"www.slaves4sale.com" is an online net art piece created by Lanfranco Aceti. For this article, I will examine this a commerce-based piece offering the trade of slaves. This act has been examined, understood, and printed about in literature but has never bee enacted on the web. Visitors to the site are given several comprehensive potions allowing them to actively participate in either becoming or owning a slave. This site facilitates trading in a manner unlike its historical model: no one comes to any harm. However, all who participate actually benefit by the experience.

The site's main page greets the viewer with a display of floating boxes, each designated with a certain colour according to its current status. These boxes are representative of online objects that resent the viewer with the potential to own, see, and bid on a slave. Aceti's site gives viewers an opportunity to become a slave or slave owner, each option requiring careful consideration of the specifics wished to be achieved by that individual while taking on that role. Aceti's "www.slaves4sale.com", thus challenges the conventions of both virtual and physical space through a multi-layered exhibit that evokes a message strongly dependant on the reaction and actions of the viewers themselves.

As stated in the "Company Policy" section of the site, this highly interactive piece allows viewers to "sell" themselves in a manner which makes them realise their value on the global market while attempting with the money raised to set real slaves free or realize "some impossible dream."

The artist himself has taken on the active role as "slave for sale" and gone so far as to "price himself" perhaps as a guide to others interested in their monetary value. Aceti's price is shockingly low for such an apparent talent; perhaps he is commenting on the lack of consideration in the global market for the emotional or mental attributes of slaves or underpaid workers and others where character is ignored and physical strength and endurance is prized. A commodification of the individual into solely a source of physical usefulness by labour.

Aceti stresses "the concepts of fragmentation and commodification" in his net art and work. By creating boxes and categories of slaves, he makes the viewer question human value, schemes, ethics, and trade interests.

In a recent interview with Aceti on this issue, he described this effect in detail:

This [social] experience, which people paradoxically attempt to present as liberation, instead creates structural forms for a new technological fascism. I was very interested in creating a paradox where, in an attempt to escape commodification, the reality of this contemporary human condition would become evermore present. I attempted to transpose these concepts in the structural element of the project itself, which I call "Interactive Integrated Media." Enabling the website to act as a filter between past and present, real and virtual, dream and reality. It gives the Viewer the possibility of organizing events, producing images and videos, creating representations of real life enslavements and transferring them into the digital from where they could bounce back into the real.

Aceti achieves his commentary on the human condition through the confines of the "slave" box, in which an individual's attributes are forcibly separated into several key themes: (1) images, (2) statements, (3) symbolic keywords, and (4) aspirations of the slaves about what his/her transaction will achieve.