«Copies are more important than their original»
Excerpt from interviews with 0100101110101101.ORG

Q.: You got known in the Net scene, because you made a complete copy of the art site Hell.com, and put it on your site. Tell me what you did exactly...

A.: We are subscribers of the mailing list "Rhizome". There we heard that they would open a door to Hell.com for 48 hours, for a show called "Surface". It was only for Rhizome subscribers, and you needed a password to look at it.
So, during these 48 hours of opening, we downloaded all the stuff of their site, and uploaded it on ours, it took us 26 hours.

Q.: How is this different from, for example, Duchamp taking a picture of the Mona Lisa and drawing a moustache on it? And all the other acts of appropriation and re-appropriation, that went on all through the 20th century, and especially in the 80's and 90's - with artists such as Sherri Levine, for example?

A.: That is a good question. On the web you can do these kind of actions very freely, without destroying the original, because there is no original; everybody can use the data on the Net. When we clone Jodi, we don't destroy their work, we re-use it. In the past, carrying out a good fake, required excellent manual and rational skills, it took time and efforts, today it's much easier, all you need is a couple of programs and a lot of coffee.

Q.: But that is in the nature of the web anyway. Anybody can look at the source code of a website, and see how it has been done, and they don't need some smart artist to do it for them...

A.: Of course, anybody can download whole sites. You just need some software, and you don't have to be worried about copyright infringements. Our point is that there is a different way of behaving towards the work. You can choose your attitude, or what you want to do with the piece. You are not obliged to just look at it. You have the tools to do something else.
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 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!
Cloning is just one of the things you can do with these works. You can modify them, you can add things, you can put them in a different order, you can even destroy them, you can do anything you want. We would like to see some more of this kind of interaction on the Net.

Q.: What do you mean by "interactive"?

A.: A work of art, Net or not doesn't matter, can't be interactive in itself, it's people that must use it interactively, it's the beholder that must use a piece in an unpredictable way, one that the author didn't foresee. Copying a site you are interacting with it, you are re-using it to express new meanings that the author didn't foresee. The beholder becomes an artist and the artist becomes a beholder: a powerless witness of what happens to his work. The necessary condition to the spreading of culture re-using is the complete abandon of the concept of copyright, that is a natural needing of the digital evolution.

Q.: How are Web art and music related?

A.: It is happening more and more frequently that musicians produce their music starting from sampling - Negativland is one of the most actual examples - and from rearrangement of sounds, taken from the infinite number of available sources. Anyone is therefore, at the same time, producer of raw materials, transformer, author, interpreter and listener, in a circuit of cooperative creation and fruition. 0100101110101101.ORG proposes the same practice in art; the "Hybrids" are just some samplings of the materials we have at our disposal. Nowadays the problem of creativity is not creating something new but learning how to use what already exists.

Q.: Do you think that on-line art has a possible market?

A.: Like all the other forms of art even net.art will build its market. It's naive to think that because net.art is "immaterial" it won't be saleable, it only needs time enough to create its "space" in the market. It's a delusion that surfaces again every time a new form of art crops out; everything has been sold as art: actions, landscapes, living animals, ideas, air, people. Everything, potentially, can become and be sold as art. So why not net.art?

Q.: What advice would you give readers interested in starting their own Web art collection?

A.: To look in their cache folder.

Q.: Could you summarize your position concerning the concepts of "author" and "originality"?

A.: It's a "non-sense" to perpetrate such concepts that seemingly functioned in the real world. The notion of author in general, and therefore concepts like authenticity and plus-value, are strictly connected to the economic, institutional, and juridical aspects of traditional art. After the invention of printing, so with the automation of text reproduction, it became necessary to define the rights of the author as inventor and not only as artisan. The figure of author was born in a very particular economic and social organization, it's only too natural that it fades into the background when the system of communications and social relations changes. The non-prominence of the author conditions neither the cultural production nor the artistic creativity.
Technology has not only expanded who can create; in blurring the distinction between consumers and producers, these new digital tools are also challenging the very ideas of creativity and authorship. They are forcing us to recognize modes of cultural production that often make it impossible to answer such a simple questions as, Who made this file? The cultural landscape that emerges will be a plural space of creation in which it may even become pointless to designate who created exactly what, since everyone will be stealing from and remixing everyone else. The results might be confusing, but it'll probably be a lot more fun and worth seeing than a world where only those with the "muse inspiration" get to make works of art.

Q.: Which is the difference between the clones of the sites you made and the "original" ones?

A.: Copies are more important than their original, although they do not differ from them. Copies contain not only all the parameters of the work that is being copied, but a lot more: the idea itself and the act of copying.

Q.: In which way do you decide to recombine different software and "aesthetics"?

A.: A good off-line browser keeps all the original names of the files and the hierarchy of the folders, so, while downloading it, you discover the internal structure of the work; it's somehow like looking inside the brain of its author, and sometimes can be interesting.
Most of people like net.art because of its design, but the most interesting thing is often the source code and the "internal architecture" of the sites.

Q.: As far as I know, most part of online plagiarism, has been related to a more strictly political content. What is the plagiarism of art sites aimed to?

A.: At the moment 0100101110101101.ORG is working on different issues, ideas like originality, reproducibility, authorship and copyright, raising issues and contradictions that are no longer strictly art matters, but deal with the free flow and exchange of information. The Internet has entered the "infoware era", and information is going to become the most important productive value.
We have never produced anything. 0100101110101101.ORG only moves packages of information from one point to another, diverts their flow, observes changes, and eventually profits from it.

Q.: Brener is considered to be this Anti-Christ of contemporary art now, the scary anti-artist. Where do you place yourself?

A.: We don't consider ourselves "artists" but "beholders". We are not against art, we are not anti-artists. We have seen what happened to Dada or Surrealism and all the other historical avant-garde, it doesn't matter if you call yourself an artist or an anti-artist, the only thing we care about are "contents".

Q.: So you might as well stop doing what you are doing, because it will be recuperated anyway...

A.: This obsession of "being recuperated" is just a Situationist paranoia. If nobody gives a shit about what you do is not necessarily because you are so radical, but more probably because you don't have anything to say. Anyway if you meant "recuperate" as "becoming rich", we hope that somebody is going to recuperate us!
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 (Aleksander Brener) or to put mustache on postcards of Monalisa (Duchamp), now art can be downloaded, modified and uploaded again, with absolute delight.

Excerpt from the following sources:

- Now you're in my computer, interview with Jaka Zeleznikar, Mladina, January 2001

- Nobody dare to call it plagiarism!, interview with Marco Deseriis, Acoustic Space, October 2000

- Life imitates art and art imitates itself, interview with Uri Pasovsky, Haaretz, September 19th 2000

- They're Not Just Mean, interview by Britannica, July 21st 2000

- No Artists, just Spectators, interview with Tilman Baumgärtel, Telepolis, December 9th 1999

- Art.Hacktivism, essay by Luther Blissett, Rhizome, June 26th 1999