Advertising Positions (in "Montage Express", Tin Hau, Hong Kong)

Advertising Positions is featured in the exhibition, "Montage Express", at the Oi! Street gallery in Tin Hau, Hong Kong. Advertising Positions is a series of art works using software robots trained to search the web according to specific user profiles including age, gender, location, interests and the like. Each robot is released on the web, driving a modified version of Google’s Chrome browser, to periodically visit sites that it 'likes', and to click links that it selects, which then bring it to new sites. This process continues over several weeks, during which the robot collects, as it has been trained to do, all of the advertisements it is served based on its profile (generally several thousand or more), applying each to a single polygon on the mesh skin of the virtual avatar it inhabits. The training period concludes when the robot’s 3-dimensional figure is complete.