photo credit Graphische Sammlung ETH Zürich
MEAT JOY ERROR FAILURE (2015)
8 volume book/pdf text release
Published in 2015 by TROLLTHREAD, MJEF is a happy accident: an unreadable epic concrete/conceptual poem that consists of a mistranslation of an encoded document. It began on March 19, 2009 at 12:25 AM, when I attempted to download an online bootleg video of Carolee Schneemann’s Meat Joy. Then, on April 7, 2009 at 12:34 PM, I took this 45.9 mb (5:18) file & looked at it as raw text.
Schneemann says “Meat Joy has the character of an erotic rite: excessive, indulgent, a celebration of flesh as material.” Similarly, MJEF takes the error/failure of exposing the rawness of text that lies beneath digital content, an insight into the expanded consciousness/text/code behind the veneer of online products disseminated via encoded means. In its excesses, boredoms & inaccessabilities, MJEF is little more than an orgy of dislocated code; a failed download which resulted in an excessive text engendered by minimal computational gestures, a kind of fauxhack(er) action.
For more information and German-language reviews:
https://gs.ethz.ch/blog/freude-am-scheitern-lauren-klotzmans-meat-joy-error-failure/
https://trollthread.tumblr.com/post/118718537299/lauren-klotzman-meat-joy-error-failure-troll