Pearl Mardenpearl.gm22@gmail.com

CASH ONLY
DONUTS
REAL AUCTION
REAL BIDS
GETTING MY DATA * a special gift just for youHi. I’m Pearl.

Thank you all for being here — I hope you enjoyed the donuts.

I just wanted to say a little something before we start. First off:

This auction is real.
 The data is real.
 The money is real.
 This is my actual digital life, and I am actually selling it.

My data is my art. I am art. Life is art. So if I am art and art is life then you are buying my life. Which is art. 

Buy it. Please. Please buy it. I need you to buy it. I am so tired and I need money. I don’t want to work a minimum wage job and hate my life. I want to be an artist. Artists commit daring acts. This is mine. Vive le revolucion. 

Also, one day, I might be really famous so that means all of this will be worth a ton of money. Like I could be Picasso. Imagine if you had Picasso’s entire browsing history. That would be like worth 1 million dollars.
Also — I hope you had a chance to check out the merch booth before the auction starts.
 Depending on how this goes, the prices might double, triple, quadruple — who knows. That’s up to you.

pearlBay is a performance centered around the live auctioning of my personal data and digital life. It began as a way to reclaim what’s been quietly taken by corporations—an attempt to understand what I’m giving up when I accept the terms and conditions. As I sifted through fifteen years of storage—early messages, photos, purchases—I began to see my data as a portrait of who I’ve been, and maybe still am.

To sell it is both an art piece and a personal investigation. If I am an artist, and this is me, then my data is art—and can be sold as such.