In today’s corporate digital media landscape, the Internet is reshaped into a controlled space for profit and consumption. Giants like Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google acquire smaller companies—Apple with Beats, Meta with Oculus, Instagram, and WhatsApp—rebranding them as their own while stifling innovation and creative freedom. Surprise Acquisition is a media artwork exposing the randomness of these takeovers by likening them to an arcade “claw” machine. As the dot-com era saw companies hoard domain names, today’s strategy is to amass capital to buy rivals and absorb their products. The work underscores how such acquisitions have spiraled into unchecked corporate territorialism, with each “captured” company’s price feeding a growing total that visualizes tech’s escalating greed.
Jonah Brucker-Cohen
Jonah Brucker-Cohen is an artist, writer, and Associate Professor at Lehman College / CUNY. He received his Ph.D. from Trinity College Dublin and his artwork has been exhibited at venues such as SFMOMA, Canadian Museum of Contemporary Art, MOMA, ZKM Museum, ICA London, Whitney Museum of American Art, Palais du Tokyo, Tate Modern, Ars Electronica, Transmediale, and more. His writing has appeared in publications such as WIRED and Make and his Scrapyard Challenge workshops have been held in over 15 countries on 5 continents.
What inspired you to make this project?
I had been wanting to merge the concept of a claw machine with corporate takeovers / greed since the early days of the dot.com boom when larger companies were purchasing domain names and smaller companies with abandon. This project connects the seemingly randomness of corporate takeovers with the arcade claw machine in a fun game for people to try in public space.
What are some of the challenges you have encountered and how did you address them?
Not too many challenges for this project except getting the visualization to work as expected.
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