Angie Waller

Angie Waller and her online presence, couchprojects, document a compelling set of cultural interventions in commercialism, shopping and social networking.

Waller's research-based art projects use the information collected from various online sources to form impressionistic, systematic visualizations (photos, images, charts), which offer a disarming perspective on economics and politics.

Her book Data Mining the Amazon (2001-2002) aggregates customer recommendations from amazon.com to find relationships between books listed under profiles for political figures and the CDs bought in conjunction with these purchases. The result is a novel kind of social network that politicizes purchasing choices in what the software industry benignly calls "data mining."

Angie's work manifests in a variety of forms, integrated into live performance, installation, videos, web sites and books. Her projects have included: an installation about the celebration of conspicuous consumption in Chinese real estate marketing, a video exploring the insider network and technologies of the armored car industry, a social networking web site for people who openly admit to only pretending to like people, and a mobile phone messaging service comprised of deadpan clip art animations for conveying taboo topics.

Angie received her MFA from UCLA. She lives in New York.