Amy Alexander: The Travesty Corporate PR InfoMixer!
September 2002
Amy Alexander: The Travesty Corporate PR InfoMixer!
Amy Alexander’s The Travesty Corporate PR InfoMixer! is a remix software that parodies corporate press releases by combining and reorganizing them. Built with “Travesty,” a Perl program that rearranges texts based on the frequency with which pairs of words appear, the project invites users to make their own remixes. They can choose three corporations (“Select Corporate Artists!”) from a provided list or download the software to reshuffle the texts of companies of their choice. Drawing inspiration from DJs and computer musicians who combine and remix dance tracks, the work challenges the homogenized language of corporate public relations, underscoring how an impersonal tone and specialized jargon often turn into a generic, formulaic form of press speak.
Amy Alexander (b. 1965; San Francisco, California) has worked in net art, software art, networked installation, audiovisual performance, film, video, music, and information technology. She is a professor in the Visual Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego, and her research and practice focus on how contemporary mediums—from performative cinema to social media—change along with cultural and technological shifts. Alexander’s projects have been exhibited at venues including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the New Museum in New York; Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria; Transmediale, Berlin; as well as [ACM] SIGGRAPH, ISEA (International Symposium on Electronic Art), ZERO1, and NIME (New Interfaces for Musical Expression). Her club performances have been featured at Sonar, Barcelona; First Avenue, Minneapolis; and Melkweg, Amsterdam. Alexander’s work has been discussed in publications including WIRED, the New York Times, Slashdot, Ecrans, Leonardo, the Boston Globe, and the Washington Post.
Gate Pages
Every month from March 2001 to February 2006, the Whitney invited an artist or collective to present their work in the form of a “Gate Page” on artport. Each page was meant to function as a portal to the artist’s own sites and projects. The Gate Pages comprise a range of artistic approaches to the format—while some of them are designed as entry points to the respective artist’s website or promote a recently launched work, others take the form of a more complex stand-alone project.
Wherever necessary and possible, these works are made functional through emulation and reconstructions from the Internet Archive. Not all of them have been restored to their original state and their conservation is ongoing. You can also view the original Gate Pages archive to see how they were presented at the time of their creation.
artport
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