From "Gospark", Jul 2001
The Great Art Swindle
Silvia Biagi0100101110101101.org. An unpronounceable name that is way too long to be memorized, but short enough to be retained in the URL area of a browser: behind this string of characters, which intentionally suggests binary code, there hides the identity of two of the most interesting artists on the Web. The choice of anonymity is already a declaration of intent for them: they refute the concept of the author and of copyright. The 01's (we'll call them that, for brevity's sake) are proposing an innovative way to make art, which conforms more closely to the new forms of artistic production and creation that the Net is offering. At the 49th Biennale they presented a project that was actually set in motion in January of this year, and was financed by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, entitled life_sharing (an anagram of file_sharing). The idea is fairly simple: for an entire year, the contents of their hard disk will be open, 24 hours a day, to all the site's visitors, who can thus access all of their projects, past and future, rummage around in their archives, use free software, and even read their private mail.
In this way, one returns to the original idea behind the Web, when the internet was fundamentally an exchange of information between various computers connected directly to one another. The "battle" for the free circulation of ideas and knowledge via the web is one of the key concepts behind the 01's activity. In the space of just a few years, this group have pulled off a number of successful action/provocations, all different from one another, but unified in their notable coherence of intent: their work directly contests the contradictions in digital art, confronting topics such as authenticity, authorship, networking, copyright and plagiarism.
Art, therefore, in the digitally reproducible age, can only be "a big rip off": the concept of copyright is obsolete, destined to disappear in the same moment that the socio-economic condition we have seen born also disappear. Overcoming the notion of authorship also means overcoming the notion in their words - of "the contradictions of capitalism," in knocking down the dualism between public and private property, in creating an empirical model which will guarantee the free distribution and creation of knowledge.
The 01's first became known in May of 1998, with the virtual creation "mitopoesia" by Darko Maver, an imaginary Serbian artist-performer who toured the former-Yugoslavia staging massacres in motel rooms and uninhabited houses with models of men and women horribly slain.
On their site, the 01's created an entire life and body of work for Darko Maver, which ended up with him dying in jail, in the Podgorica, on the 13th January, 1999. The joke (or "prank", to use the computer hacker lingo) was revealed during the last edition of the Venice Biennale, and thus the invention of Maver became "the great art swindle," in which everything that regards a life and artistic production is absorbed and transformed into a commodity. The next provocation by the 01's was the "cloning" of the hell.com site, a virtual limited-access Net-art gallery, which the two hacker-artists downloaded and reproduced on their very own site, for everybody to see. The next victim of the 01's was another web gallery called Art.Teleportacia, and later in 1999 it was the turn of Jodi, another pioneering site for Net-art: in this case they downloaded it in such a way that it was replicated absolutely identically on the site located at 0100101110101101.org.
The most provocative of all their hoaxes but, paradoxically, that which garnered the least attention was the creation of www.vatican.org. For this ruse, during an entire year from December 1998 to December 1999, their site hosted another site absolutely identical, in graphics and layout, to the official site of the Holy See, but whose content was subject to subtle revisions. Just as for Darko Maver, it was the artists themselves who revealed the prank after the fact, when the company that served the site refused to renew the contract.
The provocations of these Web enfants terribles, nonetheless, are not directed at the people or groups who suffer the plagiarisms; these are just used as a means to wake a critical sense in the public by insinuating doubt into their minds. The objective of 0100101110101101.org is to motivate the "subversion of the means, which becomes a metaphor of subversion tout court, and wakes up the conscience of the user" (Interview in Britannica, July 2000). The "subversion of means" also signifies the denial of graphic interfaces, of the web-designer's beautifying, to allow for the discovery of the actual functioning of the PC instead. At first sight, their site seems to be totally incomprehensible, un-navigable a sort of information labyrinth inside of which it's too easy to lose oneself in the meandering directories and sub-directories. This denial of order coincides with another kind of disorder in actual real life and in the human mind, of which life_sharing proposes to be a digital replica.. Life_sharing is simultaneously a complaint, an invitation, and a provocation: a kind of information based "Big Brother," open for voyeurism while hermetically sealed. It is there to show that privacy is an inapplicable concept today, that the sheer quantity of information that it is possible to monitor on an individual is enormous. It's contents are intended to provoke (all of their past hoaxes are indeed on line), and at the same time it is an explicit invitation to plagiarise. The plagiarists offer themselves up to be plagiarised, openly inviting copies and replication. With life_sharing the work of art corresponds with its very own visibility.