Leftist Leaflets in Little Libraries (LLiLL)
Leftist Leaflets in Little Libraries (LLiLL) is an ongoing collaborative project by Peter Miles Bergman and Heather Link-Bergman of the Institute of Sociometry. The Institute of Sociometry (also known as is) is a culture jamming and guerrilla communications collective with over 700 accredited special agents in 23 countries. LLiLL is chronicled across four zines – LLiLL #1, LLiLL #2, LLiLL #3, and LLiLL #4 – available for purchase at isPRESS.co. The project was also presented at MCA Denver in “Citizenship: A Practice of Society” curated by Zoe Larkins.
LLiLL began in 2017 with a simple intervention – placing leftist zines in little free libraries in affluent neighborhoods. The following summer in 2018, Peter refurbished an abandoned JOBS! classified newspaper box which we renamed the ‘LLiLL’ and placed it in front of the Institute of Sociometry headquarters (also our house) stocked with zines. When we became curious about who was taking zines, we bought a doorbell security camera and began surveilling foot traffic near the LLiLL. We logged 3,704 impressions over the course of 73 days.
15 second trailer of the 3,704 ‘impressions’ logged in front of the LLiLL during the study period.
In 2020, Heather, deep undercover in her career in advertising and communications, deployed market research techniques to conduct a driver analysis of the camera data across 13 different factors, segmenting the ‘consumers’ into four distinct clusters with snappy names including Comfortable Complacents, Alt Curious, Bohemian Ways, and Iconoclastic Lifestyles. Heather’s findings culminated in an hour-long Zoom seminar for entrepreneurial zinesters titled: Woke Not Broke: Using the Social Conformity Index™ System to Assess Zinability™.
Over time, the project turned into an examination of virtuous deeds under capitalism – political actions, activism, creative practice and side-hustles – as they are mediated through the lens of social media to inform hyper-segmented advertising algorithms. Ostensibly about trolling the rich with leftist zines, the project takes a dark conceptual turn revealing the ubiquity of surveillance and how much we as consumers are willing to give up for a personalized experience online – whether it is one that delivers a good deal or, more sinisterly, reliably delivers us content that rarely conflicts with our preferred world view.
The installation at MCA Denver featured a zine wall with leftist zines from a variety of artists and publishers with a framed picture each of being placed in a little free library. Around the corner, the main exhibition space contained all the logs and consumer insight surveys arranged in a massive grid murals and a ‘bar graph’ composed of hundreds of small surveillance photos, all held up with 1000+ tacks and linked together with color coded book binding thread. On top of this base layer are select surveillance photos enlarged and framed, an 80 hour stop motion time lapse video of all impressions over the 73 day study period, four framed LLilLL consumer profiles, and the Woke Not Broke seminar video. Also included is a live video projection that taps into the MCA’s own security system – alternating between a shot of the fully-stocked LLiLL placed in front of the MCA, and a view of the installation surveilling museum patrons in real time.