Document:Q11816

As consumerism has become the most powerful value system in late-
capitalist culture--our contemporary religion, in a sense--certain
key questions arise: how do we separate what we want from what the mass
media wants to sell us; and, once we figure out what we really want, how
do we act as responsible agents in consumer society.
Livesystems.net is Marni Kotak's answer to these questions.
Through Livesystems.net, Kotak challenges the astonishing power of mass
media to captivate the desire of individuals and direct it towards the
purchase of commercial products. Kotak, taking charge of her own role
as an agent of consumer culture, utilizes the mass medium of the
Internet to advertise her experiencing her own desires independent of
any clear connection to commercial products; she then sells these
documentations in the form of prints. She also sells advertising on her
body on the website through her Write Your Message on My Body: Place
Your Ad Here campaign (www.livesystems.net/adpage1.html).
Kotak created Livesystems.net in July 1999, during the height of the
Internet boom. Working as a marketing executive for a rapidly growing
start-up at the time, Kotak decided to apply the techniques which seemed
to be capable of creating riches overnight to her own life and
interests. Livesystems.net was conceived as her life as a business on
the web.
Traditional business plans outline a set of strategic goals which when
accomplished lead to the pleasure and profit of the company's founders
and customers. Kotak exposes these underlying drivers of business, and
applies them directly to her own life: her products are advertisements
of how she achieves her own pleasure and profit. These products or
"strategies," as she defines them on the site show the artist doing the
things she likes most. In this way, she tells viewers that they can
experience their own desires independent of the mass media's pressure to
buy.
In her Write Your Message on My Body: Place Your Ad Here campaign, Kotak
goes even further to consider the pervasive force of advertising and her
role as an agent of consumer culture by selling ad space on her own
body. Through this Internet marketing campaign, advertisers are invited
to place their logos onto a digital image of Kotak's body. Each part of
her body is associated with a different price. The logos on the Write
Your Message ad page are actually live hyperlinks that, when clicked,
bring the viewer from the Livesystems.net site to the advertisers'
websites.