Kurt Cobain's Suicide Letter vs. Google AdSense

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by: Sebastian Campion

A few years ago, French artist Christophe Bruno created the Google AdWords Happening, in which he utilized the AdWords program to publish abstract poetry instead of ads. Google didn't find the happening appropriate hence, he got banned.

Last year Bruno's happening was followed up by GWEI – Google Will Eat Itself, an artistic click-fraud scheme developed by Hans Bernhard & Alessandro Ludovico. GWEI turned Google's ubiquitous AdSense program against Google itself in order to draw public attention to the fact that Google's immense popularity constitutes a democratic paradox. The operation was quickly discovered and stopped by Google.

Now, US artist Cory Arcangel has added to the list of conceptual Google-ad hacks.

Arcangel recently put up a webpage containing the entire text from Kurt Cobain's suicide note and paired it with Google AdSense.

Naturally, the text-ads generated by Cobain's suicide note are totally absurd and so, the site demonstrates just how clueless AdSense is despite Google's claim that 'AdSense can deliver relevant ads because Google understand the meaning of a webpage'.

beigerecords.com/cory/kurt

Original Post: http://www.guerrilla-innovation.com/archives/2006/09/000524.php