I am pretty sure we are remembering the exact same incident, it would have been around this time four years ago. I just asked my roommate about it, and your stories line up:
He saw a picture of an awesome sheep on your site featured as a print, but with no prices. He emailed you about the prints, you referred him to your art dealer, and she quoted him outrageous prices that were totally out of scale with costs. When he went later to download its 'genome', it had been just removed for that sheep specifically. The capriciousness of the whole exchange really pissed us off, and we later ended up ceasing to use electricsheep in the school's CS labs because of it.
I saw the survey, and the whole thing seemed really weird. Of course you're going to get an extremely favorable response when sampling from your hardcore fanbase.
The point about your job at Google was that you don't need to extract a paycheck from electricsheep to get by. Your constant focus on art-world monetization is extremely off-putting -- it's one thing to take the money on the table from patrons, and another to artificially limit the audience for your work. All the 'limited edition' shit seems all the more ridiculous when there's zero opportunity cost.
He saw a picture of an awesome sheep on your site featured as a print, but with no prices. He emailed you about the prints, you referred him to your art dealer, and she quoted him outrageous prices that were totally out of scale with costs. When he went later to download its 'genome', it had been just removed for that sheep specifically. The capriciousness of the whole exchange really pissed us off, and we later ended up ceasing to use electricsheep in the school's CS labs because of it.
I saw the survey, and the whole thing seemed really weird. Of course you're going to get an extremely favorable response when sampling from your hardcore fanbase.
The point about your job at Google was that you don't need to extract a paycheck from electricsheep to get by. Your constant focus on art-world monetization is extremely off-putting -- it's one thing to take the money on the table from patrons, and another to artificially limit the audience for your work. All the 'limited edition' shit seems all the more ridiculous when there's zero opportunity cost.