RANDOM SHOPPER - DARIUS KAZEMI

How programming code can radically transform our consumer habits, avoiding any marketing-oriented “modus operandi”?

Darius Kazemi is a sophisticated developer of video games, but also an experimenter, programming socially engaging processes. His “Random Shopper” is a software robot that randomly selects a word and then use it searching Amazon, buying then the first (mostly) book, CD or DVD it offers, within a certain amount of money. The consumer knows what the bot has bought only when he gets and opens the package, in a mixture of bet, surprise, and eventually delusion or enjoyment in front of the shipped book. This relatively simple process is able to subvert the most essential and over-fetishized marketing strategies: knowing as intimately as possible the consumer personality in order to strategically titillate consumer’s desires (excellently embodied in Amazon books “Continue shopping” suggestions, for example). The “consumerism” ideology is then beaten to its core by what can be defined as the “wrapping” effect, the emotion triggered by a “gift” picked up by somebody else (even if it’s a machine). The most sophisticated algorithm scanning our entire online lives looking for our strongest spending compulsion are then annihilated by a simple software properly programmed in software.

Darius Kazemi is a Boston-based programmer whose art is centered on randomness, apophenia, and human (un)intelligence. His art is deployed via autonomous algorithms that use the ecosystem of the internet itself as a medium, ending with generated artifacts that range from tweets and Tumblr posts to slide decks and physical Amazon shipments.
http://tinysubversions.com/