Andreas Broeckmann on Sat, 26 Jun 1999 15:52:21 +0100


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Syndicate: Luther Blissett: 0100101110101101.ORG: art.hacktivism


Date: Sat, 26 Jun 1999 03:01:33 +0200
Subject: BOUNCE syndicate: Non-member submission from [Luther Blissett
<12345@net27.it>]


>From "re:bytes", July - August 1999:

0100101110101101.ORG: art.hacktivism

by Luther Blissett


[...] Net.art, born just some years ago, is becoming *the* new art form,
the ultimate one,
and the most absurd thing is that net.artists themselves seem to expect
nothing else.
Everyone with his own site, everyone with his own domain, everyone with his
own gallery,
they are throwing themselves into the trammels of traditional art,
completely ignoring
what net.art could/should be and misunderstanding the real power of the web.

The point under discussion is always the same: how to sell a net.art work.
In other words:
how to make net.art regress to the status of traditional art. And the
answers come, oh yes
they do. New galleries and collections of the biggest contemporary art
museums thrive,
articles on glossy reviews increase, the most absurd offers of
commercialization  spread.
All of it dictated by one and only ideal: the circled "C". Result? Within
two years
net.art will be in all museums and art history handbooks, with the names of the
"protagonists of the heroic period", dates, movements, influences,
generations and so on,
tons of the same shit we have been eating all the times. But this is not
what we expected.
We hoped that something else would come out, at least in the web. The web
is the paradise
of no-copyright, plagiarism, confusion and exchange, why the hell are those
people trying,
by any means, to create a copy of the real world?

The difference between net.art and every other form of art seems to be
"interactivity", at
least this is what we got used to hear. Well: "interactivity", as it's
usually intended,
is a delusion, pure falsehood. When people reach a site (net.art or not, it
doesn't
matter), by their mouse clicks they choose one of the routes fixed by the
the author(s),
the only decide what to see before and what after: this is not interactivity.
It would be the same as stating that an exposition in a museum is
interactive because you
can choose from which room to start, which works seeing before and which
ones after, or
because you can turn around a sculpture and seeing it from different points
of view. If
net.art is interactive then Canova is interactive as well, otherwise none
of them.

But recently something's changed. We're talking about 0100101110101101.ORG,
come into the
limelight for having hacked hell.com. In fact, 0100101110101101.ORG is
trying to show that
art in the web can really become "interactive ": the public must use it
interactively, we
must use an artwork in an unpredictable way, one that the author didn't
foresee, to rescue
it from its normal routine (studio/gallery/museum or
homepage/hell.com/Moma) and  re-use
it in a different and novel way. When this happens in "real life" people
are sent to
prison or to madhouses. Even the web is going towards such a situation, all
the paradigms
of traditional art are imposing themselves again.

The first files appeared in 0100101110101101.ORG are what we'll call
"hybrids", in absence
of other names: pages by other net.artists all mixed in a random way. This
section of the
site is centered around a random concept, so that the interface changes
every time you
visit it. The toolbar becomes useless, the "back" command loses its logical
function:
every page is set in the unpredictable sequence of chance.
0100101110101101.ORG downloads
the websites of the most popular net.artists and then s/he/it/them
manipulates them as
"it" wants, using them in an interactive way.

The "open_source_hell.com" affair happened about one month ago. In spite of
all the things
that have been said about, since it seems that very few people have said
something
interesting, we report here a press release circulated on those days:

----

open_source_hell.com

www. HELL.com was born in 1995 as a conceptual art piece, an anti-web that
sold and
promoted nothing and was not accessible to the public: a sheer b(l)ack hole
of the web.
For almost three years, HELL.com, a site with no content, never listed in
any directory
nor linked anywhere, averaged of a million hits per month from people
typing the name in
search engines. Then it became a container for net.art sites and art
galleries  which you
could access only if you were invited, and whose list of members was kept
secret;
something they themselves called "a private parallel web." The idea behind
HELL.com was to
create a launching pad for cyber-artists extremly elitist and with badly
hidden venal
ambitions... a fuckin' museum!
During february 1999 HELL.com organized "surface": a show with several
superstar net
artists like zuper!, absurd, fakeshop and many more. Like all the events by
HELL.com, this
one was not available to the public either - it was opened exclusively to
RHIZOME
subscribers.
During the 48 hours opening  0100101110101101.ORG downloaded all the files
of the site;
the clone has been put on line, this time as anticopyright, visible,
reproducible and
freely diffusible material and, thanks to some technical devices, even more
easily
downloadable.
The convinction that information must be free is a tribute to the way in
which a very good
computer  or a valid program works: binary numbers move in accordance with
the most logic,
direct and necessary way to do their complex function. What is a computer
if not something
that benefits by the free flow of information?

-----

The night of 9th june, it was the turn of "Art.Teleportacia"'s.
"Art.Teleportacia" is the
first net.art gallery to have appeared in the web, and also the first
attempt to sell
works of net.art. The exhibition we're talking about was "Miniatures of the
heroic period
", and consisted of some pages by five of the most known net.artists in the
world - Jodi,
Vuk, Irational, Easylife and Lialina - for sale at 2000 $ each.
0100101110101101.ORG cloned the gallery, manipulated the contents and
uploaded it in a new
"anticopyright" version, obviously without asking permission to anyone and
violating the
copyright of the original site. The exhibition changed its name into
"Hybrids of the
heroic period ", and the five "original" works were replaced with as many
"hybrids", files
obtained mixing pages by net.artists with some trash of the web.

The theoretical pillars that hold Art.Teleportacia are mainly three: - 1 A
work of net.art
can be sold as well as any other work of art - 2 Each net.art work must be
covered by
copyright and nobody, except the artist, can download it or even link to it
without the
permission of the author - 3 The "sign" of a net.art work is in the
"Location bar", so the
url is the only guarantee of originality.

Cloninig Art.Teleportacia 0100101110101101.ORG brought down all the
presuppositions of the
gallery, the contradictions which this way of thinking runs into became
evident.
Technically, whoever visits a site downloads automatically, in the cache,
all the files he
sees. In fact s/he already owns them, therefore it is nonsense to sell
pages already being
in the hard disks of millions of people - it would be more useful to tell
the public the
fastest way to download the whole website. We must keep in mind that
net.art is digital,
it is binary code, everything is reproducible to infinity without losing
quality... just
numbers! - finally, we entered the "age of its technical reproducibility" -
and every copy
is identical to the "original" one. The concept itself of an "original" is now
meaningless, and even the concepts of false and plagiarism don't exist any
longer. If it's
obsolete to talk about "originals" in the real world, it becomes absolutely
paradoxical in
the web. This seems to be the thread between the so called "hybrids",
Art.Telepoetacia and
open_source_hell.com.

There is no Genius isolated from the world and inspired by the Muse -
culture is made by
people exchanging information and re-working on what has been already done
in the past, it
has always been like that. Culture is only a big, endless plagiarism in
which nobody
invents nothing, people only rework, and this reworking happens
collectively;  nobody
creates nothing alone. This happens also in "real life", but the web is the
best place to
show it. It's no longer necessary to deface paintings (Alexander Brener) or
to put
mustache on postcards of Monalisa (Duchamp), now art can be downloaded,
modified and
uploaded again, with absolute delight.

We wish to see hundreds of 0100101110101101.ORG repeating sites of
net.artists endlessly,
so that nobody realizes which was the "original" one, we would like to see
hundreds of
Jodi and hell.com, all different, all original, and nobody filing lawsuits
for copyright
infringement, there would be no more originals to preserve. "WebDevil" will
be the brush
of a new generation  of artists?



links:
http://www.0100101110101101.ORG

"hybrids":
http://www.0100101110101101.ORG/0110100110/

hell.com:
clone: http://www.0100101110101101.ORG/hell.com
"original": http://www.hell.com

Art.Teleportacia:
clone: http://www.0100101110101101.ORG/Art.Teleportacia
"original": http://art.teleportacia.org/art-mac.html

infowar:
http://www.0100101110101101.ORG/0100101110101101.0RG






--
The Ultimate Luther Blissett Website:
 http://www.syntac.net/lutherblissett/


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