appear.[/quote]
