The You Museum

In early 2013, to assuage the Turkish public's response to the replacement of a public park with a luxury condo development and shopping mall, the government raised the possibility of building a museum. Jeremy Bailey's 'The You Museum', which the artist has called a nod to Ghezi, is a 'museum within a shopping mall.' It employs online advertising strategies to reclaim public space, placing a distributed art collection into the online marketplace in the form of targeted and context specific one-to-one banner advertisements.

'The You Museum is a new online gallery and series of artworks by Famous New Media Artist Jeremy Bailey. Using a few simple questions The You Museum curates personalized exhibitions that are delivered to you via banners on the websites you visit most. Using various retargeting technologies these exhibitions reach you organically across ninety-eight percent of the internet. And if you like your personalized artwork, you can buy it by simply clicking a banner, sending you to an e-commerce storefront where you can complete your acquisition.'
Excerpt from the project outline

Delivered across the websites that its participants visit every day, Bailey's banners show highly detailed, 3D modelled abstract sculptures. These artworks are composited with portraits of the artist – appearing cupped in the palm of his hands or cradled in his arms. Is your personality 'Reserved & Measured' or 'Fun & Energetic?' Are your favourite shapes 'Organic & Curvy' or 'Geometric & Pointy'? Designs are assigned and distributed to each participant based on the answers given to questions such as these during the signup process, and have names such as 'Refined Geometric Small' and 'Fun Curvy Discreet.'

In order to place and tailor ads 'The You Museum' places a cookie on the participants computer. Monitoring their personal lives online, albeit according to a strict set of privacy rules, the work enacts some of the very behaviours denounced globally in the wake of NSA revelations and Net Neutrality legislation. In a similar manner, the protests and strikes that took place across Turkey in support of those at Gezi Park where around issues of freedom of the press, of expression, assembly, and the government's encroachment on secularism. While widely accepted in advertising these techniques acquire a new resonance when employed in the personalisation of Bailey's aesthetic intervention within the online marketplace

'The You Museum' website was one of four commissions launched on The Moving Museum Online following the The Moving Museum Istanbul. The Moving Museum website was designed by Jeremy Bailey with Joe Hamilton, Harm van den Dorpel, and Jonas Lund.

Jeremy Bailey (b. 1979, Toronto) is a self proclaimed Famous New Media Artist living and working in Toronto whose work explores custom software in a performative context. He received his MA in Fine Arts from Syracuse University. Selected performances, exhibitions and commissions include Rhizome’s Seven on Seven, Transmediale, the Stedelijk Museum, FACT, Whitechapel Gallery, Tate Liverpool and the New Museum. Bailey is represented by Pari Nadimi Gallery, Toronto and is an adjunct faculty member in the Mobile Augmented Reality Lab at New York University.

'Since the early noughties Bailey has ploughed a compelling, and often hilarious, road through the various developments of digital communications technologies. Ostensibly a satire on, and parody of, the practices and language of "new media," the jocose surface of Bailey’s work hides an incisive exploration of the critical intersection between video, computing, performance, and the body.'
Morgan Quaintance, Rhizome

www.theyoumuseum.org

See Bailey's accompanying presentation for The Moving Museum Istanbul, also titled 'The You Museum', 2014