Institute for New Feeling: The Redirectory

Schlosspost Web Residents, March 2016

The »dark art« of SEO caught the eye of the Institute for New Feeling (Scott Andrew, Agnes Bolt, and Nina Sarnelle from Los Angeles/US), which as a research clinic explores the strangeness and dangers of technology and the Internet, as well as their beauty. For their Schlosspost web residency on the topic »Decentralization of Internet Art« curated by NETRO, the Institute for New Feeling (IfNf) mirrors the SEO (search engine optimization) system and initiates a campaign as a kind of performative intervention in the backend of the web. Below you can find the concept text, that convinced the jury. Read more about the project in an interview with the artists: This is SEO and check out their project »The Redirectory« realized during the residency. The project will carry on also after the residency.

On Dec 31, 2015, at 6:15 PM, Institute for New Feeling <SEO@institutefornewfeeling.com> wrote:

Hey we ran across your site today and absolutely loved the design but your rankings need to be improved. Have you noticed? Take a minute to check out our services, we’d love to help. Here’s a little bit about us.

We are workers in the world. We are scrapers, stuffers, spinners, churners. We make mirrors. We make gateways. We go to work everyday at the farm. We come home each day from the mill.

We are ever presence. We are soft optimization. We offer, we provide, we deliver.

There is a universe of content out there. There is a universal content out there.
This is the redirectory.

Be here with us right now. Be there in a few mins. Be well,
This is presence.

~~

Visit us on the web at:
thisispresence.info
redirect.rest
ceaseless.co
tight.website
inwardjob.com
freshsqueezedlinkjuice.com
emptyland.co

Watch This is Presence.

Concept

This is Presence (above) is a 17-minute video commissioned by Ballroom Marfa that functions as an online brand identity campaign for the Institute for New Feeling. The film depicts a slow fall down an Internet »rabbit hole,« floating through a ring of interconnected training modules, news articles, facility tours, click bait and social networking sites; all of this is original content, shot for and about our organization.

While constructing this film we became more and more interested in SEO marketing and reputation management services, the invisible processes by which capital manipulates search results and online presence, thereby buying influence on the Internet.

For the Schlosspost Residency we will initiate the research portion of a web-based performance we’re planning for later this year. The latter part of this project is an expansive SEO campaign for the Institute for New Feeling: we will use a content mill to create 1,000 websites.

In preparation for this project, we will spend the next 4 weeks researching black hat and white hat strategies for SEO, ORM and any other means of managing web identity. We will assemble our research into a web-based publication called The Redirectory. As portions of the publication are finished, they will be shared at: redirectory.club

Web design in collaboration with Ethan Jerrett.