Re: Dakar Arts Festival

Re: Dakar Arts Festival is a KairUs collaboration developed together with media artist Andreas Zingerle during the artist in recidence program January-April 2011 at Subnet in Salzburg, Austria.

The Re: Dakar Arts Festival project documents a new art scam form. The scammers approach artists and galerists with open calls for a fake festival in Dakar, Senegal. To appear professional, they adopt different identities. To unveil their practice, three virtual characters including their online identities were created to scam the scammers. Investigate their stories in an installation and online. Read their blogs or become friends with them on Facebook to unveil more details about the art scam plot. Follow the Cybercrime story, become a facilitator of the anti-art scam movement and see how the scammers operate to avoid becoming a victim yourself.

www.dakarartsfestival.net

The Re: Dakar Arts Festival transmedia story has been presented during year 2011 at Schmiede11-festival “chaos creates structure”, Hallein, Austria and CYBERIDEOLOGIES Web Art Show, UAVM Virtual Museum in Portugal.

In September 2010, we received an email invitation to participate in the Dakar Arts Festival.
Believing the authenticity of the invitation we replied. After a more detailed online search, we
started to doubt the realness of the festival and it turned out to be a scam. We found a handful of
artists who had fallen victims to this fraud, therefore we decided to further investigate the
scamming practice. In West Africa, scammers operate from local internet cafes adopting fake
identities, the availability of email transformed a local form of fraud into an important export
industry.

To safely approach the scammers, we created three virtual characters; artist, galerist and
secretary. We gave them a home in Switzerland. In computer terminology, a home may refer to a
homepage or a home directory which contains personal information and imposes the persons
existence, so we supported the created virtual identities with homepages and profiles on social
media platforms. They are easy to create, hence we started to question the authenticity of many
messages we received online.

We assume that online traces or google-hits underlines our existence, yet there are no tools to
proof our identity. Within this grey area, the scam baiting evolves into a game where a proof of
existence – real or fake – becomes a trophy. The low quality of the material provided by the
scammers, made us question if our material will be reused to scam other victims. On the other
hand, had we also mislead others?

The “Re: Dakar Arts Festival” project reveals the practice of scammers and questions the trust we put in online representations. As a part of the project research paper “Transmedia storytelling and online representations –issues of trust on the internet” was published at the International Conference on Cyberworlds and presented October 4 – 6, 2011, at the conference in Banff,  Canada. Also a quartet card game called “419-is just a game” was developed as a spin off from the research.

RE:DAKAR ARTS FESTIVAL IN IMAGES

An interactive installation functions as one entrance point to the transmedia story.

Through the installation visitors can follow the correspondences between the virtual characters and the scammers.

The transmedia story continues to unfold online on various social media channels.

Discoveries made during the research period was published in a research paper.

Research about various scams was published as an card game.

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