The video above is a simulation of the work's mise-en-scene. The work is ritually performed on https://www.amazon.ca

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As neomedievalists working in Scotland and Québec, our collaborative work is often fabricated mid-Atlantic in a cloud-workshop using freeware. Amazon is one of many labyrinthine online bazaars through which we have fabricated and distributed our work. Such platforms are ideal hosts for parasitic, para-artistic activities.

Since we were recognised in 2009, the Confraternity of Neoflagellants have persistently posted lavish and excessive reviews on amazon as an ongoing liturgical practice of person-object-veneration. The title of this project is Let us know about anything wrong, or anything you don’t like about this review, and you could win a £50 Amazon voucher!

Amazon.ca’s ethical values – a fluctuating mix of long-tail corporate-probes and subjectivity-surfing – we carefully elevate ‘item#s’ into neomedieval relics by scripting ‘object hagiographies’ in the form of marginalia, commentary and gloss. This is the neomedieval practice of relic-ing. An ever-expanding bestiary hosted by amazon.ca, Let us know about anything wrong, or anything you don’t like about this review, and you could win a $50 Amazon voucher! is an attempt to generate and embody a hypereconomic assemblage of practices, to become a hub that dissolves distinctions between production, transfer, consumption, humilitas and virtus.

Glossary:

Relic-ing: amazon is but one means of socially incubating person-objects via social networks. For us, this hypereconomic phenomenon closely resembles the pre-modern practice of ‘relic-ing’. The hypereconomy (Alexander Chislenko and Madan Ramakrishnan) emerged in the late 1990s as an attempt to quantify (and thus to subjugate) social capital as ‘situational’ knowledge: user-generated knowledge produced by prosumers for prosumers. In the booming Experience Economy of the 1990s, the virtus-value of goods and services would go up and down depending on the collective experience of their communities of users. Whether it be a free-range egg, a cordless power drill, a cluster of spa services, or an avatar’s high heels, the hypereconomic commodity was a relational hub in a network of inter-human (humilitas = the “human” downscaled) subjectivities.