Luther Blissett: 0100101110101101.ORG: art.hacktivism

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Date: Sat, 26 Jun 1999 03:01:33 +0200
From: Luther Blissett <12345@net27.it>
To: nettime-l@Desk.nl, list@rhizome.org
Subject: 0100101110101101.ORG: art.hacktivism

>From "re:bytes", July - August 1999:

0100101110101101.ORG: art.hacktivism

by Luther Blissett


[...] Net.art, born just some years ago, is becoming *the* new art form, the
ultimate one, and the most absurd thing is that net.artists themselves seem to
expect nothing else.  Everyone with his own site, everyone with his own domain,
everyone with his own gallery, they are throwing themselves into the trammels
of traditional art, completely ignoring what net.art could/should be and
misunderstanding the real power of the web.

The point under discussion is always the same: how to sell a net.art work. In
other words: how to make net.art regress to the status of traditional art. And
the answers come, oh yes they do. New galleries and collections of the biggest
contemporary art museums thrive, articles on glossy reviews increase, the most
absurd offers of commercialization  spread.  All of it dictated by one and only
ideal: the circled "C". Result? Within two years net.art will be in all museums
and art history handbooks, with the names of the "protagonists of the heroic
period", dates, movements, influences, generations and so on, tons of the same
shit we have been eating all the times. But this is not what we expected.  We
hoped that something else would come out, at least in the web. The web is the
paradise of no-copyright, plagiarism, confusion and exchange, why the hell are
those people trying, by any means, to create a copy of the real world?

The difference between net.art and every other form of art seems to be
"interactivity", at least this is what we got used to hear. Well:
"interactivity", as it's usually intended, is a delusion, pure falsehood. When
people reach a site (net.art or not, it doesn't matter), by their mouse clicks
they choose one of the routes fixed by the the author(s), the only decide what
to see before and what after: this is not interactivity.  It would be the same
as stating that an exposition in a museum is interactive because you can choose
from which room to start, which works seeing before and which ones after, or
because you can turn around a sculpture and seeing it from different points of
view. If net.art is interactive then Canova is interactive as well, otherwise
none of them.

But recently something's changed. We're talking about 0100101110101101.ORG,
come into the limelight for having hacked hell.com. In fact,
0100101110101101.ORG is trying to show that art in the web can really become
"interactive ": the public must use it interactively, we must use an artwork in
an unpredictable way, one that the author didn't foresee, to rescue it from its
normal routine (studio/gallery/museum or homepage/hell.com/Moma) and  re-use it
in a different and novel way. When this happens in "real life" people are sent
to prison or to madhouses. Even the web is going towards such a situation, all
the paradigms of traditional art are imposing themselves again.

The first files appeared in 0100101110101101.ORG are what we'll call "hybrids",
in absence of other names: pages by other net.artists all mixed in a random
way. This section of the site is centered around a random concept, so that the
interface changes every time you visit it. The toolbar becomes useless, the
"back" command loses its logical function: every page is set in the
unpredictable sequence of chance.  0100101110101101.ORG downloads the websites
of the most popular net.artists and then s/he/it/them manipulates them as "it"
wants, using them in an interactive way.

The "open_source_hell.com" affair happened about one month ago. In spite of all
the things that have been said about, since it seems that very few people have
said something interesting, we report here a press release circulated on those
days:

----

open_source_hell.com

www. HELL.com was born in 1995 as a conceptual art piece, an anti-web that sold
and promoted nothing and was not accessible to the public: a sheer b(l)ack hole
of the web.  For almost three years, HELL.com, a site with no content, never
listed in any directory nor linked anywhere, averaged of a million hits per
month from people typing the name in search engines. Then it became a container
for net.art sites and art galleries  which you could access only if you were
invited, and whose list of members was kept secret; something they themselves
called "a private parallel web." The idea behind HELL.com was to create a
launching pad for cyber-artists extremly elitist and with badly hidden venal
ambitions... a fuckin' museum!  During february 1999 HELL.com organized
"surface": a show with several superstar net artists like zuper!, absurd,
fakeshop and many more. Like all the events by HELL.com, this one was not
available to the public either - it was opened exclusively to RHIZOME
subscribers.  During the 48 hours opening  0100101110101101.ORG downloaded all
the files of the site; the clone has been put on line, this time as
anticopyright, visible, reproducible and freely diffusible material and, thanks
to some technical devices, even more easily downloadable.  The convinction that
information must be free is a tribute to the way in which a very good computer
or a valid program works: binary numbers move in accordance with the most
logic, direct and necessary way to do their complex function. What is a
computer if not something that benefits by the free flow of information?

-----

The night of 9th june, it was the turn of "Art.Teleportacia"'s.
"Art.Teleportacia" is the first net.art gallery to have appeared in the web,
and also the first attempt to sell works of net.art. The exhibition we're
talking about was "Miniatures of the heroic period ", and consisted of some
pages by five of the most known net.artists in the world - Jodi, Vuk,
Irational, Easylife and Lialina - for sale at 2000 $ each.
0100101110101101.ORG cloned the gallery, manipulated the contents and uploaded
it in a new "anticopyright" version, obviously without asking permission to
anyone and violating the copyright of the original site. The exhibition changed
its name into "Hybrids of the heroic period ", and the five "original" works
were replaced with as many "hybrids", files obtained mixing pages by
net.artists with some trash of the web.

The theoretical pillars that hold Art.Teleportacia are mainly three: - 1 A work
of net.art can be sold as well as any other work of art - 2 Each net.art work
must be covered by copyright and nobody, except the artist, can download it or
even link to it without the permission of the author - 3 The "sign" of a
net.art work is in the "Location bar", so the url is the only guarantee of
originality.

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 s/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! - finally, we entered the "age of its technical
reproducibility" - and every copy is identical to the "original" one. The
concept itself of an "original" is now meaningless, and even the concepts of
false and plagiarism don't exist any longer. If it's obsolete to talk about
"originals" in the real world, it becomes absolutely paradoxical in the web.
This seems to be the thread between the so called "hybrids", Art.Telepoetacia
and open_source_hell.com.

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 (Alexander Brener) or to put mustache on
postcards of Monalisa (Duchamp), now art can be downloaded, modified and
uploaded again, with absolute delight.

We wish to see hundreds of 0100101110101101.ORG repeating sites of net.artists
endlessly, so that nobody realizes which was the "original" one, we would like
to see hundreds of Jodi and hell.com, all different, all original, and nobody
filing lawsuits for copyright infringement, there would be no more originals to
preserve. "WebDevil" will be the brush of a new generation  of artists?



links:
http://www.0100101110101101.ORG

"hybrids":
http://www.0100101110101101.ORG/0110100110/

hell.com:
clone: http://www.0100101110101101.ORG/hell.com
"original": http://www.hell.com

Art.Teleportacia:
clone: http://www.0100101110101101.ORG/Art.Teleportacia
"original": http://art.teleportacia.org/art-mac.html

infowar:
http://www.0100101110101101.ORG/0100101110101101.0RG



--
The Ultimate Luther Blissett Website:
 http://www.syntac.net/lutherblissett/