Duchamp’s Fountain, as previously noted, has been credited as creating the new artform of ‘readymades’ and constituting a critique of the abandonment of functional ceramics. But in writing about Duchamp’s Fountain, John Roberts noted that the work served as more than these initial meanings, stating:
The use of the toilet in Scrape Elegy mirrors this critique of American monopoly capitalism, employing the toilet as the primary medium for users in the experience of their own historical data, outside the constraints of the capitalist monolith that is Instagram. The work plays on the anthropomorphism of machines in modern life. Like Fountain, as well as America, the medium of the toilet hails back to the concept of a swarm — every person will use a toilet in some form. But does every person use Instagram? Do we identify more with a toilet or with social media platforms? Scrape Elegy plays the two off against each other, uniting the experience of being, both on the internet and on the toilet, with the creativity of the work, as Roberts describes.
In The AI Ethicist’s Dilemma: Fighting Big Tech by Supporting Big Tech (2021), a disruptive piece in the field of AI ethics by Henrik Skaug Sætra, Mark Coeckelbergh, and John Danaher, the researchers present multiple possibilities for critiquing an industry that ‘has both resources and control of the tools and digital infrastructure required for communicating and raising awareness about the problems’ (Sætra et al. 2021: 3). One possibility presented is that an AI ethicist might use social media in a parasitic manner, feeding from it, but not contributing to the platform (Sætra et al. 2021: 3). The automated system of Scrape Elegy is designed to pull the captions from a consenting user, convert the word files into audio, and feed the audio back for the user to hear on the toilet. In this sense, Scrape Elegy is enacting a parasitic practice — pulling from Instagram, then changing the medium, while giving the platform nothing in return. Indeed, Instagram’s own software has at times logged out or demanded verification from the Scrape Elegy accounts, owing to their unusual or unhuman-like behaviour on the platform.
In presenting their possibilities for the subversion of big tech, Sætra and colleagues write:
Surveillance Capitalism is a prime example of such a system, based on collected and monetizing/actioning personal data. It is enabled not just by individual companies but by the economic, regulatory, political and social system, and we argue that you cannot correct surveillance capitalism simply by eliminating, for example, Facebook (Saetra et. al. 2021: 3).
Scrape Elegy, as a work aiming to present new experiences of our own social media data, engages directly with the platform, and the experience is deeply grounded in the social media platform itself. Without the platform, the work would be missing a crucial element in the experience it offers. Instead, the work aims to challenge our own interactions with ourselves on the platform. In presenting users with a different experience, the aim is to make clear the banality and everyday nature of the swarm that occurs on Instagram — to remind users that their lives are more than what is presented to the world on Instagram and to give power to the human experience of being, rather than existing through the validation chasing of big tech and its algorithms.