UBERMORGEN
Sound of eBay

Since 1995, the Austrian artist duo UBERMORGEN has been working in the fields of digital fine art, media activism, programming and media hacking. 

The Sound of eBay is a website that generates MP3 tracks from eBay user data and presents them in the form of teletext sex ads. Any eBay user names and an e-mail address can be entered on the site. Robots collect all the data from the respective, usually actually existing, accounts: credit card, bank accounts, passwords and non-sensitive user data such as purchased and sold products, prices, comments and ratings.
Out of the data arising from consumption and economics, the sound-creating supercollider machine generates a unique piece of electronic music. As soon as the work is ready to be downloaded, the user receives an e-mail notification. The work, which UBERMORGEN itself describes as an affirmative high-end (media hacking), low-tech (teletext-look) contribution to the atomic soundtrack of a new shock capitalism, concludes a trilogy devoted to the three big players of e-commerce: Google, Amazon and eBay.

On June 15, 2016, 560,544 eBay accounts were registered, along with 1.3 million songs and 6.5 TB of data.

(Text: Bettina Back)