American Psycho (conceptual novel)

American Psycho is a conceptual artist's book by Mimi Cabell and Jason Huff, based on the 1991 novel by Bret Easton Ellis. The entire text of Ellis's novel was sent through Gmail, one page at a time, to collect Google's contextual advertisements generated for each page. The advertisements were used to annotate the original text as footnotes, and Ellis's body text was then erased — leaving only chapter titles and constellations of ad-derived footnotes. The physical book, published by Traumawien in 2012, replicates the design of the 1991 Vintage Contemporaries first edition and runs to 408 pages.[1][2]

Background

Cabell and Huff, both Rhode Island School of Design MFA graduates, created the work in 2010.[2] The project exploited Gmail's then-active practice of scanning email content to generate targeted advertising. By emailing the full text of Ellis's novel page by page, they generated 819 contextual advertisements across the length of the book.[3] The results revealed patterns in Google's algorithmic reading: violent passages generated ads for knives and knife sharpeners, while a passage containing a racial slur caused all ads to disappear. The most frequently appearing ad, for Crest Whitestrips, appeared alongside both the most graphic and most mundane sections with no discernible logic.[1]

A PDF edition was also released through Traumawien, with the original Ellis text rendered in white (invisible in print but recoverable by copying and pasting in a PDF reader), an intentional gesture toward subversive filesharing.[4]

Publication

The book was first published in 2012 by Traumawien, a Vienna-based independent publisher of conceptual digital literature active from 2010 to 2016. It is carried by Printed Matter in New York.[1]

The work has a dedicated entry in Library of Artistic Print on Demand: Post-Digital Publishing in Times of Platform Capitalism (Spector Books, 2025), a 720-page hardcover publication edited by Annette Gilbert and Andreas Bülhoff and distributed by ARTBOOK | D.A.P.[4][5] It is also referenced in Hannes Bajohr's essay "Print on Demand as Strategy and Genre: Auto-Factography and Post-Digital Writing" within the same volume.[4]

Exhibitions

  • Erreur d'impression — Jeu de Paume, Paris, 2012.[6]
  • Collect the WWWorld: The Artist as Archivist in the Internet Age — 319 Scholes, Brooklyn, New York, 2012. Curated by Domenico Quaranta. Other artists in the exhibition included JODI, Jon Rafman, Ryan Trecartin, Penelope Umbrico, Evan Roth, Clement Valla, Oliver Laric, and Eva and Franco Mattes.[7]
  • Young Artists' Biennial — Bucharest, Romania.[6]
  • Library of the Printed Web — curated by Paul Soulellis. Soulellis used the work as a primary example in his taxonomy of printed-web practices, categorizing it under "performing" — artists using a procedural methodology with a narrative that materializes between web and print.[8]

Collections

The work is included in the Library of the Printed Web, a collection of 244 web-to-print artists' publications by 130 artists founded by Paul Soulellis in 2013. The collection was acquired in its entirety by the MoMA Library in January 2017, where it is preserved as a self-contained archive with its own call number designation and is accessible to the public by appointment.[9][10][11]

Reception

Academic

Karl Wolfgang Flender published a full-length academic article, "American Psycho: Reading an Algorithm in Reverse," in Interface Critique Journal (Heidelberg University Press, 2019), analyzing the work as media archaeology and algorithmic critique.[3]

Kaja Marczewska published "Erasing in the Algorithmic Extreme: Mimi Cabell and Jason Huff's American Psycho" in Media-N Journal (New Media Caucus, Vol. 11, No. 1, 2015), a peer-reviewed essay examining the work through lenses of erasure, data politics, and algorithmic criticism.[12] The essay is also archived in the Westminster Research repository at the University of Westminster.[13]

The work is discussed in Alessandro Ludovico's Post-Digital Print: The Mutation of Publishing Since 1894 as an example of processual publishing in the post-digital era.[8]

Press

The project received international press coverage in 2014 following the release of the PDF edition, including articles in Electric Literature,[2] Dazed Digital,[14] the Daily Dot,[15] and Adweek.[16]

The work was also discussed in Jacket2 (University of Pennsylvania) in the critical essay "The POD People," examining print-on-demand artist's books,[17] and in the New Criticals essay "The Printed Web."[18]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c "Jason Huff and Mimi Cabell – American Psycho". Printed Matter. Retrieved March 10, 2026.
  2. ^ a b c Pabón, Maru (August 30, 2014). "Rewriting through Google Ads: Mimi Cabell and Jason Huff's American Psycho". Electric Literature. Retrieved June 26, 2015.
  3. ^ a b Flender, Karl Wolfgang (2019). "American Psycho: Reading an Algorithm in Reverse". Interface Critique Journal. 2. Heidelberg University Press: 197–211. doi:10.11588/ic.2019.2.66992. Retrieved March 10, 2026.
  4. ^ a b c "American Psycho". Library of Artistic Print on Demand. Retrieved March 10, 2026.
  5. ^ "Library of Artistic Print on Demand". Spector Books. Retrieved March 10, 2026.
  6. ^ a b "American Psycho – Mimi Cabell & Jason Huff". Jeu de Paume. Retrieved March 10, 2026.
  7. ^ Nadir, Leila Christine (November 9, 2012). "Hunting + Gathering in the Digital Wilderness". Furtherfield. Retrieved March 10, 2026.
  8. ^ a b "Expanding Books and Post-Digital Print". CCCB LAB (Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona). Retrieved March 10, 2026.
  9. ^ "Library of the Printed Web". Museum of Modern Art Library Catalog. Retrieved March 10, 2026.
  10. ^ Soulellis, Paul. "Library of the Printed Web". Retrieved March 10, 2026.
  11. ^ "Cabell, Mimi and Jason Huff. American Psycho". Library of the Printed Web. Retrieved March 10, 2026.
  12. ^ Marczewska, Kaja (2015). "Erasing in the Algorithmic Extreme: Mimi Cabell and Jason Huff's American Psycho". Media-N Journal. 11 (1). New Media Caucus. Retrieved March 10, 2026.
  13. ^ "Erasing in the Algorithmic Extreme". Westminster Research, University of Westminster. Retrieved March 10, 2026.
  14. ^ Gorton, Thomas (September 10, 2014). "Download American Psycho reimagined using Google ads". Dazed Digital. Retrieved June 26, 2015.
  15. ^ Klee, Miles (September 4, 2014). "American Psycho perfectly retold through Google Ads". Daily Dot. Retrieved June 26, 2015.
  16. ^ "Art Students Rewrite American Psycho Using Google Ads". Adweek / GalleyCat. September 2, 2014. Retrieved June 26, 2015.
  17. ^ "The POD People". Jacket2, University of Pennsylvania. Retrieved March 10, 2026.
  18. ^ "The Printed Web". New Criticals. Retrieved March 10, 2026.
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