Adrian Chen at Gawker: “Alexey Kouznetsov is a 30-something Russian web developer. He looks not unlike a scrawnier Mark Zuckerberg.” And he’s the guy behind the popular weird Twitter account @horse_ebooks, which this blog first slow-clapped in January 2012. A detail Parker Higgins notices: the twitter “spambot” been an art project since 9/14/11, “exactly the fan-identified inflection point. The truth is disappointing, for reasons I cannot quite articulate, but I’m sure horse_ebooks could.
You have questions, surely, about this important truth-leak.
Susan Orlean, in the New Yorker:
Most of those questions will be answered today, starting at 10 A.M., at the Fitzroy Gallery, on the Lower East Side. There, the creators of the two accounts, Jacob Bakkila and Thomas Bender, will prove that they are indeed human, appearing in a performance that is the final flourish in this suite of conceptual-art pieces, weaving together Horse_ebooks and Pronunciation Book. They will also launch the next installment of the project, a choose-your-own-adventure interactive-video piece called Bear Stearns Bravo. Bakkila and Bender have been working on the project for almost four years, keeping their identities secret from just about everyone, including their colleagues at Buzzfeed, where Bakkila is a creative director, and Howcast, where Bender, until about a year ago, was the vice-president of product development.
Ah, Buzzfeed.