For 20 working days in June 2008, Ben Bloch and Caroline Peters excavated discarded objects, sites and histories from the lands around Earthquake Lake in southwest Montana. With a series of docu-dramas they envisioned the life of each item, subsequently placing them for auction on eBay. The project unfolded in real-time on their blog, eBay, Facebook and YouTube, creating a linked circuit between 3 of the Internet’s most visited sites and their own virtual outpost.

Daily Treasures: Living off the Land! experiments with the possibilities for elevating the real value of these all but forgotten objects by restoring some significance to the reality of their loss and decay. The significance we help bring to each item may be expressed in several ways: financial capital produced through eBay sales, symbolic capital accrued with Internet popularity, and the artistic capital derived from the labor and creativity required to realize the project on a daily basis. Weaving history and memory, sentiment and satire, fiction and reality, Daily Treasures evokes the possibilities—and limitations—of “living off the land."

Ben Bloch & Caroline Peters, 2008