Press release, 17 oct 2003

Why doesn't Nike want to play with me?
Nike starts legal action against the European art group 0100101110101101.ORG and cultural Internet platform Public Netbase.

 

In mid September this group started a surreal art project called Nike Ground (http://www.nikeground.com), a performance built around a fake guerrilla marketing campaign: Nike was supposedly buying streets and squares in major world capitals, in order to rename them and insert giant monuments of their famous logo. A hi-tech container was installed in Vienna, supposedly the first city to host a "Nike Square", as part of the action.

On October 10th, 0100101110101101.ORG publicly claimed to be behind this "hyper-real theatrical performance". The project questions the issues of private appropriation of public space, the side effects of bombarding marketing strategies and the artistic freedom to manipulate symbols of everyday life.

On October 14th, Nike released a 30 pages injunction requesting the immediate removal of any reference to copyrighted material, and that any activity related to Nike cease immediately. Failure to comply with this request would mean that Nike will claim 78,000 Euro for damages.

«Where is the Nike spirit? - responds Franco, spokesman of 0100101110101101.ORG - I expected to deal with sporting people, not a bunch of boring lawyers!».

«Many artists have dealt with commercial products in the past, before Nike even existed - comments Eva, also from 0100101110101101.ORG - think of Andy Warhol's Campbell Soup, for example. Contemporary art does not have a well defined role within this society. On the contrary, it is a field where one can make statements that are not possible in any other context. Art has always used powerful images from the society of its time as its subject. Nike invades our lives with products and ads but then forbid us to use them creatively».

According to independent curator and writer Timothy Druckery, «the work of 0100101110101101.ORG provokes questions about how corporate identity cannot endorse itself as a proxy public sphere or as an entity immune from the implications of its actions».

Curiously enough, the building of the "Viennese Secession", built by Joseph Olbrich in 1898, faces the fake Nike Infobox in Karslplatz. In huge gold letters over the entrance are the words: "To every time its art. To every art its freedom".