After investigating on 'semantic capitalism' and 'taylorisation of speech' with the project 'Google Adwords', Christophe Bruno reflects on the economic dynamics of collective hallucination. According to the French net artist "The Web, specifically in its version 2.0, is an implementation of control strategies in writing." On the contrary, the image can't be easily interpreted by a machine remaining a hardly accessible territory. Therefore, he created Logo.Hallucination, a software based on neural image recognition that continuously monitors images on the Internet, to track pattern similarities with corporate logos. The idea is to use image recognition technologies to detect subliminal logos or emblems forms, hidden (mostly involuntarily) in the visual environment or whole images on the net. The 'found' images can be accessed through a weblog, with an argued comparison between the original picture and the (supposedly found) original brand logo. Like Cayce Pollard, protagonist of William Gibson's 'Pattern recognition', Bruno investigates to find brand loyalty secret that would become every marketing research gold mine. Clearly here there's a massive amount of irony. Every time a hallucination is detected, an email is then sent to the image owner - if the owner is known, to inform him that the “automated monitoring spiderbot has detected a potential infringement of Intellectual Property Law." Logo.Hallucination confirms Bruno’s theory on the alliance between the society of control and the Web 2.0 spectacle: media corporations cannot measure their messages real effects and hence they need an additional control structure, like Google and the same Web 2.0. The role of this panoptic web part, achievement of the society of control, is to scientifically analyze the message effect and observe its deviations. The resulting outcome will be sold back to media corporations, so to continuously optimize the whole process in loop.
Valentina Culatti