Hybrids by Henry Hyland
«It is no longer necessary to deface paintings or to put a mustache on postcards of Mona Lisa, now art can be downloaded, modified and uploaded again, with absolute delight» Luther Blissett, Art Hacktivism
Hybrids are digital collages done remixing "stolen" works of Net.art together with web pages randomly chosen from the Internet. Aesthetically speaking they look like new works in which the original sources are hardly distinguishable, while conceptually they represent an open invitation at actively re-using culture through digital-plagiarism and visual-recycling. Having appeared on the Web for the first time in 1998 Hybrids, as well as other 0100101110101101.ORG works of that period, make a statement on some of the main themes of digital art: the issues of reproducibility, authenticity and the sharing of knowledge. In a world of constantly recycled sounds and images, Hybrids are no aberration, they're part of the natural evolution of all things digital. Hybrids don't contain any specific viewable element of originality in the composition, in the sense that one can identify any specific original image or composition created by the software. The only original element of a Hybrid is the selection and collage of the material to be blended into a new work. 0100101110101101.ORG spokesman Franco Birkut readily admits this: «There is no creative aspect, because all pages work well together, and all the visuals and composition has been done for you. You may rearrange the segments of a source code, but that's just production work» Even so, isn't production work what constitutes most of what goes into crafting most art these days? Because of this, Hybrids (and to some extent also their Copies) highlight the increasing difficulty in distinguishing between artists, critics and producers. Is there really all that much difference, on a technical level, between 0100101110101101.ORG, Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol? Putting aside any qualitative judgments, on one level or another they are all just appropriators of images. They are all combining elements of other people's works in order to create new ones, in effect challenging the old model of authorship that presupposes that the building blocks of creativity should spill forth directly from the mind of the artist. While everyone (particularly the companies touting the technologies that make all this possible) predicted a flood of original images and websites spewing forth from the desktops of bedroom auteurs, no one anticipated that large numbers of people would be more interested in using their computers to combine, mash together, or remix other people's work. Sharing one's unauthorized creations via the Net is even easier. It's a dramatic change from just a few years ago, when an artist's sole option would have been to exhibit his works inside small underground events. Such Hybrids are also, technically, illegal, but from the perspective of Net.artists and cultural jammers at the forefront of the explosion of Net.art, copyright laws don't look like anything other than the means by which one group of artists limits the work of another. Illegality can actually be a large part of the allure of Hybrids. Using other people's art without permission used to be the point of historical avantgarde's collages. Back in the ‘10s and early ‘20s, when Dada and Surrealists collagists like Annah Hoch and John Heartfield released their first works, collages had a decidedly subversive edge to them. Collages were typically created as statements about pop culture and the media juggernaut that surrounds us. Traces of that element remain in the Hybrids being made today. Eventually recombining and remixing is likely to become so prevalent that it will be all but impossible to even identify the original source of samples, making questions about authorship and origins largely irrelevant, or at least unanswerable. We're already seeing the beginnings of that, like the Hybrid that samples another website that samples a Warhol icon that sample a Campbell Soup can. |
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