olia lialina: Re:art.hacktivism

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Date: Fri, 09 Jul 1999 12:50:57 +0400
From: olia lialina <olialia@teleportacia.org>
To: nettime-l-temp@material.net
Subject: Re:art.hacktivism

Subject: 
             Re:art.hacktivism
        Date: 
             Fri, 09 Jul 1999 11:10:54 +0400
       From: 
             olia lialina <olialia@teleportacia.org>
 Organization: 
             Teleportacia
         To: 
             nettime-l@Desk.nl, list@rhizome.org, Luther Blissett
<12345@net27.it>



LB: [...] 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. OL: 1.Wrong argument. Registration of domain name sais about
understanding of the real power of the web. 2.0100101110101101.ORG is a
domain name registrated at the same company and for the same money as
others.

LB: 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. OL: Not "in other words" but "in LB words".

LB: 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?
OL: In general net is an analog of "real world" and part of it. What I and
others who take Internet seriously are doing is modeling situations,
relations, structures.

LB: 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. OL: Bozhe moj.
who told it to you? whom you talked with and when? try to recall. May be
it was about compact disks or computer installations? any way, dont say it
again. If you need a keyword for net art its a "connectivity".

LB:But recently something's changed.
OL: What exactly has changed?

LB: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.

OL: What you've described is an art method known long before the Internet.
(Soviet conceptual culture is based on it, or found footage in film can be
an example). Internet really gave a new life to "re-use" and it is one of
the most important skills if you work with the net.

LB: 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. OL: Yes, I
remember we made it two years ago at http://remote.aec.at. Random is a
nice idea.

LB: The toolbar becomes useless, the "back" command loses its logical
function: OL: its a fault..

LB: 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. OL: what you call interaction i still cant
understand.


LB: 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. OL: as it seems you are an expert
not only in interactivity. What is made on 0100101110101101.ORG is a
parody, clone means complite identity.

LB: 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. OL: Good. this is actually what I
like in 0100101110101101.ORG. Right attitude - to be a spider. And not
only to make a web, but to make it on purpose: to catch flys. Not only to
make links but to be able to work and play with things which are already
created in the net.

LB: 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 OL: Right

LB: 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. OL: Not true

LB: 3 The "sign" of a net.art work is in the "Location bar", so the url is
the only guarantee of originality. OL: Not the only, but the most
effective.

LB: Cloninig Art.Teleportacia 0100101110101101.ORG brought down all the
presuppositions of the gallery, the contradictions which this way of
thinking runs into became evident. OL: Making a parody on Art.Teleportacia
0100101110101101.ORG brought new clients to the gallery and good publicity
for itself.

LB: 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. OL: This I already heard from media curators who wanted to have my
works for nothing and to earn money on them. But its an illusion.


LB: - 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 OL: no, now it is
meaningful as never before. will explain in the end why.

LB: 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. OL: Im not very much involved in real
world business, but if this issue would be obsolete you, Luther, wont be
able to get money from your publishing house.

LB: 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.

OL: Are you really familiar with net art or net in general? if yes you
should know that copying is not a big deal. You can make hundreds of
Art.Teleportacia galleries, but next day they will be only hundreds of
outdated pages with not actual information and broken links, because I
will update only http://art.teleportacia.org . The same with all on line
art and not art works. What is done on the net is not a book or cd or tape
kind of product. It is not complete, not frosen, but can be changed every
moment. And this moment is a difference between copies and originals.


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