Some internet art is a file you can save to a hard drive and open again later. Other works are machines that only run while connected to a service, and their meaning lives in that wiring, not in pixels. The second kind has a preservation problem that page-savers cannot solve, because part of the artwork sits on someone else’s servers, running under someone else’s rules. Google Will Eat Itself is a documented example.
A cannibalistic economic engine
In 2005 UBERMORGEN, Alessandro Ludovico, and Paolo Cirio released a work built around Google’s advertising infrastructure. The project site describes a network of hidden websites serving Google ads and using the resulting revenue to buy Google shares. In the artists’ own account of the mechanism, automated activity generated the clicks that produced those payments. The shares were to be handed to GTTP Ltd., a company set up for the work, which would distribute them back to the public. Google, paying for its own undoing, would eat itself.
What mattered here was not an image or a text but an arrangement through which real money moved across Google’s advertising system: ads served, clicks counted, payments accumulated, stock purchased. Rhizome’s archival description of GWEI preserves the work as a conceptual intervention into Google’s click-based advertising economy. That was the artwork. The dependence was the point — the engine only ran while Google’s program kept answering.
When the service stops answering
Google eventually disabled the accounts and challenged the project, ending the live economic mechanism. The surviving pages document that conflict, but the important preservation fact is simpler: once the external ad service stopped participating, the artwork could no longer perform the operation it had been built around.
What survives is the wrapper around the machine. The project site still serves the concept and documentation, while Paolo Cirio’s archive preserves project material and credits. What is gone is the live relationship with Google’s advertising infrastructure. What is gone is the engine itself: no ads, no clicks, no revenue, no share purchases. The pages can describe the mechanism but cannot run it.
That is the preservation lesson. Archiving a website preserves the documentation of a dependency, not the dependency. A static copy can show visitors what GWEI claimed to do; it cannot show the artwork happening, because half of it was an external service that no longer responds. The record of the performance stays complete while the performance itself stays out of reach, and GWEI’s meaning has quietly shifted from a running machine to a surviving account of one — more than most such works get, but less than the artists built.