Chicago Sun-Times

I find the whole publicity campaign fascinating. There's a really great short story by James Tiptree, Jr. called The Girl Who Was Plugged In. In this story, advertising has been made illegal. Corporations circumvent the law by having "puppet" celebrities that are controlled telepathically by operators. These celebrities are perfect, beautiful people who go to all the right places, are highly visible, and use only the corporations' products. It's a love story--the son of one of the corporate executives falls in love with one of the puppets and tracks down the operator. He is appalled when he realizes that the consciousness he has come to love actually inhabits a very drab, pitiable body. In the end he is unable to reconcile the two.

The story is very prescient in the way it anticipated embedded advertising, viral marketing, and astroturfing; techniques like the Sarah Marshall movie promotion. Contemporary artists have used those strategies too, for example Mel Chin and his insertion pieces on Melrose Place, or Hasan Elahi using his webpage to track himself for the FBI. I am a visual artist, a printmaker. I own sarahmarshall.net, sarahmarshall.com, and sarahmarshall.be. All those URLs redirect to the personal/faculty site hosted by The University of Alabama, where I am an Associate Professor of Art. I bought the domains some years ago and I keep an online gallery of my work. Over the past few weeks, I have received over twenty thousand hits at this webpage.