Installation: {poem}.py – a critique of linguistic capitalism

Google makes its money auctioning words to the highest bidder. It’s known as linguistic capitalism, and it means that your search queries will always return the most lucrative version of the word you searched for, regardless of your intent. The monetary exchange value of language has therefore become more important than its linguistic value. The {poem}.py project makes this process visible by feeding poetry through Google’s advertising platform AdWords, and recording the monetary value assigned to each word. The reconstructed poems are then printed out as receipts. In this way, poetry is reclaimed from the algorithmic marketplace, and returned to art.