[Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> /// 0100101110101101.ORG /// Data-Nudism

[Matze Schmidt <matze.schmidt@n0name.de>]

please burn your life on cd-rom & send it to one of the adresses in the
signature!

ms

At 18:03 14.04.01 +0200, you wrote:
>
>/// PROPAGANDA /// HTTP://WWW.0100101110101101.ORG ///
>
>
># HTTP://WWW.0100101110101101.ORG/home/PROPAGANDA/PRESS
># HTTP://WWW.0100101110101101.ORG/home/PROPAGANDA/PRESS
># HTTP://WWW.0100101110101101.ORG/home/PROPAGANDA/PRESS
># HTTP://WWW.0100101110101101.ORG/home/PROPAGANDA/PRESS
># HTTP://WWW.0100101110101101.ORG/home/PROPAGANDA/PRESS
># HTTP://WWW.0100101110101101.ORG/home/PROPAGANDA/PRESS
># HTTP://WWW.0100101110101101.ORG/home/PROPAGANDA/PRESS
># HTTP://WWW.0100101110101101.ORG/home/PROPAGANDA/PRESS
># HTTP://WWW.0100101110101101.ORG/home/PROPAGANDA/PRESS
># HTTP://WWW.0100101110101101.ORG/home/PROPAGANDA/PRESS
>
>
>/// from "Gallery 9 / Walker Art Centre", 01 jan 2001
>/// http://www.walkerart.org/gallery9/lifesharing
>
>
>
>
>Data-Nudism
>An interview with 0100101110101101.ORG about life_sharing
>
>
>Matthew Fuller
>matt@axia.demon.co.uk
>
>Q.: In your text describing the project, you mention that "A computer,
>with the passing of time, ends up looking like its owner’s brain." Do
>you mean this in the way that any collection of objects of a certain
>type (i.e., books; bathroom cupboards full of half-used and failed
>rejuvenating cosmetics; boxes of toys; etc.) begins to provide material
>from which ideas and generalizations about a person can be extrapolated?
>Or, do you go further and suggest that in the augmentation of human by
>computer, the particular collection of data objects provides at least
>one of the means by which a person is "themselves"?
>
>A.: A computer is less and less an instrument of work. With a computer
>one shares time, one’s space, one’s memory, and one’s 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. We are not interested in the fact that a user can
>"study 0100101110101101.ORG’s personality"; rather, in the sharing of
>resources, it’s a matter of politics more than of "psychology."
>
>With life_sharing, 0100101110101101.ORG reveals its mechanism. It sets
>its kernel free and all the functions that concern it, in the same way
>as a programmer who frees the source code of their software. It is not
>only a show. It’s not like looking at Jennicam. The user can utilize
>what he finds in our computer.  Not only documents and software, but
>also the mechanisms that rule and maintain 0100101110101101.ORG: the
>relations with the Net; the strategies; the tactics and the tricks; the
>contacts with institutions; access to funds; the flow of money that
>comes in and goes out. All must be shared so that the user has a
>precedent to study. From this learning, concrete knowledge - that
>normally is considered "private" - can be transformed into a weapon, a
>tool that can be reused.
>
>Q.: Following on from this, I/O/D has a slogan: "Stop the
>Anthropomorphization of Humans by Computers." By this we mean that the
>pattern of "personalization" that users effect on their computers are
>pre-empted and formatted by software designers. The kind of person
>allowed for by the personal computer is a rather limited version of what
>we and computers might be. What do you think the consequences of
>becoming networked are in this context?
>
>A.: life_sharing is an evolution in comparison with the traditional
>"Anthropomorphization of Humans by Computers." One of the ideas at the
>roots of life_sharing is exactly the abolition of one of the levels of
>simulation that separate one user from another: the website. 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: the
>format of pages, indexes, and so on. life_sharing proposes a deeper
>relation. It’s like a "lower level language" that abolishes this
>simulation, allowing the user to directly enter one’s computer, to use
>the data in their own time-space.
>The abolition of this particular simulation opens many possibilities for
>using the data contained inside the computer. However, it is naive to
>think that it is possible to completely avoid simulation. Any language,
>for programming or not, is symbolic.  It exists to mediate, to communicate.
>Websites are only periodically updated, generally via ftp. The bulk of
>the contents of the Internet are not accessible in real time. There is a
>strong "delay" from the time a file (a piece of news, an image, a sound)
>is "produced" to the time when it is actually accessible from the Net:
>the time of formatting and upload. life_sharing avoids this "delay,"
>permitting access in real time to its contents. The user can even get to
>know some data (i.e., e-mails or logs) earlier than 0100101110101101.
>ORG, by connecting to life_sharing while we aren’t at the computer.
>
>Q.: In comparison with the project to generate a mythopoesis about the
>invented Serbian artist Darko Maver, pulling a multi-authored hoax on
>the art world, this work seems to be a very gentle and beguilingly
>simple intervention -- which is very welcome. It clearly follows more
>closely from your work duplicating the data from various internet art
>sites but shifts, moving data from one context of availability into
>another, but instead proffers up the data from your own computer. It
>seems that these projects offer a form of work that is not concerned
>with representation so much as directly creating new arrangements of
>patterns of life, of the availability of data, and so on. What
>possibilities does operating in this way open up?
>
>A.: Until now, 0100101110101101.ORG has attacked what in general seemed
>to be in open contradiction with the evolution of the Net, focusing on
>cultural production and on the inaccessibility of information. The
>websites involved were not targets for attack but instruments to
>highlight some paradoxes of the Net. The duplication of hell.com, for
>example, provoked a radical change in their approach, avoiding password
>protection and the pay-per-view method. With life_sharing,
>0100101110101101. ORG launches release 2.0. In other words, passes from
>a critical position to a positive one. From this moment, we will propose
>new ways for the production and distribution of culture, furnishing
>alternative models to the current ones and bringing together the
>cultural, political, and commercial aspects of life. life_sharing is not
>the end. It is the means.
>
>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.
>0100101110101101. ORG 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.
>Consider the increasing tendency toward intrusion in the private sphere
>-- not only by big corporations -- and the consequent efforts of people
>trying to preserve their own privacy. 0100101110101101.ORG believes
>firmly that privacy is a barrier to demolish. life_sharing must be
>considered a proof ad 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. 0100101110101101.ORG solves
>the dualism between public and private property. It proposes an
>empirical model that fosters the free distribution of knowledge that
>grants, at the same time, its fruition.
>>From now on, the product of 0100101110101101.ORG will be its own
>visibility. life_sharing is the root under which will come other
>services, all directed to show to what degree our life can be monitored.
>We want to show as many forms of data as possible on us: not only in the
>transparency of the hard disk, but also by analyzing economic
>transactions: the use of credit cards; physical movements; purchases.
>0100101110101101. ORG will show the enormous amount of information that
>is possible to find on a person in the present society.
>
>Q.: Further in this vein, some of the material is relatively intimate
>information -- forms for the avoidance of national service, for
>instance. How do these forms of personal information conflict with the
>anonymous collective form of manifestation, which you adopt as a group?
>
>A.: In all probability, by activating life_sharing our anonymity will
>fade, since in our computer there are many documents, e-mails or
>contracts, which contain our real identities. In any case, life_sharing
>has the priority over anything else, anonymity as well. It is an
>operative system under which an infinite number of other functions can
>run, never compromising this one. The war of secrecy (cryptography,
>anonymity, and so on) is unfortunately a losing battle. The big
>corporations will always have at their disposal more sophisticated means
>than the average user, more calculation capacity, more control through
>satellites. It is possible to maintain anonymity only to a superficial
>level. After a certain level it is no longer possible. Any economic
>transaction, any purchase or sale, any human relationship, is based on
>documentation. The more this society grows to depend on computers, the
>more this process will be facilitated.
>0100101110101101. ORG’s real strength is its visibility. The only way to
>avoid control is data-overflow -- to heap up and multiply data to the
>point that it becomes extremely difficult to isolate and interpret. Any
>time you switch on your computer, any key you type, any file you save,
>something is automatically written somewhere in the maze of your
>computer. Everything is logged. In systems like Linux this is visible.
>You only have to look at the bash history or the access log. Each action
>is potentially reconstructible with absolute precision. This must be
considered.
>0100101110101101. ORG uses and makes visible the aesthetic of this flow
>of data. 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 every
>day. It is the actualization of the idea of "total work of art" --
>gesamtkunstwerk -- in other words, the dream of modelling reality
>through aesthetic canons.
>
>Q.: Do you intend life_sharing to become an extensible system, one that
>can be taken up by other people, or is it a one-off?
>
>A.: The diffusion of life_sharing to anyone who wants to adopt it, as an
>operative system, is surely one of its potentials. However, the total
>sharing of one’s computer is not, nowadays, easily achieved. To entirely
>share your computer you need a server and extremely expensive fast
>network connections. Some operating systems and software (i.e. MacOs9,
>Napster, and Gnutella) are developing this sharing potential. At the
>moment, the biggest technical problem is the cost of telephone lines. It
>is predictable, however, that these costs will come to be more within
>the reach of the average user. (As happened with the modem connection.)
>
>Q.: In life_sharing, you invoke the GNU Public License (GPL) a
>particular form of license for software developed by the Free Software
>Foundation. This license allows users of a piece of code to make changes
>to it, to adapt it for their own purposes, so long as they then make
>those changes publicly available to other users and do not "close" the
>code as it develops. The GPL is a document that has excited interest
>outside of programming circles, providing a link to other takes on
>collective or open authorship, redefinitions of copyright, intellectual
>property, and so on.
>It is its particular status as a document that I’d like to ask you to
>comment on. GPL seems to be formed at the meeting point between two
>different dynamics which, in another context, Toni Negri names
>"constituent power" and "constitutional power." The GPL is a technical
>document that forms the basis of a particular range of working
>practices. As a form of constituent power, it is both a manifestation of
>the fecundity of collaboration and -- at the present time -- an
>insurgent reinvention of the form of property.
>Equally, existing as it does in the form of a license, a contract, GPL
>relies on the constituted power of social stasis and normalization. It
>is based on an immediate appeal to Law. It is this latter aspect of it
>which meshes so well with the determination to treat software as simply
>another variant on capitalist forms of property and GPL as simply a more
>useful means of generating such property. Constituent power, on the
>other hand, is the amorphous and ambivalent power of change, of the
>social in the process of mutation. (This at once means that it also
>encompasses emergent sections of the bourgeois, what is inventive and
>seductive in the rhetorical figure of the "entrepreneur" deployed so
>much around e-commerce, for instance.) For Negri there is no lasting
>accommodation between constituent and constitutional power. There is no
>synthesis onto a higher plane of compromise. I suspect that it is this
>sense that there is more to it, that there’s more coming, more mutation,
>more space for profound invention that makes GPL and other systems like
>it attractive to take up as models for development in other contexts.
>Given this, I’d like to ask a couple of things. Firstly, is your use of
>GPL in the description of the life_sharing project accurate, or (besides
>the project’s explicit use of software released under GPL or open-source
>licenses) is it more along the lines of an allusion? If so, what is it
>that you use GPL to point toward? What do you see lying beyond it? (In
>the case of life_sharing and other projects, I suspect that although
>they use GPL as a "model," they may actually do something rather
>different, rather more. One of the ways this happens is that they do not
>make an appeal to Law as a basic condition for their function. Here I
>mean Law in both senses, that of "absolute right" in that GPL is somehow
>seen as being transcendentally correct in some circles, rather than as
>being something operating within a specific historical setting; and the
>more direct sense that, as it exists in the form of a legal document, it
>allows a route into this apparently "freely" constructed relationship
>for the state.
>
>A.: The fact of adopting Linux as operating system and consequently the
>GPL license, is absolutely not an allusion, but the result of political
>choices, and for technical and legal reasons. First of all, it is
>necessary to make some distinctions. life_sharing contains stuff
>produced under three different licenses:
>
>-- GPL: GNU General Public License. It is the general license created to
>protect free software. All the software adopted in life_sharing is
>covered by GPL. http://www.gnu.org
>-- Copyright: applied only where specified, on files not produced by
>0100101110101101. ORG but protected by traditional copyright, i.e.,
>certain articles or texts
>-- We are working, together with a lawyer, to develop a license that we
>want to apply to all the files in which no other license is specified.
>This license is directly inspired by the GPL but will be extended to all
>cultural products, granting the possibility of:
>-- using the product
>-- modifying the product
>-- distributing copies, modified or not, of the product (freely or with
payment).
>This license also prevents the addition of any restrictions -- avoiding
>the possibility of products covered by this license being added to or
>combined with any other products under any different form of license. Up
>until now, 0100101110101101.ORG has not placed any of the things it did
>under copyright. First of all, because 0100101110101101.ORG has never
>produced anything.
>0100101110101101. ORG only moves packages of information, diverts their
>flow, observes changes, and eventually profits 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
>www.plagiarist.org, www.geocities.com/maxherman_2000/hell.html,
>www.message.sk/warped). If someone else profits from 0100101110101101.
>ORG, it’s because of their own merit. In the end, it 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. (A different formulation of this might be found in the
>statements of anti/copyright commonly used in the underground and
>radical media in Italy and elsewhere, where copyright is open to further
>nonprofit users, or for participants in social movements, but closed to
>proprietary reproduction. Thus, on the "inside" an open context is
>created, but the proprietary weapon of copyright is still maintained for
>use against for-profit use. The fiction of the will is used in this
>sense as a legalistic shield in order, in essence, to dissolve it.) 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.
>The problem of copyright is increasingly more important. It deals not
>only with software, art, or music, but is invading every field of human
>life. Let’s consider, for example, the field of genetics. In 1987, in
>apparent violation of the laws that govern the concession of patents on
>natural discoveries, a revolutionary decree was made in which it was
>declared that the components of human beings (genes, chromosomes, cells,
>and tissues) could be patented and considered the intellectual property
>of anybody who first isolates a length of DNA, describes its properties
>or functions, proposes an application, and pays some money for a patent.
>This implies that, for example, when a person wants to have a genetic
>code test, they may have to pay a percentage to the company that holds
>the copyright of one or more of their genes.
>"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!"
>
>
>
>
>First published by Gallery 9 / Walker Art Centre for life_sharing by
>0100101110101101.ORG http://www.walkerart.org/gallery9/lifesharing/
>
>
>
>
>/// PROPAGANDA /// HTTP://WWW.0100101110101101.ORG ///
>
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