50 year accumulation 2 day sale
50 year accumulation 2 day sale is an exploration of the end-life of material objects told through the visual and linguistic aesthetics of online estate sales. The piece presents the afterlife of fulfilled desires and the unseen epilogue to the advertising industry’s narrative of happiness through ownership. This collaboration draws from the vernacular images of online estate sales featuring dramatic enlargements of hurried, functional photography of over-packed closets, overflowing dressers, musty basements and random juxtaposed objects.
This poem was created by Andrew Demirjian and Dahlia Elsayed, the video was directed and edited by Andrew Demirjian and the music is by Matthew Gantt.
50 year accumulation 2 day sale
still from 50 year accumulation 2 day sale
The work shifts the context from hastily taken images for explanatory display to lure visitors to upcoming sales to one of poetry, producing a poem with a subtext of demise and the hereafter of need. The poem’s text is exclusively drawn from online descriptions of images, using a syncopated delivery from two people, sometimes speaking simultaneously, other times sequentially.
The screen shot above is an example of the vernacular photography and fragmented text of online estate sales. For this project, I created a database of language and images and used natural language processing to analyze the linguistic content of the language and find interesting connections across the words used in dozens of online estate sales.
50 year accumulation 2 day sale was created for the 15th edition of the Screen Compositions series at Experimental Intermedia. It is a program that explores the intersection of sonic arts and moving image and represents dynamic two-way collaborations between artists working in this field.