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Portrait of the Artist as a Hard Disk Data nudism, abstract pornography, online voyeurism Excerpts from interviews with 0100101110101101.ORG on Life Sharing
Q.: Did you decide to make artwork and then learn programming code or how did you first get into online artwork? A.: For almost one year our activity was to deliberately reproduce other people’s online artworks, exactly as they were, or mashed up. We had no idea on how to make a website, therefore the obvious conclusion was that stealing them was easier and quicker, and that’s what we did. And it functioned. Boring things, such as websites, should be done by machines, not people. Q.: Your latest work, Life Sharing, is again completely computer based. You wish to explore the levels of representation, data nudity and shared distribution and production of artworks. A.: Life Sharing is an anagram of File Sharing. Life Sharing is a computer running Linux, sharing its hard-disk with the whole world, making all its contents accessible via Internet. Since January 2001 we give free and unlimited access, twenty-four hours a day, to all the contents of our computer: "All" means not a directory of the hard-disk but the whole content of the computer: programs, system, desktop, archives, tools, ongoing projects, mail and so on. You can literally get lost this huge data maze. Life Sharing is a brand new concept of net architecture turning a website into a hardcore "personal media" for complete digital transparency. They can rummage through our archives, search for texts or files they’re interested in, check what kind of software we work with, watch the "live" evolution of our projects and even read our private mail. At the end of the 90’s we used to work exclusively re-using, stealing and mixing other people’s work. In 2000 we inverted this perspective starting to share everything we were working on with everybody, freely and in real time. Privacy is stupid. Q.: A clear implication of the Life Sharing project is the breach of the boundary between personal and public life and between personal and public data. Is there any risk in this, or have you entirely sanitized, or even fabricated the data you make available? What are the consequences for the way you work, communicate, and live generated by this openness of process? A.: Life Sharing is 0100101110101101.ORG. It is its hard disk entirely published, visible and reproducible by anybody: public property. We will not produce material explicitly as "content," except where it is technically required. We will use the computer as we have always done. Naturally, it is impossible to ignore that we are so "opened." Any internal or external connection modifies the entire structure, thus affecting the project itself -- for example, in the manner of acting and expressing. [...] Life Sharing must be considered a proof ab absurdo. The idea of privacy itself is obsolete. A computer connected to the Net is an instrument that allows the free flow of information. This is its aim. Anything blocking this free flow shall be considered an obstacle to be overcome. Q.: Why the hostile attitude to the visitors in your site? A.: 0100101110101101.ORG is not hostile. The "user friendly" politics is much more hostile, because is insidious, ambiguous, and dissimulates its true aims hiding the mechanisms that move it. [...] Most of the interfaces are designed to let the average user be familiar with data. A website, except in rare cases, is an interface that simplifies the exchange between users, making the contents "easier" to use. This trivialization is called "user friendliness", and it is often inspired by paper: pages, indexes, and so on. Life Sharing is exactly the abolition of one of the levels of simulation that separates one user from another: the website. Life Sharing allows the user to directly enter our home computer. In your text describing the project, you mention that "A computer, with the passing of time, ends up looking like its owner’s brain." [...] A computer is less and less an instrument of work. With a computer one shares time, space, memory and projects, but most of all one shares personal relationships. This flow of information passes through the computer - all our culture is going to be digitized. Getting free access to someone’s computer is the same as getting access to his or her culture. [...] It is not only a show. It’s not like looking at Jennicam. The user can utilize what he finds in our computer. Q.: With group work you must somehow relate to the issue of copyright which was also the topic of your early works - which copyright model do you see as convenient? A.: 0100101110101101.ORG’s goal is not a complete abolition of copyright but its substitution with a license directly inspired by the GPL (Gnu General Public License, www.gnu.org), the license created explicitly for Free Software. Till now, the GPL has been applied only to software, with great success, both economically and "culturally". 0100101110101101.ORG wish to apply the open source model also to all intellectual products. This is the result of political choices, and also technical and legal reasons. The idea of an open source license for intellectual products would grant the possibility of: (1) using the product; (2) modifying the product; (3) distributing copies, modified or not, of the product (freely or with payment); (4) combining the product, modified or not, with other products covered by the same open source license. Up until now, we haven’t placed any of the things we did under copyright. First of all, because we’ve never produced anything. We only move packages of information, divert their flow, observe changes, and eventually profit from it. Visibility is the real problem of the Net. If someone uses your music, your words, or images, he is only doing you favor. Many people have spontaneously reused 0100101110101101.ORG. If someone else profits from our work, it’s because of his own merit. In the end, he is doing the same as what we did: profit is always inevitably mutual. Q.: Yes, so this is this surplus, happening also in the economy of visibility. Developing this, it seems there are two basic forms of approach to the knot of problems pointed to by the terms appropriation/plagiarism/anticopyright, etc. One is illustrated by Hegel when he says, in Elements of the Philosophy of Right, "To appropriate something means basically only to manifest the supremacy of my will in relation to the thing." The other approach is the generation of contexts in which the creation of dynamics of circulation and use that have greater or lesser degrees of openness -- not the imposition of will -- prevail. [...] Do these two forms correspond in some way to the two modes of operation that you have spoken about? A.: The fact that 0100101110101101.ORG is explicitly no-copyright is surely strictly linked to commercialization, but not in the sense in which it is often used. It is common to mistake "no-copyright" for "no-profit." 0100101110101101.ORG is compatible with monetary retribution, under different forms. Life Sharing, being a project financed by an institution, is one of these. "Free" software, Negativland’s music, Wu-Ming’s books, are all examples of cultural products that have been able to reconcile the no-copyright model with commercialization. No-copyright is no longer solely an underground practice, but a wider cultural "production standard." This means, in the first place, being conscious that your own knowledge is not innate, but that it is a synthesis of different cultural products. Recognizing this means making our own knowledge shareable and thus usable not only by ourselves but by anyone, even commercially, imposing simply that nobody can subsequently restrict this possibility to others. [...] "Manifest the supremacy of my will in relation to the thing." This signifies that all the times that it is necessary, every time we found ourselves in front of a distance that doesn’t belong to us, that we share a book, a film, an idea, we can say: "It is mine! I did it!" Q.: What are your plans for the future and how do you see net art developing? A.: We want to be Web Stars and then take advantage of our high profile position to make our ideas public. Applying a terrorist strategy to the arts system, we aim to raid the coffers of culture to finance our activities: infiltrate, inculcate doubt, instill panic. Art is a tool, a weapon with which political beliefs can be promoted in the guise of entertainment. We are currently engaged in a battle against copyright and privacy rules, which we intend to continue. What we produce is really "abstract pornography" and the public seems to like it. They spend hours accessing our computer, rummaging among the folders, copying texts and images, downloading software, and reading our mail; Life Sharing has struck a chord with public voyeurism. Our aim is to be one with the computer, to enter the machine, to be dispersed throughout the Web. Q.: How do you see the relationship between aesthetics and functionality? A.: The functionality of a computer is an aesthetic quality: the beauty of configurations, the efficacy of software, the security of system, the distribution of data, are all characteristics of a new beauty. Life Sharing is the result of aesthetic discipline applied everyday. It is the actualization of the idea of the "total work of art" - gesamtkunstwerk - in other words, the dream of modeling reality through aesthetic canons. Q.: How do you think about your medium, which is sort of hard to envision as a real object? Where is cyberspace? A.: Cyberspace is a state of mind. The medium in itself doesn’t make any difference. What counts is how you use it. "Media hacking" refers to the deliberate disruption, distortion, or subversion of any media message. The message is the message, who cares about the medium? Q.: Do you see online art as a way for conceptual artists to display their work to a bigger audience? A.: Of course, but not only. The Net is not the mere amplifier of our actions, sometimes it’s the heart itself. The theft of the online gallery Hell.com, the fake Vatican website, recently defined "The World’s First Internet Coup D’état", the 5 hours kidnapping of the Korea Web Art Festival, are some of the media hacks we produced that couldn’t be staged outside of the Internet.
References - Life imitates art and art imitates itself, interview by Uri Pasovsky, first published in Haaretz, 19 September 2000 - Data-Nudism, interview by Matthew Fuller, first published by Gallery 9 / Walker Art Centre, January 2001 - Now you are in my computer, interview by Jaka Zeleznikar, first published in Mladina, January 2001 - Vuk Cosic and 0100101110101101.ORG, interview by Daniele Perra, first published in Tema celeste, July - September 2001 - Portrait of the Artist as a Hard Disk, article by Tilman Baumgärtel published in Eyestorm, July 2001 - 0100101110101101.ORG, unpublished interview by Gabe Friedman, done for Wired, May 2003 - Artivism: quando l’arte diventa consapevole, interview by Tatiana Bazzichelli, first published in Cyberzone, June 2003 |
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