Analysis of Caleb Larsen’s work
A tool to Deceive and Slaughter is a seemingly simplistic piece of art by Caleb Larsen. It consists of a black box which is connected to a server via an ethernet connection. This connection checks if the box is up for sale on ebay. This connection is refreshed every 10 minutes to check if the auction has either ended or sold. If either of these conditions are met, the box automatically starts another auction of itself. The owner has to then send the box to its new owner for the cycle to repeat. Caleb is from the United States and was born in 1979. He is based in Bootjack in Michigan and attended 3 different universities including Yale. He has also received multiple awards for his work in the digital media world and regularly attends lectures to talk to new students about his experiences. The piece has really altered my perception of how items are sold over the internet. Here you have an item which is basically selling itself with no input from the owner at the time. That’s a really interesting perspective to see a world where items can denote their own paths through owners along with their value too. I think a big focal point of the project is actually questioning this value. The sole purpose of this box is to be sold but how can you put a value on nothing. It has no other use or reason for existence and yet people will still buy it because of its premise. Premise is a powerful concept. It’s like the hierarchy of the monetary world. At the end of the day, an item is only worth what someone will pay for it and this work proves just that.
