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Airworld series (1999-2000)

The Airworld series was initiated at the “World Views” residency programme in World Trade Center’s 91st floor in 1999. Airworld developed into a series of intervention into global capitalism that ran between 1999-2000.

Various projects

2000

These included distributed banner ads, a pirate radio station, two installations, several net art projects, and a video. A series of photographs from the Airworld installation project as realised at the World Trade Center during the “World Views” residency program. The installation consisted of viewing stations from which viewers could access the project’s website, radio program, and video components. The McCoys use software to scan the websites where the Airworld Banner Ads were displayed, collecting their texts and press releases for a database. The Airworld site extracts from this database to create unique texts for each visitor to the site. These texts presented a flood of corporate jargon. In addition, the Jargon Machine searches for images using the, then current, AltaVista image search and automatically assembled the results into a streaming video. This online project used the Doubleclick.com network to distribute one million banner ads over one month, from mid-August to mid-September 1999. Each banner ad adopted a business slogan such as "option: business as usual" or "welcome, we are air." Doubleclick.com, which sponsored the project, did not inform the sites on which the ads were displayed that they were hosting this content. Airworld Economic Theories uses DHTML and javascript to create a real-time remix between texts taken from the economic theory of Marx and the content of prominent financial websites. The Marx quotes are imprinted upon live sites from the Airworld database, creating a "floating" layer of the critique of capital. Airworld Flood Timer was produced in solidarity with art collective etoy.com as they attempted to flood the site of etoys.com in the 1999 performance/intervention Toywar. The Flood Timer was designed to time the servers of etoys.com by drawing from an internal dictionary to repeatedly query their site's searching functions. The user has no controls other than to start or stop it.

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