Repositório Da Universidade De Lisboa

UNIVERSIDADE DE LISBOA FACULDADE DE BELAS-ARTES

ESTÉTICA DE AÇÕES COLETIVAS NA INTERNET ART: Crowdsourcing e o despertar de públicos criativos

(Volume II - Apêndice)

José Manuel de Almeida Pereira

Orientador: Professora Doutora Sílvia Lami Tavares Chicó

Tese especialmente elaborada para a obtenção do grau de Doutor em Belas-Artes, na especialidade de Multimédia

2019

ÍNDICE

Projetos de Crowdsourcing Art……………………………..………………… 1

The World’s First Collaborative Sentence, Douglas Davis, 1994-2005…..…… 2

The File Room, Antoni Muntadas, 1994-presente…………………...………… 3

Bodies© INCorporated, Victoria Vesna, 1995…………….………………...… 4

SITO Synergy project HyGrid, Ed Stastny, 1995-presente……………...…..… 5

Telegarden, Ken Goldberg, 1995-2004……………………………………...… 6

www.rtmark.com, ®™ark, 1996-2002………………………………………… 7

Degree Confluence Project, Alex Jarret, 1996-presente…………………….… 8

Identity Swap Database, Olia Lialina & Heath Bunting 1999……………….… 9

Starrynight, Alexander R. Galloway, Mark Tribe e Martin Wattenberg, 1999... 10

Karlskrona 2 (K2), Superflex, 1999…………………………………………..… 11

Toywar, etoy.CORPORATION, 1999-2000…………………………………… 12

Communimage, Johannes Gees e calc (Looks Brunner, Malex Spiegel, Teresa

A. Novo, Omi Scheiderbauer e Silke Sporn),1999-presente………………...… 13

Riot, Mark Napier, 2000……………………………………………………..… 14

CarnivorePE, RSG (Radical Software Group), 2001………………………...… 15

Glyphiti, Andy Deck, 2001-presente………………………………………...… 16

OPUS(Open Platform for Unlimited Signification), Raqs Media Collective

(Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula e Shuddhabrata Sengupta), 2002………….… 17

Nine (9), Mongrel (Graham Harwood), 2003………………………………..… 18

Googlehouse, Marika Dermineur e Stéphane Degoutin, 2003………………… 19

Sky Ear, Usman Haque, 2004………………………...……………………..… 20

Agonistics: A Language Game, Warren Sack, 2004………...…………….…… 21

Yellow Arrow, Counts Media (Michael Counts, Christopher Allen, Brian

House e Jesse Shapins), 2004-2006………………………………………….… 22

Biomapping, Christian Nold, 2004-presente……………………………...... … 23

We Feel Fine, Jonathan Harris & Sep Kamvar, 2005-2007…………………… 24

Swarm Sketch, Peter Edmunds, 2005-presente………………………………… 25

The Sheep Market, Aaron Koblin, 2006……………………………………..… 26

Wish, Boredomresearch (Vicky Isley e Paul Smith), 2006………………….… 27

The Dumpster, Golan Levin, Kamal Nigam e Jonathan Feinberg, 2006……… 28

On Translation: Social Networks, Antoni Muntadas, 2006………………….… 29 myfrienemies, Angie Waller, 2007………………………………………….… 30

Le registre/ The Register - Flußgeist 2, Grégory Chatonsky & Claude Le Berre,

2007…………………………………………………………………...… 31

Googlegrama 49:White on White, Joan Fontcuberta, 2007…………………..… 32

Noplace, Marek Walczak & Martin Wattenberg (MW2MW), 2007-2008…..… 33

Reenactments/ Synthetic Performances, 0100101110101101.ORG (Eva e

Franco Mattes), 2007-2010…………………………………………………..… 34

Ten Thousand Cents, Aaron Koblin & Takashi Kawashima, 2008………….… 35

Star Wars Uncut, Casey Pugh, 2009…………………………………………… 36

Wikipedia Art, Scott Kildall & Nathaniel Stern, 2009………………………… 37

Highrise/Out My Window, Katerina Cizek & NFB (National Film Board –

Canadá), 2009-2010………………………………………………………….… 38

Cadavre Exquis - Stainboy, Tim Burton, 2010………………………………… 39

Unnumbered Sparks, Aaron Koblin & Janet Echelman, 2010……………….… 40

Sunset Portraits from Sunset Pictures on Flickr, Penelope Umbrico, 2010- presente………………………………………………………………………… 41

Twistori, Amy Hoy e Thomas Fuchs, 2010-presente………………………..… 42

Virtual Choir, Eric Whitacre, 2010-presente………………………………...… 43

Johnny Cash, Chris Milk & Aaron Koblin, 2010-presente…………………..… 44

Life in a Day, Kevin Macdonald & Ridley Scott, 2011……………………...… 45

Face to Facebook, Paolo Cirio e Alessandro Ludovico, 2011……………….… 46

Born Nowhere, Laís Pontes, 2011-presente………………………………….… 47

This Exquisite Forest, Chris Milk & Aaron Koblin, 2012-2014……………..… 48

Webcam Venus, Pablo Garcia & Addie Wagenknecht & F.A.T. (Free Art

&Technology), 2013…………………………………………………………… 49

Moon, Olafur Eliasson e Ai Weiwei, 2013-2017…………………………….… 50

The Exceptional and the Everyday: 144 Hours in Kiev, Lev Manovich, Alise

Tifentale, Mehrdad Yazdani e Jay Chow , 17 a 22 de fevereiro de 2014……… 51

Internet Cache Self Portrait series, Evan Roth, 2014-presente………………… 52

Place, Reddit/ Josh Wardle, 2017……………………………………………… 53

Manifestos, declarações de artistas, curadores e teóricos da Internet

Art…………………………………………………………………………….... 54

The Hacker’s Manifesto, The Mentor (a.k.a. Loyd Blankenship), 1986…….… 55

Manifestation for the Unstable Media, V2_Organisation, 1987………………. 57

A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century, VNS Matrix (Josephine

Starrs, Julianne Pierce, Francesca da Rimini, and Virginia Barratt), 1991…….. 58

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, John Perry Barlow, 1996.... 59

Command Communications and Control in eastern Europe – a View from

Isolation, Marko Peljhan , 1997………………………………………………... 61

Manifeste du web Indépendant, uZine 3, 1997……………………………….... 64

On The ABC of Tactical Media, David Garcia and Geert Lovink, 1997…….. 65

The Digital Artisans Manifesto, Richard Barbrook e Pit Schultz, 1997………. 68

The Piran Nettime Manifesto, Pit Schultz (Berlin), Geert Lovink

(Amsterdam), Critical Art Ensemble (Chicago), Diana McCarty (Budapest), Marko Peljhan (Ljubljana), Oliver Marchart (Wien) e Peter Lamborn Wilson (New York), 1997…………………………………………………………….... 72

Manifesto: Thread Baring Itself in Ten Quick Posts, Mark Amerika, 1998….. 73

Introduction to Net.Art, Natalie Bookchin e Alexei Shulgin, 1994-1999……... 77

Lowtech Manifesto, Redundant Technology Initiative, 1999………………….. 81

A few Things I know about Neen, Miltos Manetas, 2000-2006……………….. 82

iii

Manifesto for Agile Software Development, Kent Beck, Mike Beedle, Arie

van, Bennekum, Alistair Cockburn, Ward, Cunningham, Martin Fowler, Robert C. Martin, Steve Mellor, Dave Thomas, James Grenning, Jim Highsmith, Andrew Hunt, Ron Jeffries, Jon Kern, Brian Marick, Ken Schwaber, and Jeff Sutherland, 2001…………………………………………... 83

Dispersion, Seth Price, 2002………………………………………………….... 84

Flat against the Wall, Olia Lialina, 2007………………………………………. 93

The Zero Dollar Laptop Manifesto, James Wallbank, 2007………………….. 96

Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, Aaron Swartz, 2008………………………. 99

The Lo-Fi Manifesto, Karl Stolley, 2008…………………………………….... 101

Media Art 2.0, Aristarkh Chernyshev, Roman Minaev, Alexei Shulgin, 2009.. 103

Pirates of The Internet Unite!, Miltos Manetas, 2009……………………….... 105

The Culto f Done Manifesto, Bre Pettis and Kio Stark, 2009…………………. 107

UBERMORGEN.COM manifesto, UBERMORGEN.COM (Hans Bernhard and LIZVLX), 2009……………………………………………………………. 108

The Dead Drops Manifesto, Aram Bartholl, 2010……………………………... 113

The Hardware Hacker Manifesto, Cody Brocious (Daeken), 2010……………. 114

Postinternet: Art after the Internet, Marisa Olson, 2011……………………….. 116

We, The Web Kids, Piotr Czerski, 2012………………………………………. 122

A Manifesto for the truth, Edward Snowden, 2013……………………………. 125

The Tale of Lord Snowden and marquis D’Assange, UBERMORGEN.COM

(Hans Bernhard and LIZVLX), 2013…………………………………………... 126

Balconism, Constant Dullaart, 2014………………………………………….... 127

New Clues, Doc Searls & David Weinberger, 2015………………………….... 129

User Dta Manifesto 2.0, Frank Karlitschek, 2015……………………………... 137

We lost, F.A.T. GOLD - Magnus Eriksson and Evan Roth, 2015……………... 139

Beta – Manifest for the Future Art Market, Association of German Galleries and Art Dealers (BVDG) and Independent Collectors, 2016………………….. 141

Speed Show LA: Manifesto, Aram Bartholl, 2016…………………………….. 145

The Perfect Medium User, Casey Gollan, 2016……………………………... 146

......

. PROJETOS DE CROWDSOURCING ART

The World’s First Collaborative Sentence, 1994-2005 ______Douglas Davis

Fig. 1 Plataforma original do projeto The World’s First Collaborative Sentence, 1994

Fig. 2 Interface destinada à submissão de texto, 1994

Fig. 3 Detalhe do texto decorrente de múltiplas contribuições, versão restaurada em 2005. Disponível em http://artport.whitney.org/collection/DouglasDavis/live/Sentence/sentence1.html ______OBSERVAÇÕES: O projeto The World’s First Collaborative Sentence consiste num texto performativo com imagens online em permanente expansão, comissariado pela Galeria de Arte Lehman College e a City University of New York, com o auxílio de Gary Welz, Robert Schneider e Susan Hoeltzel. Na sequência da intenção da Galeria de Arte Lehman College em realizar uma mostra dos primeiros trabalhos de Douglas Davis (1967-1981) na internet (alojada no servidor da City University of New York), surge paralelamente este projeto em estreita ligação com o tema da exposição. O projeto permanece ativo, foi restaurado e relançado em 2005 pelo Whitney Museum of American Art (detentor da obra de arte). Um estudo realizado no início do ano 2000 assinalava mais de 200 mil colaborações, divididas em 21 capítulos, escritos em dezenas de idiomas.

The File Room, 1994-presente ______Antoni Muntadas

Fig. 4 A instalação física temporária, The File Room, esteve em Chicago (1994), Lyon (1995), Paris (1996), Barcelona (1996) e Hamburg (1996). Disponível em http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/the-file-room/

Fig. 5 O interface do projeto. Apresentado na Ars Eletronica (1994), ISEA (1995), Medienbiennale (1994), entre outros. Disponível em http://www.thefileroom.org/ ______OBSERVAÇÕES: The File Room é um projeto com espírito coletivo, aberto ao espaço público e social que privilegia o diálogo, discussão e contribuições sucessivas dos participantes. Muntadas, em colaboração com a equipa do centro artístico de Randolph Street Gallery em Chicago, desenvolveu um arquivo, composto por uma instalação física temporária e expansível de forma permanente no WWW, com o intuito de constituir uma plataforma que problematize a censura artística e cultural sem reivindicar autoridade editorial, científica ou académica; em vez disso, propõe métodos de recolha, processamento e arquivo de informação que estimule o debate em torno da censura e arquivamento. A atmosfera burocrática da instalação física determina a recriação de um espaço sinistro e bastante sombrio que pretende acentuar as controvérsias políticas e culturais de repressão artística em contraste com a internet e a liberdade de expressão no domínio público que lhe subjaz. O interface do projeto evoca simultaneamente ao papel de visitante e de participante, podendo este último contribuir coletivamente para a discussão, assinalando casos ou opiniões.

Bodies© INCorporated, 1995 ______Victoria Vesna

Fig. 6 Print Screen do interface do projeto. Disponível em http://www.bodiesinc.ucla.edu/frames2. html

Fig. 7 Print Screen do interface para a construção dos avatares: catálogo de texturas.

Fig. 8 Print Screen do espaço virtual Showplace!!!© INCorporated.

Fig. 9 Detalhes de alguns corpos virtuais. Disponível em http://victoriavesna.com/ ______OBSERVAÇÕES: Bodies© INCorporated projeta o corpo como avatar numa dimensão corporativa online onde a maioria dos participantes simula o seu alter-ego (para além dos corpos digitais serem criados segundo o padrão de género, há igualmente criações que seguem as preferências sexuais dos participantes: hermafroditas, transexuais, homossexuais, assexuais, etc.). Contudo, com o intuito de afastar os participantes do projeto de um contexto iminentemente sexual proporcionava-se a possibilidade de adicionar texturas à ‘pele digital’. O participante era convidado a construir um corpo virtual, com a devida caraterização, e a incorporar a comunidade online e os seus ambientes de interação: o Showplace!!!© INCorporated (um espaço virtual ativo que proporciona a dinâmica em grupo, desde a expetável atitude voyeurista à realização de debates, performances nos corpos da semana, etc.); o Limbo© INCorporated (uma zona inerte, onde se amontoam os corpos abandonados pelos participantes); e a Necropolis© INCorporated (uma ambiência rica, onde os participantes podem escolher a morte a que devotam os seus corpos digitais).

SITO Synergy project HyGrid, 1995-presente ______Ed Stastny

Fig. 10 Projeto Hygrid, diagrama com as instruções básicas de navegação. Disponível em http://www.sito.org/synergy/hygrid/

Fig. 11 Print Screen da interface do projeto HyGrid.

Fig. 12 Print Screen do relatório estatístico de colaborações no projeto HyGrid (1995-2014). Disponível em http://www.sito.org/cgi-bin/hygrid/hygridle?report ______OBSERVAÇÕES: Inicialmente anunciado como OTIS (The Operative Term is Stimulate), SITO surge pela inversão do acrónimo com intuito de desenvolver uma comunidade artística open source destinada a criar um repositório de obras de arte e agilizar a sua exposição. Face ao interesse pela experimentação de projetos de arte colaborativa, foi criada uma secção intitulada “Synergy on SITO” dedicada exclusivamente a este tipo de participação online. O projeto HyGrid é um dos mais relevantes e utiliza um paradigma de interação baseado no método surrealista cadavre exquis, onde é disponibilizada uma grelha composta por quadrados e, a partir de uma imagem, o participante pode dar-lhe continuidade, reservando um dos lados adjacentes disponíveis para o efeito. A escolha da imagem inicial é feita aleatoriamente, o colaborador pode utilizar qualquer programa gráfico para criar a sua imagem e é convidado a fazer o upload para firmar a sua colaboração, num período de 180 minutos. Há, ainda, a possibilidade dos artistas comentarem os trabalhos submetidos. Este projeto foi galardoado com o 2º prémio da Prix Ars Electronica, em 1996.

Telegarden, 1995-2004 ______Ken Goldberg

Fig. 13 Estrutura física do projeto Telegarden. Disponível em http://www.ieor.berkeley.edu/~goldberg/garden/Ars/

Fig. 14 Interface de controlo do braço robotizado. ______OBSERVAÇÕES: O projeto Telegarden faz uma ponte entre o espaço virtual e uma instalação real. Os elementos físicos, depois de um ano na University of Southern California, foram instalados no Ars Electronica Center, em Linz, e são constituídos por um braço robotizado no meio de uma plataforma, onde se encontra organizado um pequeno canteiro. Os participantes online através de um interface intuitivo semeiam e cuidam de plantas, trocam opiniões e agem em comunidade. No primeiro ano foram registados 9000 jardineiros virtuais que se associaram à materialização da ideia da comunhão comunicacional entre os mundos real e virtual. Embora os utilizadores controlassem de facto o braço robotizado pela internet, alimentou-se a descrença sobre a real existência do jardim, bem como o questionar se as ações dos participantes verdadeiramente contribuíram para o crescimento das plantas, problematizando e reassumindo a controvérsia da união do espaço virtual com o real.

www.rtmark.com, 1996-2002 ______®™ark

Fig. 15 Print Screen da interface do projeto www.rtmark.com. Disponível em http://www.rtmark.com/deconstructingbeck.html

Fig. 16 Sala de reuniões do grupo ®™ark. ______OBSERVAÇÕES: ®™ark é um grupo de ativistas de arte que se apresenta com um estatuto empresarial claramente subversivo motivado pela paródia da imagem de marca das empresas. As ações provocatórias do grupo deram origem a diversos processos judiciais, pois os seus membros mantiveram o anonimato de modo a permitir-lhes o envolvimento em sabotagens sociais, participações anticorporativas e antigovernamentais. O projeto www.rtmark.com foi selecionado para ser apresentado na Bienal de Whitney em 2000 (conjuntamente com outros 8 projetos online); para o efeito foi disponibilizada uma sala com um computador e um projetor para os participantes acederem aos 9 projetos. Ressalve-se que foi a primeira vez que a Bienal de Whitney incluiu Net.Art. Os visitantes, ao acederem a www.rtmark.com, confrontavam-se com um interface que imita a linguagem dos sites empresariais e em vez de acederem à página do grupo acediam a um repositório de projetos realizados e outros sites (página dos Backstreet Boys, portal de pornografia, etc.) enviados por seguidores e amigos do grupo. Esta ação é vista como o reflexo de um determinado momento da internet com a ironia de um conjunto de ready-mades duchampianos.

Degree Confluence Project, 1996-presente ______Alex Jarret

Fig. 17 Visualização do registo no “Degree Confluence Project” no local 41ºN 8ºW, Viseu-PT. Disponível em http://confluence.org/confluence.php?lat=41&lon= -8

Fig. 18 Dispersão global das colaborações registadas no site. A cada imagem corresponde uma confluência de coordenadas e garante uma história de quem as produziu. Disponível em http://www.orbitals.com/dcp/dcp3a.htm ______OBSERVAÇÕES: O “Degree Confluence Project” tem a pretensão de realizar um registo da superfície terrestre sob o olhar de um manancial de colaboradores residentes ou meramente visitantes de locais devidamente referenciados por GPS, à escala mundial. O projeto destaca–se por dois objetivos fundamentais: por um lado, visitar locais, intercetando a latitude e longitude, registando-os em fotografia e permitindo a possibilidade de criar uma narrativa desses locais com a respetiva descrição; por outro lado, visa igualmente documentar a mudança desses locais ao longo do tempo, quando são revisitados e registados de novo. Esta cartografia do mundo distingue-se pelo mapeamento colaborativo das aventuras dos participantes criando uma etiquetação do mundo baseada no princípio geotagging (informações geolocalizadas e adicionadas em pontos do mapa). A plataforma apresenta vários níveis de coordenação, por países e em termos regionais, que avalizam e aprovam as diversas contribuições.

Identity Swap Database, 1999 ______Olia Lialina & Heath Bunting

Fig. 19 Print Screen do interface do inquérito multilinguístico que ajuda a definir uma identidade. Disponível em http://www.teleportacia.org/swap/

Fig. 20 Print Screen do arquivo de identidades disponíveis ao público ______OBSERVAÇÕES: IDENTITISWAPDATABASE oferece a possibilidade de participar na construção de uma base de dados destinada à criação e partilha de identidades. O projeto tem a pretensão de problematizar um posicionamento que se situa entre a arte, intervenção crítica e a ‘desumanização tecnológica’. Assim sendo, propõe-se a possibilidade de mudar, deformar ou consolidar a identidade todos aqueles que se sentem oprimidos ou limitados pelos dados de identificação. O status do projeto permite simultaneamente criar e adquirir identidades em vários idiomas, banalizando o valor de identificação protagonizado pela cultura da informação e comunicação, a que Bunting chama de ‘dataflage’.

Starrynight, 1999 ______Alexander R. Galloway, Mark Tribe e Martin Wattenberg

Fig. 21 Interface de Starrynight com uma ‘constelação’ motivada pela pesquisa de um tópico. Disponível em http://archive.rhizome.org/starrynight/Starrynight-full.php

Fig. 22 Informação referente a uma ‘estrela’/texto disponibilizada num menu pop-up. Disponível em http://www.marktribe.net/starrynight/ ______OBSERVAÇÕES: Starrynight é uma interface art associada aos arquivos da comunidade artística RHIZOME.ORG. Cada estrela simboliza um texto arquivado na RHIZOME.ORG e o brilho correspondente era determinado pelo número de vezes que era lido. Assim, as estrelas mais brilhantes correspondem aos textos mais lidos, traçando-se desta forma um mapa dos hábitos de leitura na comunidade artística. O participante podia criar estrelas através da partilha de textos, numa perspetiva de colaboração artística global, bem como navegar nesse imenso arquivo de informação. Nesse sentido, ao clicar numa estrela acedia a um menu pop-up que lhe permitia aceder à informação geral do texto, assim como digitar uma palavra-chave que estabelecia de imediato um conjunto de interligações entre textos que partilham essa mesma palavra, criando-se constelações ou mapas de navegação. A integração dos dados gerados pelos utilizadores é visualizado sob uma dimensão mimética do universo, enfatizados por uma esteticidade interativa que deixa vestígios a cada passagem de um visitante/participante.

Karlskrona 2 (K2), 1999 ______Superflex

Fig. 23 Recriação tridimensional da cidade, a comunidade de indivíduos e o relacionamento entre vizinhos e amigos (metaverso).

Fig. 24 Ações de debate público entre habitantes. A internet atua como mediador relacional e o ciberespaço assume-se como um ambiente comunicacional. Disponível em http://superflex.net/tools/karlskrona_2/image/1#g ______OBSERVAÇÕES: O grupo dinamarquês em colaboração com o arquiteto Rune Nielsen desenvolveu no ciberespaço uma recriação tridimensional da cidade de Karlskrona, Suécia. A inserção de projetos artísticos em grupos sociais é uma das principais preocupações dos membros do grupo e enfatizam críticas à realidade social e económica que vigoram, questionando atividades de exploração social, competitividade, monopólio, entre outros. Este projeto tem o mesmo enfoque, proporciona um ambiente virtual (metaverso) que possibilita aos cidadãos de Karlskrona a criação dos seus próprios avatares que interagem com a cidade, transformando-a. O conceito de rede é perspetivado com base no estabelecimento de relações que possibilitam o debate público e contribuem para estruturar o pensamento artístico. Esta ação de intervenção cívica dos seus habitantes manifestou um toque democratizante, devolvendo as habituais hierarquias das cidades aos seus reais cidadãos. O acesso por parte de pessoas que não habitavam na cidade era limitado ao papel de visitantes, impedido de participar a nível decisório. O acesso ao projeto poderia ser feito online e visualizado num painel colocado na praça da cidade.

Toywar, 1999-2000 ______etoy.CORPORATION

Fig. 25 Interface do etoy.CORPORATION. Fig. 26 Interface do jogo Toywar. Disponível em http://www.etoy.com

Fig. 27 Timeline do Toywar. Disponível em http://www.etoy.com/projects/toywar/

______OBSERVAÇÕES: A etoy.CORPORATION é um grupo de artistas de New Media Art que misturam ações na rede e no mundo real com performances ativistas. Possuem uma identidade cooperativa inspirada pelo modelo de muitas empresas de negócios e atuam com uma agressividade caraterística das estratégias de marketing comercial. O projeto Toywar exemplifica essa missiva, surge como reação à denúncia da famosa empresa de brinquedos eToys em acusar a Etoy por violação dos seus direitos sobre a marca, mesmo depois de comprovado o facto de a Etoy ter registado o seu endereço na rede dois anos antes. Toywar foi a contraofensiva preconizada pela Etoy, concretizada através de um jogo online, onde os membros/participantes atacavam os brinquedos da eToys e se organizaram numa comunidade ‘etoy-acionistas’, ativistas da rede, que usaram a internet como um campo de batalha. No período em que decorreu o projeto assinalaram-se 1798 simpatizantes/participantes online que provocaram perdas significativas nas ações da eToys, levando o consórcio a retirar as queixas e a acabar com o litígio.

Communimage, 1999-presente ______Johannes Gees e calc (Looks Brunner, Malex Spiegel, Teresa A. Novo, Omi Scheiderbauer e Silke Sporn)

Fig. 28 Print Screen da interface do projeto Communimage. Disponível em http://www.communimage.ch/cgi-bin/engl/communimage.pl?96,137 ______OBSERVAÇÕES: Communimage é um projeto colaborativo inspirado pelo www.sito.org de Ed Stastny e tem como objetivo empreender um diálogo visual global. O projeto tem tido um crescimento progressivo desde que foi criado em 1999, graças às colaborações dos visitantes, prolongando-se indefinidamente ao longo do tempo, com recurso a uma collage visual justaposta organizada em função dos metadados de cada imagem ou patch. A interface está estruturada num sistema em rede capaz de mapear a posição da imagem (128x128 pixeis) migrada para o projeto e proporcionar a sua visualização no contexto onde foi colocada. Paralelamente oferece aos utilizadores ferramentas de comunicação para estabelecer relações em torno das suas participações no Communimage numa amplitude inimaginável. A 11/03/2014 o projeto reunia um conjunto de 26643 imagens proporcionadas por 2342 participantes de 94 países, acumulando uma área de 16242072 m ².

Riot, 2000 ______Mark Napier

Fig. 29 Print Screen de um detalhe da recombinação de dados de páginas web. Disponível em http://marknapier.com/riot

Fig. 30 Print Screen da interface do projeto Riot. Disponível em http://www.potatoland.org/riot/ ______OBSERVAÇÕES: O projeto Riot representa o processo evolutivo de Mark Napier em expor as fragilidades dos territórios virtuais (desafiando as convenções de propriedade, domínios, direito à marca e página pessoal). Shredder 1.0 de 1998 e Feed em 2000 antecedem os intentos do artista em combinar a informação contida em sites, recombinando-a de modo a alcançar padrões visuais. Wolf Lieser enquadra estas ações numa subcategoria designada por Browser Art pela natureza das intervenções de Napier (re)apresentarem as páginas web com um sentido estético. A aplicação de Napier que permite ao utilizador introduzir o endereço de uma página e proceder à combinação aleatória de texto, formas e imagens per si (base de representação dos projetos Shredder 1.0 e Feed) é claramente excedida em Riot: para além da sua natureza de recombinação de dados, o software permite a fusão entre páginas e domínios desafiando limites ideológicos que ultrapassam a mera marcação territorial (e.g. misturando a página do Vatican.org com a Hell.com). Em termos colaborativos, Riot acrescenta no plano interativo a possibilidade do participante misturar dados provenientes de domínios diferentes e operar nos links (entretanto recombinados) de modo a adicionar a introdução de novas nuances estéticas.

CarnivorePE, 2001 ______RSG (Radical Software Group)

Fig. 31 Print Screen da interface do projeto CarnivorePE. Apresentado como software livre pronto a ser utilizado por qualquer artista. Disponível em http://r-s-g.org/carnivore/

Fig. 32 Projetos subsidiários de ‘CarnivorePE’: ‘Amalgamatmosphere’ (2001) de Joshua Davis, Braden Hall e Shapeshifter, in http://ps3.praystation.com/pound/assets/2001/11-20- 2001/index.html; ‘Guernica’ (2001) do coletivo Entropy8Zuper!, Disponível em http://entropy8zuper.org/guernica/ ______OBSERVAÇÕES: Numa época de controlo cada vez mais orwelliana dos espaços online, o projeto ‘CarnivorePE’ surge como uma abordagem crítica ao software Carnivore utilizado pelo FBI na década de 90 para executar a vigilância do tráfego de dados pessoais na Internet. Funciona como uma plataforma ou ferramenta open source para artistas, usando os dados colhidos como matéria-prima para desenvolvimento de interfaces artísticas. Utilizando o Processing, qualquer artista pode animar, diagnosticar ou interpretar o tráfego de dados da forma que entende. Nesse sentido, os artistas são assumidamente clientes que enfatizam as implicações políticas da vigilância na rede, criando interfaces artísticas como a ‘Guernica’ (2001), do coletivo Entropy8Zuper!, mostrando fragmentos de mensagens de correio eletrónico a orbitar um globo estéril ou a ‘Amalgamatmosphere’ (2001) de Joshua Davis, Braden Hall e Shapeshifter, cuja interface representa os utilizadores ativos na rede com círculos coloridos e translúcidos, associando cada cor a atividades específicas.

Glyphiti, 2001-presente ______Andy Deck

Fig. 33 Interface do projeto Glyphiti. Disponível em http://artcontext.net/act/06/glyphiti/docs/index.php

Fig. 34 Composição colaborativa referente ao mês de setembro de 2003. Disponível em http://artcontext.net/act/01/glyphiti/anim/ ______OBSERVAÇÕES: O projeto Glyphiti baseia-se nos signos gráficos dos egípcios e maias conhecido por glifos (glyphs), assim como nas influências do trabalho do artista digital Ken Knowlton. Glyphiti perspetiva-se como uma imagem composta por outras mais pequenas designadas por glifos. O participante é encorajado a criar uma imagem e contribuir para uma composição colaborativa em constante fluxo; pode igualmente apropriar-se, alterar e intervir noutros glifos. A interface tem um aspeto grosseiro e recria a estrutura de intervenção pixel-by-pixel num suporte quadrado (uma ínfima parte da composição final que se pretende alcançar com as várias intervenções), numa base cromática a preto e branco. Mensalmente a imagem é congelada e é dada a conhecer de acordo com o fluxo das intervenções realizadas em time-lapse. Andy Deck afirma-se como promotor do open-sourcing e o seu trabalho na rede oscila entre o ativismo político e criação colaborativa, pelo que estimula que os visitantes a se apropriem do seu próprio código e o remisturem, assim como o incentivo à destruição do paradigma autoral da obra.

OPUS(Open Platform for Unlimited Signification), 2002 ______Raqs Media Collective (Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula e Shuddhabrata Sengupta)

Fig. 35 Print Screen da interface do projeto OPUS. Disponível em http://www.raqsmediacollective.net/works.aspx#

Fig. 36 Interface para a colaboração no projeto. ______OBSERVAÇÕES: O Raqs Media Collective é um grupo sediado na Índia no foco de desenvolvimento da alta tecnologia, que se autocaracteriza pela pluralidade de papéis que assume, podendo ser simultaneamente artista, curador, filosoficamente provocador, etc. . O projeto OPUS é representativo dessa multiplicidade estabelecendo-se como uma plataforma open source e colaborativa que encoraja os participantes a carregar os seus ficheiros, assim como a apropriarem- se de ficheiros do sistema, de modo a produzirem aquilo que Raqs Media Collective chama de Rescensions, consolidados pela remistura, ajuste e alteração dos códigos e restituindo novos trabalhos à OPUS. O projeto coloca a ênfase na cultura de código aberto disponibilizado livremente, assente na trilogia apropriação, colaboração e partilha, constituindo-se como matéria- prima e produto artístico. O projeto foi lançado na Documenta 11 e no ano subsequente fez parte do núcleo How Latitudes Become Forms no Walker Art Center Minneapolis.

Nine (9), 2003 ______Mongrel (Graham Harwood)

Fig. 37 Detalhe da interface do projeto Nine (9). Disponível em http://www.mongrel.org.uk/nine

______OBSERVAÇÕES: Nine (9) reveste-se dos ingredientes fundamentais para se assumir como um projeto de software colaborativo organizado de modo a proporcionar a nove grupos ou participantes a partilha de imagens, texto e som, bem como a possibilidade de explorar a estrutura social das suas comunidades por intermédio de ‘mapas de conhecimento’. O participante efetua a escolha das suas próprias imagens, vídeos, texto e sons para criar um produto multimédia simples num determinado contexto social traduzindo um ‘mapa de conhecimento’ que pode ser ligado a um segundo mapa feito por outros participantes. Nine (9) evoluiu do projeto Linker (1998) e utiliza uma grade constituída por 9 imagens para permitir aos participantes ou comunidades a definição de ligações entre a informação e arquivos de outros participantes. A partir deste esquema inicial, outros se sucedem criando uma rede intrincada de narrativas em torno de fotografias de pessoas, memórias, paixões e política, expressão das relações sociais padronizadas. Nesse sentido, o projeto possibilita alojar um total de 729 ‘mapas de conhecimento’ coletivos (9x9x9), isto é, nove grupos, em que cada um contêm cada nove arquivos com nove mapas por arquivo.

Googlehouse, 2003 ______Marika Dermineur e Stéphane Degoutin

Fig. 38 Print screen do Interface. Disponível em http://incident.net/works/googlehouse/presentation.html

Fig. 39 Detalhe do projeto. Disponível em http://incident.net/works/googlehouse/presentation.html ______OBSERVAÇÕES: ‘Googlehouse’ é um dispositivo que, em tempo real, constrói simbolicamente uma casa (ou o espaço doméstico) a partir de fotografias de ‘salas de estar’ ou ‘sala de TV’ encontradas na internet com recurso ao mecanismo de pesquisa oferecido pela Google. A disposição das imagens, como se de paredes se tratassem, evoca o espírito labiríntico dos sistemas de pesquisa e questiona o algoritmo de hierarquização dos motores de pesquisa na disponibilização da informação. A anotação de reconstituição infinita da casa sugestiona os modelos de produção dos utilizadores na internet. A apropriação de fotografias enfatiza a participação não consentida de milhares de participantes no projeto sem que para isso tivessem intenção prévia. No entanto, a obra não é construída de acordo com um modelo preestabelecido, o algoritmo evolui imprevisivelmente e dá lugar a processos aleatórios de construção, sobrepondo andares sobre andares. A interface foi igualmente pensada de modo a permitir que a audiência inicie a sua própria pesquisa (digitando os seus termos), ou ainda, navegar pela ‘casa’ e pelo espaço privado de outrem.

Sky Ear, 2004 ______Usman Haque

Fig. 40 Evento realizado em Fribourg, na Suiça. Disponível em https://www.haque.co.uk/skyear/images-040704.html

Fig. 41 Evento realizado no Greenwich Park, em Londres. Disponível em https://www.haque.co.uk/skyear/images-040915.html ______OBSERVAÇÕES: O projeto ‘Sky Ear’ tomou a forma de um evento de uma noite com uma etiqueta estética alicerçada na conetividade e na exploração de um território imperceptível de ondas eletromagnéticas no espaço público. O evento teve duas edições: a primeira em Fribourg, na Suiça, e a segunda, no Greenwich Park, em Londres. É constituído por uma nuvem de balões de hélio equipados com sensores que detetam diferentes tipos de radiação eletromagnética e seis LEDs capazes de gerar um vasto espetro de cores, suspensos a uma altitude entre 60 a 100 metros, reagem aos distúrbios do ambiente eletromagnético e alteram a cor cintilando em conformidade com fatores de perturbação, tais como: as condições atmosféricas e a utilização dos telemóveis. A audiência no solo interagia, em tempo real, com a nuvem, ao telefonar para os vários telemóveis que se encontravam fixos na estrutura, mudando a cor dos balões e gerando uma sinfonia de toques que se propagava em direção aos participantes.

Agonistics: A Language Game, 2004 ______Warren Sack

Fig. 42 Disposição dos ‘jogadores’ na discussão. A força centrípeta é definida com base no sucesso da argumentação, encaminhando o participante para a posição central do círculo. Disponível em http://www.mediaartnet.org/works/agonistics/images/1/

Fig. 43 Print Screen do interface: gestão e disposição dos participantes na discussão. Disponível em http://classic.rhizome.org/artbase/artwork/32034/ ______OBSERVAÇÕES: Este projeto está selado com um sólido conjunto de referências de primeira linha: o livro ‘Metaphors We Live By’, de George Lakoff e Mark Johnson, onde a linguagem é equiparada a uma discussão belicista, a relação entre os argumentos para defender uma ideia e os contra- argumentos perfila avanços e recuos, alianças e cisões, táticas e estratégias, vencedores e vencidos, etc.; a assunção da discussão democrática como uma competição ou uma atividade ‘agonística’, teorizada por Chantal Mouffe e Ernesto Laclau; bem como uma atenção especial aos escritos de teóricos políticos onde se incluem Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze e Bruno Latour. Assim sendo, o projeto assume estas ideias sob a forma de um jogo aplicado aos fóruns de discussão online ou à mailing list da Rhizome. A participação dos jogadores depende do conteúdo e do encadeamento das mensagens inscritas que definem a sua posição num círculo. O sistema traduz as mensagens dos participantes numa representação gráfica.

Yellow Arrow, 2004-2006 ______Counts Media (Michael Counts, Christopher Allen, Brian House e Jesse Shapins)

Fig. 44 Mensagem associada ao sticker: “TXT: It looks like the city has grown on top of the industry towards the skies. Is this a symbol of deindustrialization despite it beeing 100 years old?”Disponível em https://www.flickr.com/photos/yellowarrow/2397007104/in/photostream/

Fig. 45 Registo cartográfico do projeto no Google Maps. Disponível em http://thinkingwhatwearedoing.blogspot.pt/2010/12/check-out-yellowarrow.html ______OBSERVAÇÕES: O “Yellow Arrow” é um projeto de arte pública que visa a utilização do mundo cibernético para partilhar opiniões, informações e lugares, interligando o mundo físico com o digital, superando a leitura de qualquer mapa convencional e possibilitando aos participantes contribuir coletivamente para os lugares onde vivem. Os participantes ‘plantam’ no espaço público setas amarelas autocolantes (stickers) portadoras de um código único e ao qual associam uma mensagem que pode ser acedida por qualquer transeunte que, ao digitar esse código com recurso a um smartphone, recebe uma mensagem com a informação deixada pelo autor que assinalou aquela localização. Os stickers são adquiridos por 50 cents diretamente na página Yellowarrow.net e apresentam uma disseminação geográfica com cerca de 7535 setas amarelas colocadas em 467 cidades, pertencentes a 35 países. O projeto baseia-se em reminiscências do movimento internacional situacionista fazendo a apologia da relação social entre pessoas, mediada por imagens, fruto de uma práxis social em imagens e mensagens de natureza poética e/ou lúdica. Poderíamos elencar outros projetos com caraterísticas semelhantes, tais como “Urban Tapestries”, “Wikimapia” ou “PDPal”.

Biomapping, 2004-presente ______Christian Nold

Fig. 46 Print screen da visualização dos dados dos participantes no Google Earth no “Brentford Biopsy Map”, desenvolvido em 2008.

Fig. 47 Detalhe do mapa emocional de San Francisco, desenvolvido durante 5 semanas, com 98 participantes. Disponível em http://www.sf.biomapping.net/download.htm ______OBSERVAÇÕES: Christian Nold desenvolveu uma ferramenta para visualizar as reações das pessoas com o mundo exterior: biomapping. Nesse sentido, o artista faz mapeamentos a partir do registo de emoções através da leitura de respostas cutâneas dos participantes – GSR (Galvanic Skin Response) -, definidas quando o corpo recebe descargas de eletricidade devido à emoção. A intensidade de cada emoção cria cores diferenciadas que preenchem um mapa de modo a evidenciar as zonas de maior excitação emocional em conjunto com a sua localização geográfica. O projeto surge como reação crítica à difusão tecnológica e a sua intromissão em todos os lugares do quotidiano do ser humano. Tal como o grupo RAQS MEDIA COLLECTIVE refere, a identidade do ser humano esbate-se no contacto com a tecnologia contribuindo para o reconhecimento através das expressões, transversais a questões de género, raça ou outra característica peculiar. Os participantes equipados com um dispositivo biométrico e de localização GPS registam um ‘percurso emocional’ que pode ser visualizado no Google Earth. Abordagens similares a este projeto, com fluxos de ações e os mapas mentais individuais geolocalizados por GPS, têm motivado projetos como “Amsterdam Realtime” (2002), “Milk Project” (2004), “Drift”(2004) , Cabspotting (2005) e “You are not here” (2006).

We Feel Fine, 2005-2007 ______Jonathan Harris & Sep Kamvar

Fig. 48 Print Screen do acesso ao interface do projeto ‘We Feel Fine’. No lado direito está a apresentação de dados, tendo por base a idade dos participantes. Disponível em http://wefeelfine.org/mission.html

Fig. 49 Print Screen das emoções representadas com base na disposição cromática, onde cada partícula representa uma emoção publicada por um indivíduo. As propriedades das partículas (cor, tamanho, forma e opacidade) indicam a natureza do sentimento e, ao clicar sobre uma partícula, acede-se à informação. ______OBSERVAÇÕES: ‘We Feel Fine’ é uma obra de arte que utiliza o ato de blogging para perscrutar os sentimentos humanos. Recolhe, desde 2005, os sentimentos que são expressos publicamente nos blogs, reunindo todas as frases iniciadas em “I feel” e “I am feeling”. Os dados coligidos são tratados estatisticamente ilustrando o fluxo dos sentimentos expressos em termos demográficos: propondo ao espetador uma topografia navegável de dados sociais associados a cidades, países, género, idade, data, tipo de sentimento ou clima. A pesquisa dos resultados é feita por intermédio de diferentes interfaces de visualização de dados de acordo com as categorizações definidas e tipologia de emoções humanas (Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics e Mounds). Os dados crescem diariamente de uma forma vertiginosa e, ao serem aglomerados com registos muito específicos, oferecem resposta padronizadas que traduzem um zeitgeist de uma época ou mesmo de um momento.

Swarm Sketch, 2005-presente ______Peter Edmunds

Fig. 50 Interface do projeto. Disponível em http://swarmsketch.com/

Fig. 51 Navegação pelos trabalhos em exibição. Disponível em http://swarmsketch.com/browse/84 ______OBSERVAÇÕES: Este projeto explora as possibilidades de desenho distribuído pelas massas. A cada semana, o projeto seleciona aleatoriamente um dos termos pesquisados mais populares e define-o com tema e pretexto para um trabalho colaborativo. Os visitantes do projeto podem adicionar linhas (uma única linha por cada visitante do site) e votar ou moderar as contribuições de outros utilizadores. O tema é o elemento catalisador das diversas contribuições, fazendo com que as imagens sejam obrigatoriamente desenhadas em grupo e nos termos considerados pelos elementos desse grupo a cada semana (ou a cada 1000 linhas/contribuições). ‘Swarm Sketch’ representa a consciência coletiva dos participantes online. Para além da considerável dispersão geográfica dos participantes iniciais, a longevidade do projeto (que já acumula 2 347 901 aontribuições) e os níveis de participação denunciam um trajeto de popularidade decrescente. A plataforma disponibiliza uma interface hibrida que permite experienciar a obra ao mesmo tempo que se participa.

The Sheep Market, 2006 ______Aaron Koblin

Fig. 52 Projeto The Sheep Market, painel final constituído por um “rebanho” de10000 ovelhas. Disponível em http://www.aaronkoblin.com/work/thesheepmarket/index.html

Fig. 53 Pormenor do projeto The Sheep Market

Fig. X Ferramenta desenvolvida em processing para desenhar e gravar a criação de ovelhas.

Fig. 54 Print Screen da plataforma para a venda de fragmentos com 20 ovelhas.

______OBSERVAÇÕES: Este projeto utiliza o sistema Mechanical Turk da Amazon.com para envolver milhares de participantes na criação de uma enorme base de dados de desenhos de ovelhas. Mechanical Turk é uma plataforma crowdsourcing destinada ao uso corporativo que permite a empresas disponibilizar tarefas simples online para serem realizadas por trabalhadores, e estes serem ressarcidos pelo serviço prestado. Neste contexto, Koblin disponibilizou uma ferramenta de desenho e solicitava a participação criativa de público anónimo e aleatório a partir de uma única regra: “desenha uma ovelha virada para a esquerda”. Cada participação foi compensada com 2 cêntimos ($USD), permitindo ao artista reunir um “rebanho” com 10000 ovelhas que mais tarde comercializou a 20 dólares cada conjunto de 20 ovelhas (os valores alcançados reverteram para campanhas de solidariedade). Este mercado de ovelhas teve a pretensão de evidenciar a importância do trabalhador num sistema e o seu desempenho como parte de um todo.

Wish, 2006 ______Boredomresearch (Vicky Isley e Paul Smith)

Fig. 55 Interface de Wish (Edition nº1). Disponível em http://www.boredomresearch.net/wish.html

______OBSERVAÇÕES: Boredomresearch é uma dupla de artistas britânicos (Vicky Isley e Paul Smith) cujas obras são inspiradas na diversidade que existe na natureza e nas metáforas a ela associadas. O projeto Wish é baseado na tradição oriental e inspirado nas ‘Árvores de Desejos’ de Lam Tsuen, em Hong Kong e no caráter poético de pendurar desejos sob a forma de mensagens escritas nas árvores. O intento do grupo é envolver comunidades online através de experiências colaborativas e, para tal, recriaram uma ‘árvore dos desejos’ digital onde é permitido ao participante pendurar um desejo num dos ramos. Depois de ter criado o seu desejo, o visitante poderá assistir à sua fixação no ramo junto de outros; caso não seja bem-sucedido, os ‘desejos’ em falta caem, espalhando as personagens individuais com o pó. A acumulação de participações/desejos estimulou o crescimento da árvore, traduzindo-se num complexo emaranhado composto por inúmeros sonhos e mensagens dos colaboradores. Boredomresearch desenvolveu um software generativo interativo que recria a aparência decrépita das árvores de fruto características das pinturas japonesas do período de 1600-1868.

The Dumpster, 2006 ______Golan Levin, Kamal Nigam e Jonathan Feinberg

Fig. 56 Interface de visualização interativa do projeto . Disponível em http://artport.whitney.org/commissions/thedumpster/

Fig. 57 Detalhe do padrão de um grupo de relações românticas fracassadas similares. Disponível em http://www.flong.com/projects/dumpster/ ______OBSERVAÇÕES: Desenvolvido para o Dia de São Valentim, o projeto é uma visualização online interativa do comportamento romântico de adolescentes em grande escala, criando um mapa dinâmico e navegável de relações fracassadas. Usa publicações reais extraídas de milhares blogs em 2015, possibilitando aos visitantes a interação com dezenas de milhares de relações específicas em que uma pessoa se separou de outra. ‘The Dumpster’ representa uma coleção de 20 000 relações românticas que acabaram em separação e que foram registadas em blogs, cujas entradas continham as palavras “broke up” ou “dumped me”. As frases foram colhidas, colecionadas e depois filtradas com base na sua coesão e precisão. O grafismo do projeto revela algumas similaridades e diferenças que destacam padrões do sentimento de dor nessas relações, providenciando ao visitante uma perspetiva íntima ou global. Na interface cada relação é representada por uma pequena bolha e o conjunto de bolhas estão agrupados por cores de acordo com similaridades nas narrativas das relações fracassadas, permitindo ao espetador consultar uma relação específica e, ao mesmo tempo, observar o seu contexto num grupo maior.

On Translation: Social Networks, 2006 ______Antoni Muntadas

Fig. 58 Print Screen do website da apresentação do projeto. Disponível em https://www.datadreamer.com/item/otsn

Fig. 59 Detalhe do catálogo da instalação do projeto apresentada na exposição “Entre/Between” no museu Reina Sophia. Disponível em https://issuu.com/actar/docs/muntadas/14 ______OBSERVAÇÕES: ‘On Translation’ é uma espécie de incubadora de projetos focalizados em questões específicas que refletem o interesse do artista na forma como rotula e filtra o envolvimento, partilha e trocas da audiência com artefactos culturais. A tradução arroga-se a dar visibilidade ou revelar as ideologias subjacentes aos processos comunicativos que estavam devotados à invisibilidade, sejam eles estéticos, políticos, económicos, emocionais, tecnológicos ou linguísticos. São exemplo disso a sequela de projetos: ‘On Translation: The Pavilion’ (1995); ‘On Translation: The Games’ (1996); ‘On Translation: The Internet Project’ (1997); ‘On Translation: The Bank’ (1998); ‘On Translation: The Audience’ (1999);(…) ‘On Translation: FIFA’ (2014); ‘On Translation: Celebracions’ (2009); ‘On Translation: Himnes’ (2016). ‘On Translation: Social Networks’ explora um tipo diferente de interpretação centrada na pesquisa de dados sociais e na forma como as organizações (Wired, Appel, Rhizome, US Federal Reserve, entre outras) selecionam o vocabulário que utilizam nos seus sites. A análise e classificação desse vocabulário são colocados num mapa mundial; tendo por base o nível de influência tecnológico, cultural, militar ou económico de cada organização, a diferenciação desses aspetos é assinalada com cores distintas (vermelho, azul, verde e branco respetivamente) para melhor clareza da sua leitura. As cores projetadas sob o mapa mundial ilustram a dispersão e a tendência da linguagem utilizada pelas organizações nos seus websites.

myfrienemies, 2007 ______Angie Waller

Fig. 60 Interface da rede social myfrienemies. Disponível em http://angiewaller.com/myfrienemies/

Fig. 61 A interface do site desdobra-se em mensagens explicitas que alimentam uma cultura de inimizades. Disponível em http://angiewaller.com/myfrienemies/ ______OBSERVAÇÕES: O questionamento e a subversão do ambiente amigável das redes sociais é o principal corolário do projeto ‘myfrienemies’. O site da rede social maliciosa inverte o ambiente amigável ao convidar as pessoas para estabelecerem conexões ou cultivar novas ‘amizades’ baseadas na partilha perniciosa de comentários e dislikes. Nesse sentido, era encorajada uma atmosfera de partilha de sentimentos sob as premissas de antipatia, deceções, aversão, hostilidade e agressão que se poderia ter para com uma determinada pessoa, alterando o paradigma de Sociedade Positiva que habitualmente prolifera nas redes sociais. O projeto possibilita que os participantes se escondam no anonimato para estimular depoimentos cáusticos e detalhados sobre pessoas famosas e, consequentemente, permite que outros visitantes adivinhem de quem se trata com base nas pistas descritas. As pseudo amizades ou as conexões entre membros fortalecem-se pelos laços de antipatia que têm pela mesma pessoa. ‘myfrienemies’ contraria ou nega o espírito de comunidade aberta ao restringir o senso de união para padrões que se assemelham ao funcionamento de uma ‘sociedade secreta’.

Le registre/ The Register - Flußgeist 2, 2007 ______Grégory Chatonsky & Claude Le Berre

Fig. 62 Instalação para a apresentação do projeto. Os livros foram impressos na editora online. Disponível em http://chatonsky.net/register/

Fig. 63 Interface da editora online DIY (faça você mesmo) lulu.com para a qual eram remetidos automaticamente os livros com 500 páginas para impressão, quando solicitado. Disponível em https://www.lulu.com/ ______OBSERVAÇÕES: O projeto consiste numa aplicação que extrai e reúne sentimentos encontrados em blogs e Chats, a partir da pesquisa de um conjunto de termos predefinidos relacionados com a expressão pública de sentimentos. Os procedimentos enquadram-se numa metodologia de recolha e arquivamento do fluxo de dados derivados da comunicação entre utilizadores na forma de um livro. O banco de dados gera automaticamente, a cada hora, um livro com 500 páginas que é enviado para a editora online DIY (faça você mesmo) lulu.com, para que os utilizadores, se assim o entenderem, solicitem a impressão do livro. Diariamente, o sistema reúne os 24 livros criados numa biblioteca que ambiciona ser infinita. ‘Le registre/ The Register - Flußgeist 2’ desenvolve uma forma de tradução, mistura e reinterpretação do incessante fluxo de informações que ocorre na internet; no entanto, este processo faz uma clivagem da abstração de dados provenientes de milhões de utilizadores, extraindo a natureza sentimental dos participantes involuntários, dando-lhe uma coerência padronizada representativa da globalidade da internet.

Googlegrama 49:White on White, 2007 ______Joan Fontcuberta

Fig. 64 ‘Googlegrama 49:White on White’. Disponível em https://www.fontcuberta.com/

______OBSERVAÇÕES: Fontcuberta baseou-se num dos símbolos do distanciamento de Malevich em relação ao mundo visível e à redução da linguagem expressa na obra ‘White on White’ (1917). Para o efeito, destacou as práticas de apropriação, catalogação e arquivismo para comprovar que a aura do original não é destituída pelo ‘rapto’ de imagens; ao invés disso, a associação de imagens encontradas na internet define padrões que atribuem novos significados à obra, sem destituir o sentido individual de cada imagem. O motor de pesquisa Google foi utilizado na pesquisa de sinónimos de ‘vazio’, ‘nada’ e ‘zero’ em inglês para perscrutar qual é a perceção que a comunidade online tem do sentido de redução mínima de Malevich. Este projeto enquadra-se numa série de Googlegramas que se baseia na reciclagem de imagens e (re)apresentação como Photomosaic que persegue uma lógica de ‘ecologia’ de imagens encetada pelo autor. A singularidade no meio da diversidade de informação é apagada pela produtividade quasi infinita de milhares de utilizadores em rede.

Noplace, 2007-2008 ______Marek Walczak & Martin Wattenberg (MW2MW)

Fig. 65 Frame de um vídeo Noplace. Fig. 66 Instalação física do projeto Noplace. Disponível em http://www2.tate.org.uk/intermedia art/ noplace.shtm

Fig. 67 Interface de interação com o projeto. ______OBSERVAÇÕES: Noplace é um sitio na internet que proporciona uma colaboração endémica em torno dos conceitos de paraíso e utopia. Uma das anotações maiores do advento da internet deve-se ao facto dos cibernautas estarem a deixar quantias incomensuráveis de informação como indícios temporais da nossa memória coletiva que estão disponíveis para serem apropriados, modificados e reformulados. Nesse sentido, o projeto reutiliza essa informação, registada como Creative Commons License, para a criação de novas obras. Os participantes são convidados a fazer o upload de fotografias do Flickr, agrupá-las segundo uma palavra-chave ou tag que simbolize um desejo ou uma ambição futura, e o site recria um filme, associando-lhe som igualmente disponível na rede, que podia ser visto numa instalação física interativa no Tate Modern sob várias telas de projeção ou online. No plano interativo é possível escolher uma palavra inicial e uma final, sendo que o projeto tem a capacidade de associar um conjunto de palavras para preencher o que Deleuze chama de intermezzo e, considerando que cada palavra tem um conjunto de imagens e sons associados, o site produz um filme que pode ser descarregado pelo participante.

Reenactments/ Synthetic Performances, 2007-2010 ______0100101110101101.ORG (Eva e Franco Mattes)

Fig. 68 Print Screen da recriação da performance Imponderabilia de Marina Abramovich e Ulay. Disponível em http://0100101110101101.org/works/

Fig. 69 Print Screen da recriação da performance Touch Cinema de VALIE EXPORT e Peter Weibel.

Fig. 70 Print Screen da recriação da performance Shoot de Chris Burden. ______OBSERVAÇÕES: Reenactments consistiu na reposição de performances consagradas na esfera artística no metaverso Second Life (SL). A dupla italiana (Eva e Franco Mattes), conhecida por 0100101110101101.ORG, com o auxílio de participantes corporizados em avatares recriam múltiplas performances de Chris Burden, VALIE EXPORT, Joseph Beuys, Marina Abramovic, Vito Acconci e Gilbert&George. Este revivalismo tem a pretensão de analisar a reação de um público virtual num ambiente virtual. As (re)interpretações digitais de performances famosas estimularam a feitura de um conjunto de performances ousadas no SL, sob o título"Synthetic Performances", em 2009/10, claramente provocadoras da dinâmica social e das vivências em comunidade. A dispersão geográfica dos participantes é impressionante, assim como o é a diversidade de avatares presentes nestes eventos.

Ten Thousand Cents, 2008 ______Aaron Koblin & Takashi Kawashima

Fig. 71 Print Screen do website do projeto. Nota de 100 dólares desenhada por 10 000 artistas anónimos. Disponível em http://www.tenthousandcents.com/index.html

Fig. 72 Detalhes das contribuições dos participantes. À esquerda a visualização do processo construtivo de fragmentos e à direita a constituição da obra com as partes submetidas. Disponível em http://www.tenthousandcents.com/top.html

______OBSERVAÇÕES: ‘Ten Thousand Cents’ é uma obra de arte que recria a representação de uma nota de 100 dólares. Para tal, os artistas desenvolveram uma ferramenta de desenho para que milhares de participantes pudessem reproduzir uma parte da nota a partir de um fragmento, desconhecendo o contexto geral do projeto. Cada trabalhador recebeu 1 cêntimo pela sua contribuição, através de uma das maiores plataformas de mercado de trabalho digital: o Mechanical Turk da Amazon. O Mechanical Turk foi utilizado para aquilo que foi concebido: fazer dinheiro. A nota de 100 dólares foi dividida em 10 000 partes e, sem qualquer critério, pediram aos participantes que desenhassem o fragmento que lhes era disponibilizado. Os resultados foram diversos: houve pessoas que mimetizaram realisticamente o que lhes foi pedido e houve outras que simplesmente desenharam rabiscos. Todas as contribuições foram inseridas na nota. Posteriormente, reuniram todas as partes que constituem a nota de 100 dólares e colocaram-nas no website TenThousandsCents.com, onde se pode ver todas as contribuições individuais. Os visitantes podiam igualmente trocar notas verdadeiras de 100 dólares por notas de 100 dólares falsas e o dinheiro angariado era doado ao projeto Hundred Dollar Laptop, que é atualmente conhecido por One Laptop Per Child. O projeto envolveu participantes de 51 países diferentes e foram gastos 10 000 cêntimos (100 dólares) pelo trabalho total produzido num período de realização de aproximadamente 4 meses.

Star Wars Uncut, 2009 ______Casey Pugh

Fig. 73 Print Screen do site do projeto (à esquerda) e da interface interativa para a visualização do remake da longa-metragem. Disponível em http://www.starwarsuncut.com/

Fig. 74 Print Screen de alguns dos clips de vídeo realizados pelos fãs.

______OBSERVAÇÕES: ‘Star Wars Uncut’ é um remake elaborado por fãs da saga Star Wars. Casey Pugh dividiu o filme em cenas de 15 segundos e pediu aos fãs para recriar cada uma dessas cenas. Estabeleceu um prazo de 30 dias para a execução dessa tarefa e deu liberdade para que utilizassem o vocabulário que entendessem: desde o Stop-motion, live action, animação 3D, flipbboks ou ASCII. O projeto arrebatou participantes de cerca de 300 países diferentes e o estilo diversificado/desconcertante da linguagem, oscilando entre sequências deliberadamente grosseiras e humorísticas (própria do amadorismo dos participantes), foram disponibilizadas no YouTube. Depois de terminado o processo colaborativo, Pugh e sua equipa selecionaram, compilaram todo o material enviado, organizaram-no, reeditaram a longa-metragem e colocaram-na online. Pugh manteve o áudio original do filme em todos os clips de vídeo recebidos para assegurar a coesão interna do remake e no design do site permitiu que o espetador escolhesse os clips de vídeo que quer ver para cada cena, uma vez que os participantes realizaram várias versões para esse efeito. O projeto foi galardoado com o Emmy de 2010 pela Outstanding Creative Achievement, na categoria Interactive Media-Fiction.

Wikipedia Art, 2009 ______Scott Kildall & Nathaniel Stern

Fig. 75 Print Screen do lançamento da ‘Wikipedia Art’, integrada na plataforma Wikipédia (2001).

Fig. 76 Print Screen da eliminação da obra de arte por não cumprir as condições de alojamento pela Wikipédia. Disponível em https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Wikipedia_Art ______OBSERVAÇÕES: A ‘Wikipedia Art’ é assumidamente uma obra de arte em si mesma, com uma estrutura conceptual que se apropria da essência colaborativa da Wikipédia. A obra assume a forma convencional da submissão de uma qualquer entrada enciclopédica na Wikipédia – com ‘história’, ‘conteúdo’, ‘referências’, etc. – em associação com a sua propensão bem conhecida de produção colaborativa de conhecimento e da sua popularidade como a plataforma mais consultada na internet. Nos dias anteriores ao seu lançamento os artistas solicitaram a legitimação da obra a críticos e especialistas de modo a cumprir as condições de verificação e fiabilidade das fontes. Todavia, quinze horas depois do seu lançamento a obra foi censurada e removida sob grande controvérsia por marginalizar as normas de edição da Wikipédia. Ironicamente, a eliminação do projeto ‘Wikipedia Art’ foi efetuada pelos participantes da Wikipédia que cumulativamente colaboraram como editores, gerando um sistema autorregulável.

Highrise/Out My Window, 2009-2010 ______Katerina Cizek & NFB (National Film Board – Canadá)

Fig. 77 Pormenor do interface de navegação do projeto. Disponível em http://outmywindow.nfb.ca/#/outmywindow

Fig. 78 Pormenor de alguns dos participantes no projeto e respetiva dispersão geográfica. ______OBSERVAÇÕES: O projeto Highrise surge com o intuito de relançar a linguagem do documentário; para tal, assume-se como uma incubadora de outros projetos que ambicionam novas abordagens a partir da cultura digital. Out My Windows é o primeiro documentário interativo, com um espaço de navegação de 360º, desenvolvido neste contexto integrando uma linguagem em evolução, mais democrática e acessível com a participação direta das comunidades visadas. A temática preocupa- se com a periferia urbana das cidades, o estado de degradação e abandono de arranha-céus, bem como as experiências vivenciais das comunidades que os habitam. Assim sendo, todo a ‘matéria prima’ do documentário é assegurada ‘na primeira pessoa’, pela comunidade local, enviada para a equipa de Katerina Cizek, que se limita a efetuar pequenos ajustes e disponibilizá-lo online. Os aspetos documentais da obra reúnem 49 histórias inscritas em 13 cidades, dispersas geograficamente, relatadas em 13 idiomas diferentes.

Cadavre Exquis - Stainboy, 2010 ______Tim Burton

Fig. 79 Print Screen do Twitter de Tim Burton com a primeira frase da história para gerar brainstorming: “Stainboy, using his obvious expertise, was called in to investigate mysterious glowing goo on the gallery floor”. Disponível em https://twitter.com/BurtonStory/status/5694394896220160

Fig. 80 Print Screen da página oficial do projeto, onde a última frase era apresentada, compilados os tweets selecionados e a história foi organizada. Disponível em http://burtonstory.com/ ______OBSERVAÇÕES: Na sequência da famigerada exposição de Tim Burton no MoMA e na preparação de uma mostra para o Festival Internacional de Cinema de Toronto (TIFF), Burton iniciou o projeto colaborativo ‘Cadavre Exquis’ através do Twitter, com recurso ao mecanismo criativo surrealista com o mesmo nome. Para o efeito, retoma uma das suas personagens prediletas ‘Stainboy’ que apareceu em trabalhos anteriores como The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy & Other Stories (1997) e The World of Stainboy (2000). Utilizando a simplicidade das regras do Twitter, os participantes, ao longo de duas semanas (22 de novembro a 6 de dezembro de 2010), poderiam realizar os tweets que quisessem na continuidade da narrativa que se encaixasse na última entrada na história com o hastag #BurtonStory; contudo, somente os melhores tweets do dia eram escolhidos e as submissões inapropriadas eram bloqueadas. A primeira linha da história foi publicada pelo próprio Tim Burton e contou com as massas criativas para criar um conto para a sua personagem. A afluência massiva de tweets desencadeou um status viral tendo-se registado 13143 contribuições, de 163 países diferentes, dos quais 89 tweets foram incorporados na narrativa.

Unnumbered Sparks, 2010 ______Aaron Koblin & Janet Echelman

Fig. 81 Print Screen do site referente à planificação e ‘bastidores’ da construção do projeto ‘Unnumbered Sparks’. Disponível em http://www.unnumberedsparks.com/

Fig. 82 Frames do trailer oficial da apresentação do projeto ‘Unnumbered Sparks’. Interação do público com a instalação multimédia colaborativa. Disponível em https://youtu.be/npjTmG- TBHQ

______OBSERVAÇÕES: No âmbito das comemorações para 30º aniversário da Conferência TED, na baixa de Vancouver, no Canadá, Aaron Koblin, em colaboração com Janet Echelman, desenvolveu uma monumental instalação interativa no espaço público. Os visitantes, com os smartphones, coreografavam em tempo real projeções visuais numa escultura feita de cordas. A interação com a escultura dinâmica era realizada através de uma interface, criada no Google Chrome, e projetada diretamente na malha da rede que se agitava espontaneamente ao sabor do vento. O dispositivo permitia a conexão simultânea de centenas de pessoas a colaborarem, interagirem juntas e a influenciarem aquilo que viam. Adicionalmente, cada uma dessas interações contribuía com um som que se propagava no espaço. Os artistas valorizaram a ideia de uma instalação efémera que converge num espaço, no meio de uma cidade ativa, onde se vivencia uma experiência imersiva e, logo a seguir, se dissipa.

Sunset Portraits from Sunset Pictures on Flickr, 2010-presente ______Penelope Umbrico

Fig. X Detalhe de ‘Sunset Portraits from Sunset Pictures on Flickr’, 2011.

Fig. 83 ‘Sunset Portraits from 9 623 557 Sunset Pictures on Flickr, Instalação na PACE Gallery, NY, 2011. Disponível em http://www.penelopeumbrico.net/index.php/project/sunset-portraits/ ______OBSERVAÇÕES: Penelope Umbrico é conhecida por se apropriar de imagens da internet a partir de redes sociais como o Flirck ou de anúncios (como a Craigslist) que são manipuladas para construir instalações em grande escala com uma estética minimalista. Em 2006, a artista fez uma pesquisa para tentar aferir qual o assunto mais fotografado e publicado online; tendo constatado que as pessoas à frente do pôr-do-sol era o tema mais popular, com milhões de fotografias publicadas diariamente. Na sequência do projeto ‘Suns from Sunsets from Flickr’ (2006-presente), em 2010, a artista criou a obra ‘Sunset Portraits from Sunset Pictures on Flickr’ assumindo o papel de ‘artista-recolector’ para reunir um substancial acervo fotográfico sobre o tema. Considerando que o que define o conteúdo de cada fotografia são as ‘pessoas com o pôr-do-sol de fundo’, a artista recortou o motivo que carateriza o tema de cada fotografia e dispô-los numa instalação que conta com várias reelaborações, tendo-se iniciado como uma seleção entre 8 462 359 fotografias publicadas em 2010, aumentando exponencialmente o acervo de escolha para 30 253 384 em 2016. Segundo a artista, “este número dura apenas um instante, o arquivo é análogo ao ato de fotografar o próprio pôr-do-sol”. Umbrico viu nos padrões das imagens fotográficas publicada no Flickr a forma de representar um retrato social eficaz do tema revelador de experiências comuns que preservam o caráter singular de cada individuo.

Twistori, 2010-presente ______Amy Hoy e Thomas Fuchs

Fig. 84 Interface do projeto. Disponível em http://twistori.com/#i_wish

Fig. 85 Varrimento em tempo real das palavras-chave: ‘desejo’, ‘odeio’ e ‘acredito’. Disponível em http://twistori.com/#i_hate

______OBSERVAÇÕES: ‘Twistori’ é um projeto centrado na estética do fluxo de dados e baseia-se na participação não- intencional dos utilizadores. Os artistas desenvolveram um algoritmo que faz a varredura, em tempo real, de milhares de tweets publicados no Twitter por cibernautas anónimos relacionados com a expressão pública de emoções associadas às palavras-chave: ‘amo’, ‘odeio’, ‘penso’, ‘acredito’, ‘sinto’ e ‘desejo’. A interface produz a visualização de dados em tempo real de informação não filtrada dos laços emocionais básicos e do quotidiano das pessoas. A linha ténue entre aquilo que é privado e o público misturam-se numa agregação de mensagens com a intensão de revelar padrões do pensamento coletivo na internet. O projeto é uma experiência social em curso sobre o fluxo de sentimentos na comunidade inspirado no projeto ‘We Feel Fine’ (2005- 07), de Jonathan Harris & Sep Kamvar.

Virtual Choir, 2010-presente ______Eric Whitacre

Fig. 86 Print Screen do interface de recrutamento de participantes para o ‘Virtual Choir 4: Fly to Paradise’. Disponível em https://ericwhitacre.com/the-virtual-choir/history/vc4-flytoparadise- remix

Fig. 87 Frames dos vídeos ‘Virtual Choir: Lux Aurumque’ e ‘Virtual Choir: Water Night’ (da esquerda para a direita).

______OBSERVAÇÕES: O projeto ‘Virtual Choir’ tem a pretensão de se configurar num fenómeno global, criando um coro que reúne cantores de todo o mundo unidos pela paixão pela música. O compositor e maestro Eric Whitacre, motivado pela publicação de uma fã de um cover da sua música ‘Sleep’, iniciou uma sequência de versões do projeto ‘Virtual Choir’ disponibilizando, para cada versão, uma interface com instruções e uma matriz para a inscrição prévia de participantes. Posteriormente, utiliza o YouTube ou o Skype como mediadores. Sendo a rede social uma plataforma de autoexpressão por excelência, Whitacre e sua equipa aceitam as diferentes colaborações, mais ou menos dissonantes, reunindo-as numa coreografia sincronizada. A apresentação do produto final é coerente com a linguagem utilizada pelos participantes, em vídeo, com cenários idílicos que agregam indiscriminadamente todos os participantes. O ‘Virtual Choir’, na sua primeira versão com o tema 'Lux Aurumque’, cresceu de 185 cantores para o impressionante número de 8 409 vídeos, dispersos por 101 países, na quarta versão.

Johnny Cash, 2010-presente ______Chris Milk & Aaron Koblin

Fig. 88 Print Screen do interface The Johnny Cash Project. Disponível em http://www.thejohnnycashproject.com/

Fig. 89 Interface da componente ‘explore’ com a linha de tempo representativa da submissão dos frames criados (à esquerda). Ferramenta de desenho criada especificamente para reproduzir cada um dos frames do vídeo original de ‘Ain’t No Grave’ (à direita). ______OBSERVAÇÕES: O projeto ‘Jonhnny Cash’ trata-se de um vídeo clip animado desenhado à mão frame by frame com uma técnica muito próxima da rotoscopia. Cada frame é desenhado por uma pessoa diferente. Os participantes são encorajados a contribuir com um frame para o vídeo de ‘Ain’t No Grave’, redesenhando, como quiserem, por cima de um frame do vídeo original, criando novas versões visuais do vídeo clip. O projeto tem a pretensão de se constituir como um tributo e expressão coletiva de sentimentos das pessoas ao músico icónico (através da sua última obra). O site do projeto está seccionado em 3 partes fundamentais: ‘contribute’, onde é disponibilizada uma ferramenta de desenho preparada para o efeito, com uma paleta limitada aos tons cinza (para garantir coerência estética e formal), para redesenhar um frame que é fornecido automaticamente; ‘explore’, oferece a opção de explorar as contribuições na linha de tempo, assistir ao vídeo de forma livre ou filtrando diversos aspetos, como os frames mais populares ou estilos de representação similares; ‘credits’ onde figuram os autores e coautores do projeto, configurando uma estatística das intervenções da multidão que participou no projeto. A obra permanece aberta e continua a crescer de tal forma, que a visualização do vídeo nunca é a mesma duas vezes.

Life in a Day, 2011 ______Kevin Macdonald & Ridley Scott

Fig. 90 Filme ‘Life in a Day’ (frame). Fig. 91 Filme ‘Life in a Day’ (frame).

Fig. 92 Filme ‘Life in a Day’ (frame). Disponível em https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaFVr_cJJIY

______OBSERVAÇÕES: O projeto ‘Life in a Day’ baseia-se na cultura do vídeo amador no YouTube. A dupla Ridley Scott (produtor) e Kevin Macdonald (diretor) convidaram participantes de todo o mundo a filmarem as suas vidas e a responderem a algumas perguntas simples (“O que ama? O que teme? O que tem no bolso?”) num único dia: o dia 24 de julho de 2010. O documentário colaborativo, com 90 minutos de duração, enfatiza os momentos íntimos e mundanos dos participantes a partir de uma seleção de 331 fragmentos de vídeo de um total de mais de 81000 contribuições voluntárias submetidas no YouTube de 192 países. De acordo com Macdonald, embora a organização tenha sido idealizada de modo a representar sequencialmente as 24 horas do dia, a definição da narrativa não seguiu os padrões convencionais e foi estruturada sob uma perspetiva ‘emocional progressista’, depois de ter assistido a mais de 4500 horas de vídeo. A música composta por Matthew Herbert conferiu coerência e ligação à diversidade de fragmentos de vídeos ao longo na narrativa inusitada. A fusão da linguagem de documentário com a web congregou a riqueza, a diversidade e a narrativa global das experiências humanas. O documentário estreou em 2011 no Sundance Film Festival e foi devolvido ao contexto que esteve na sua origem, o YouTube, com acesso livre.

Face to Facebook, 2011 ______Paolo Cirio e Alessandro Ludovico

Fig. 93 Instalação para a apresentação do projeto em Bilbao. Disponível em https://paolocirio.net/work/face-to-facebook/

Fig. 94 Interface do site de encontros amorosos ‘Lovely-Faces’, criado especificamente para o projeto. Disponível em http://www.lovely-faces.com/ ______OBSERVAÇÕES: ‘The Hacking Monopolism Trilogy’ é composto por três projetos – ‘Google Will Eat Itself – GWEI’ (2005), ‘Amazon Noir’ (2006) e ‘Face to Facebook’ (2011), envolvendo Paolo Cirio, Alessandro Ludovico e o duo UBERMORGEN – que exploram as fragilidades de três das maiores corporações online, num plano hacktivista, encenando performances com o intuito de denunciar o abuso de poder instituído nos seus algoritmos. ‘Face to Facebook’ foi lançado no festival Transmediale em 2011. Consistiu na apropriação de 1 000 000 de perfis de utilizadores do Facebook, seguida de uma clivagem com recurso a um programa de reconhecimento facial e, posteriormente, a publicação de 250 mil desses perfis (com todos os dados correspondentes, inclusive os contactos) num site para encontros amorosos, criado para o efeito, denominado ‘Lovely-Faces’. A deslocação de contexto (do Facebook para o Lovely-Faces) questionou a exposição pública de dados ‘privados’ de cada um dos perfis pirateados causando-lhe o desconforto decorrente de contactos indesejados, o bloqueio das contas dos artistas no Facebook e uma ação litigiosa movida pela rede social pela ‘violação e ‘uso indevido’ de informações que são públicas per si. A apresentação pública deste projeto teve sempre presente a tónica de cultura aberta, exibindo todo o material, diagramas e código que estiveram na base da sua criação.

Born Nowhere, 2011-presente ______Laís Pontes

Fig. 95 Print Screen do perfil do facebook do projeto. Disponível em https://www.facebook.com/born.nowhere

Fig. 96 Pormenor dos comentários dos participantes que forjaram a identidade da Debra. ______OBSERVAÇÕES: Considerando que a identidade nas redes sociais altera-se por conveniência do meio e segue o padrão de expectativas que se gera no contexto relacional, Laís Pontes propõe a construção de identidades influenciadas pelo meio a que se destinam. A artista inclui diferentes personagens no projeto baseadas em autorretratos com alterações de aparência e perfís individualizados no facebook. O processo de contrução da identidade é feito com base nos comentários dos facebookianos, traçando-se uma biografia virtual a que a personagem corresponde, em comportamentos e relacionamentos. O projeto conta com 25 identidades virtuais que se reveem no conjunto dos colaboradores do projeto. Há uma diversidade de personagens que vão desde professoras, advogadas, artistas, a strippers, umas casadas, outras solteiras ou divorciadas, algumas personagens apresentam gostos ecléticos, outras são brejeiras, com uma faixa etária que varia dos 18 aos 50 anos.

This Exquisite Forest, 2012-2014 ______Chris Milk & Aaron Koblin

Fig. 97 Interface de acesso ao projeto. Disponível em http://www.exquisiteforest.com/

Fig. 98 Ferramentas disponibilizadas para a colaboração no projeto (seleção da ramificação, construção da sequência de frames e criação e associação de música à animação).

Fig. 99 Pormenor de algumas árvores com as respetivas sequências de animações. ______OBSERVAÇÕES: O ímpeto conceptual do projeto é baseado no mecanismo criativo surrealista, Cadavre exquis, adotando a estrutura simbólica da árvore para proporcionar uma plataforma para a criação de animações, ligadas umas às outras, com a possibilidade de evoluírem para várias ramificações, de acordo com as colaborações dos participantes (adotando o silogismo: o princípio de uma narrativa pode desdobrar-se em múltiplos fins). A sustentabilidade online do projeto é proporcionada pelo Google Creative Lab e pelo Tate Modern, em Londres. O projeto no Tate foi complementado com uma instalação física cujas árvores/sequências de animações foram iniciadas por artistas consagrados convidados pelo museu, suscetíveis de lhes serem acrescentadas novas sequências de animações pelos visitantes. O registo de uma análise realizada a 26/07/2013 permitiu apurar um volume de colaborações absolutamente abismal: a árvore com maior número de colaborações tem 539 sequências de animações e o número de árvores criadas (floresta) era de 910.

Webcam Venus, 2013 ______Pablo Garcia & Addie Wagenknecht & F.A.T. (Free Art &Technology)

Fig. 100 Interface do chat online sexcam , estrutura comunicacional para o ajuste da pose. Disponível em http://fffff.at/webcamvenus/

Fig. 101 Pose de kimisquirtx por referência à Vênus de Urbino (1538) de Tiziano.

Fig. 102 Pose de Ricadoll por referência à Mona Lisa (1503-1506) de Leonardo da Vinci. ______OBSERVAÇÕES: Em Webcam Venus os autores do projeto convidam performers que se encontram em chats online sexcam para replicar as poses de obras de arte consagradas, com o intuito de problematizar a diferença entre as pinturas que contêm nus e se encontram em museus (a que chamamos Belas- Artes) e as imagens eróticas tipificadas pela cultura da internet e que tratamos como ‘pornografia’. A diversidade de pessoas e comunidades que utiliza estes chats num misto de exposição pública e intimista dos seus corpos e sexualidade é impressionante e pressupõe o contacto com uma audiência. Nesse sentido, em troca de algum dinheiro (custo associado à interação no chat) o projeto abordava os performers com a simples pergunta: Would you like to pose for me?, seguida de todo um conjunto de orientações para melhor mimetizar a pose que servia de referência.

Moon, 2013-2017 ______Olafur Eliasson e Ai Weiwei

Fig. 103. Print Screen da Interface do projeto. Disponível em http://www.moonmoonmoonmoon.com/#sphere

Fig. 104 Detalhe da participação coletiva e da expressão individual. Disponível em http://olafureliasson.net/archive/artwork/WEK108821/moon ______OBSERVAÇÕES: ‘Moon’ resulta de uma parceria entre Olafur Eliasson e Ai Weiwei e ilustra categoricamente a diluição de fronteiras geográficas, políticas e sociais ao juntar os dois artistas numa interação colaborativa e incentivar o público a reforçar essa mesma ideia. O objetivo do projeto é enfantizar o alcance global e a interconetividade de ideias, partindo do pressuposto que independente da nossa localização no mundo todos vemos a mesma lua.O projeto é composto por uma plataforma colaborativa que convida os visitantes a deixarem as suas marcas, desenho ou escrita, na superfície de uma lua virtual (em substituição das cicatrizes ou carateras existentes na lua real). A cada participação a ‘manta’ que cobre a lua ia sendo alterada, destacando a expressão individual entre a participação coletiva. A dupla de artistas utilizou o Twitter e o Facebook para mediatizar o projeto que contou com mais de 80 000 participações.

The Exceptional and the Everyday: 144 Hours in Kiev, 17 a 22 de fevereiro de 2014 ______Lev Manovich, Alise Tifentale, Mehrdad Yazdani e Jay Chow

Fig. 105 Visualização dos dados da composição colaborativa de imagens partilhadas durante os protestos e detalhe da organização temporal das fotografias. Disponível em http://www.the-everyday.net/ ______OBSERVAÇÕES: Lev Manovich e os seus colaboradores têm vindo a desenvolver um conjunto de projetos que visa explorar os dados das redes sociais, ilustrados pela vida quotidiana das pessoas, como uma janela que reflete as transformações sociais (eg. Phototrails em 2013 e SelfieCity em 2014). O projeto The Exceptional and the Everyday: 144 Hours in Kiev persegue o mesmo propósito e incide sobre as convulsões sociais ocorridas no período de seis dias durante a agitação política em Kiev na Ucrânia. Sendo o Instagram uma rede global organizada em torno da fotografia e, numa análise generalista, oferecer um relato visual do que se passa nas cidades, desde os acontecimentos mais relevantes aos mais supérfluos; Manovich fez o download de mais de 20000 fotografias, partilhadas publicamente por aproximadamente 6000 pessoas, no Instagram. A partir dos metadados das fotografias foi possível definir uma área em torno da Praça de Independência para a recolha de imagens e, posteriormente, sequenciá-las por data e hora. A visualização dos dados foi coligida numa só imagem, composta por 13208 fotografias, que é representativa da vivência dos factos ocorridos na Praça da Independência pelos participantes/intervenientes, sem quaisquer enviesamentos preconizados por uma cobertura jornalística.

Internet Cache Self Portrait series, 2014-presente ______Evan Roth

Fig. 106 ‘Internet Cache Self Portrait: 3-6, 2013’, Wesleyan University. Disponível em http://www.evan-roth.com/work/internet-cache-self-portrait/

Fig. 107 ‘Internet Cache Self Portrait: november 24, 2015’, Electronic Superhighway 1966- 2016, MTAA. ______OBSERVAÇÕES: O ‘Internet Cache Self Portrait series’ regista o fluxo de navegação diário do artista, materializando esse fluxo de forma arbitrária através da impressão de longas tiras de papel. Evan Roth é um representante fervoroso do paradigma Pós-Internet Art e este projeto manifesta precisamente a intenção de transitar a obra do seu contexto nativo para o espaço físico da galeria ou museu, mantendo, porém, uma consciência da internet que assegura o significado da obra. O rasto da navegação – fotografias dos perfis dos ‘amigos’ consultados, logótipos corporativos, banners dos sites visitados, etc. – é organizado sem qualquer critério especial por um algoritmo que expõe o histórico das interações realizadas ao longo do dia. Toda a matéria-prima utilizada é coletada sem a autorização dos seus autores, tornando-os em participantes passivos. A reconstituição baseia-se ou assemelha-se ao ‘histórico’ incorporado nos motores de busca.

Place, 2017 ______Reddit/ Josh Wardle

Fig. 108 Mapa interativo com informações e metadados sobre as diferentes imagens que compõem a versão final do projeto. Disponível em https://draemm.li/various/place-atlas/

Fig. 109 Detalhe da versão final da obra. Disponível em https://i.redd.it/agcbmqgjn14z.png

______OBSERVAÇÕES: ‘Place’ foi criado para explorar a interação humana numa escala incomensuravelmente grande. Surgiu inusitadamente na rede social Reddit sem qualquer aviso prévio e utilizou os artifícios de disseminação viral da rede como forma de mobilizar participantes para aderirem ao projeto projeto. Em apenas 72 horas, mais de um milhão de redditors debitaram 16,5 milhões de pixés coloridos sob um singelo suporte branco online, com 1000x1000 pixéis. A liberdade colaborativa, a ausência de controlo e o senso de comunidade promoveram a evolução dos padrões de participação e expressão individual para a agregação em grupos de expressão coletiva filiados em cores específicas, sob regras de participação muito simples: “Existe uma tela vazia. Pode colocar um ladrilho sobre ela, mas deve aguardar para colocar outro. Individualmente pode criar algo. Juntos podem criar algo mais”. Todavia, esta associação em grupos deu lugar a formação de fações, alianças e destruição, com o intuito de reclamar território, transformando o espaço do projeto numa autêntica batalha estética, com rivalidades geográficas emergentes (entre países ou entre continentes) por uns, e com uma disposição amenizadora, por outros.

......

. MANIFESTOS, DECLARAÇÕES DE ARTISTAS,

CURADORES E TEÓRICOS DA INTERNET ART

THE HACKER'S MANIFESTO1

(1986) The Mentor (a.k.a. Loyd Blankenship)

Another one got caught today, it's all over the papers. "Teenager Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal", "Hacker Arrested after Bank Tampering"...

Damn kids. They're all alike.

But did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950's technobrain ever take a look behind the eyes of the Hacker? Did you ever wonder what made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him?

I am a Hacker, enter my world....

Mine is a world that begins with school... I'm smarter than most of the other kids, this crap they teach us bores me...

Damn underachiever. They're all alike.

I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake it's because I screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me... Or feels threatened by me... Or thinks I'm a smart ass... Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here...

Damn kid. All he does is play games. They're all alike.

And then it happened... a door opened to a world... rushing through the phone line like heroin through an addict's veins, an electronic pulse is sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought... a bored is found.

"This is it... this is where I belong..." I know everyone here... even if I've never met them, never talked to them, may never hear from them again... I know you all...

Damn kid. Tying up the phone line again. They're all alike...

You bet your ass we're all alike... we've been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak... the bits of meat that you did let slip were pre-chewed and tasteless. We've been dominated by

1 http://phrack.org/issues/7/3.html#article 55 sadists, or ignored by the apathetic. The few that had something to teach found us willing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert.

This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of the service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge, and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals.

Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something you will never forgive me for.

I am a Hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual, but you can't stop us all. After all... we're all alike.

MANIFESTATION FOR THE UNSTABLE MEDIA2

(1987) V2_Organisation

We strive for constant change; for mobility. We make use of the unstable media, that is, all media which make use of electronic waves and frequencies, such as engines, sound, light, video, computers, and so on. Instability is inherent to these media. Quantum mechanics has proved, among other things, that the smallest elementary particles, such as electrons, exist in ever-changing forms. They have no stable form, but are characterized by dynamic mobility. This unstable, mobile form of the electron is the basis of the unstable media. The unstable media are the media of our time. They are the showpieces in our modern homes. We promote their comprehensive use, instead of the often practiced misuse of these media. We love instability and chaos, because they stand for progress. We do not see chaos as survival of the fittest, but as an order which is composed of countless fragmentary orders, which differ among themselves and within which the prevailing status quo is only a short orientation point. The unstable media move within the concepts of 'movement-time-space', which implies the possibility of combining more forms and contents within one piece of work. The unstable media reflect our pluriform world. Unstable media are characterized by dynamic motion and changeability, this in contrast with the world of art which reaches us through the publicity media. This has come to a standstill and has become a budget for collectors, officials, historians and critics. ART MUST BE DESTRUCTIVE AND CONSTRUCTIVE. The Manifesto for the Unstable Media was issued by V2_Organisation in 's- Hertogenbosch (Netherlands) in 1987. At the time, V2_ began transforming itself from an multi-media organisation into a centre for media technology. The Manifesto laid down the theoretical principles of V2_, also known since that time, as the Institute for the Unstable Media. Though an historical document, most of what is in the Manifesto is still crucial for the work of the organisation. One way or the other, it would need continuous updating, being, as it should be, unstable.

2 https://web.archive.org/web/20000619222100/http://www.v2.nl/browse/v2/manifesto.html 57

A CYBERFEMINIST MANIFESTO FOR THE 21ST CENTURY3

(1991) VNS Matrix (Josephine Starrs, Julianne Pierce, Francesca da Rimini, and Virginia Barratt)

We are the modern cunt positive anti reason unbounded unleashed unforgiving we see art with our cunt we make art with our cunt we believe in jouissance madness holiness and poetry we are the virus of the new world disorder rupturing the symbolic from within saboteurs of big daddy mainframe the clitoris is a direct line to the matrix VNS MATRIX terminators of the moral codes mercenaries of slime go down on the altar of abjection probing the visceral temple we speak in tongues infiltrating disrupting disseminating corrupting the discourse we are the future cunt

3 https://anthology.rhizome.org/a-cyber-feminist-manifesto-for-the-21st-century 58

A DECLARATION OF THE INDEPENDENCE OF CYBERSPACE4

(1996) John Perry Barlow

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.

Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.

4 https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence 59

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge. Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.

In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.

You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.

In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.

Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.

These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

COMMAND COMMUNICATIONS AND CONTROL IN EASTERN EUROPE - A VIEW FROM ISOLATION5

(1997) Marko Peljhan

The following text includes a draft and a collection of notes for a lecture first presented at the LEAF conference in Liverpool in April 1997

TOPICS

* changing geopolitical and social circumstances in Eastern Europe and the world

* unveiling of previously invisible divisions and political preferences

* digital revolution - end of the analogue era, the last possible time to exert any kind of control over oppressive media and state structures.

A new state of awareness must be developed in connection with the completely changed and invisible power structures, which at this very moment shape the state of the world. Study the enemy, learn from it, build on the knowledge, push back (pull out if necessary), start from the beginning.

Use the following strategies:

The principles of war

1. objective: clarity of purpose - direct every operation toward a clearly defined, decisive, and attainable objective.

2. offensive (initiative): seize, retain and exploit the initiative

3. mass: concentrate combat power at the decisive place and time

4. economy of force (efficiency): allocate minimum essential combat power to secondary efforts

5. manoeuvre: place the enemy in a position of disadvantage through the flexible application of combat power

6. unity of command (cohesiveness): for every objective ensure unity of effort under one responsible commander

7. security (do not be surprised): never permit the enemy to acquire an unexpected advantage

5 http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9705/msg00084.html 61

8. surprise (surprise your opponent): strike the enemy at a time or place or in a manner for which he is unprepared

9. simplicity: prepare clear, uncomplicated plans and clear, concise orders to ensure successful operations through understanding

Learn the functions of command and control:

1. planning: selecting the mission and objectives as well as the strategies, policies, programs, and procedures for achieving them; decision making that is future oriented: the selection of a course of action

2. directing and leading: clarifying, guiding, teaching and encouraging participants in the organisation to perform effectively and with zeal and confidence

3. co-ordinating: achieving harmony of individual effort with a group effort toward the accomplishment of group purposes and objectives. (the words individual and group in this definition should be interpreted to include organisational units and supra units as well)

The following is the gathered material from one of the study cases, that PACT (Projekt Atol Communication Technologies) has been working on for the past year.

RESEARCH - A CASE STUDY RIVET JOINT PROGRAM / JOINT STARS PROGRAM - MICROWAVE OVEN IN THE SKY

USAF R135v/w rivet joint surveillance aircraft are equipped with an extensive array of sophisticated intelligence gathering equipment that enable military specialists to monitor the electronic activity of enemies or potential enemies of the US and it’s allies. The Rivet joint AWACS combination has become a powerful tactical weapon in the 1990’s during Desert Storm, the occupation of Haiti, and most recently over Bosnia. Using automated and manual equipment, mixed crews of electronic and intelligence specialists can precisely locate, record and analyse much of what is being done in the EM spectrum.

Basic roles: - providing indications about the location and intentions of enemy forces and warnings of threatening activity - broadcasting a variety of direct voice communications. Of highest priority are combat advisory broadcasts and imminent threat warnings that can be sent direct to aircraft in danger - operating both data and voice links to provide target info to US ground based air defenses

Redefined intelligence data can be transferred from Rivet Joint to AWACS through the Tactical Digital Information Link TADIL/A or into intelligence channels via satellite and the TACTICAL INFORMATION BROADCAST SERVICE (TIBS), which is a nearly real-time theater information broadcast. For example the aircrews in Okinawa watched the live broadcast of the 1995 NATO bombing campaign in Bosnia. TIBS is

62 broadcast via FLEET SATCOM and enhances the battle picture as provided to combined air operations centers such as the one in Vicenza, Italy, which oversees operations in Bosnia. The Pentagon’s primary military goal at the end of the 20th century is to create a battlefield environment in which US forces know a foe’s intentions with precision, early enough to foil completion of his plans. If the goal is achieved, US forces could dominate combat. They claim, that sufficient prior knowledge of intent might even keep a conflict from breaking out. Knowledge of an enemy’s intentions is referred to within the Pentagon as dominant battlespace knowledge, DBK and a key element for it’s success and applicability is a fleet of 14 RC 135 Rivet Joints, which is scheduled to be increased to 16 in 1998. The linkage is still being designed, that would complete the operational, communications and electronic connectivity among Rivet Joint, E-3 AWACS and E-8 JOINT STARS. The linkage is expected to seamlessly connect the RJs ability to intercept and plot the location of electronic emissions with the AWACS aerial radar picture and the JOINT STARS ground radar and moving target indications.

Ground radar activities happened over an extended period of time during 1994/95/96, where strong microwave emissions were present over the Balkan region.

Digital communication between AWACS aircraft, Rivet Joint and Joint Stars could not be decrypted. The analogue era is over. If you don’t want to be monitored and heard, encrypt your own signals, jam back.

RESPONSE

Goals: to monitor and promote awareness of these activities to prepare adequate tactical answers

Take similar systems as possible models for reaction and organisation.

Fight back with the same tools.

Problem: telecommunication laws are very oppressive towards any new and independent media. The presence, activities and policies of telecommunications monopolies stop the possible development of telecommunications and their proliferation into the second and third worlds. Study the case of the wind-on radio, the radio without batteries. Produce the radio, distribute it.

Suggestion: build a global independent satellite telecommunications network / an alternative to the Intelsat system, and the new low orbit commercial systems that are slowly becoming reality. A multinational, interdisciplinary organisational effort would develop tactics and strategies and confront the global capitalist and state multinational organisms with organised resistance and provide an alternative, non-commercially based means of reliable telecom. Start collecting funds, start working on possible strategies, after you develop a firm plan, look for allies.

MANIFESTE DU WEB INDÉPENDANT6

(1997) uZine 3

Le Web indépendant, ce sont ces millions de sites offrant des millions de pages faites de passion, d’opinion, d’information, mises en place par des utilisateurs conscients de leur rôle de citoyens. Le Web indépendant, c’est un lien nouveau entre les individus, une bourse du savoir gratuite, offerte, ouverte ; sans prétention.

Face aux sites commerciaux aux messages publicitaires agressifs, destinés à ficher et cibler les utilisateurs, le Web indépendant propose une vision respectueuse des individus et de leurs libertés, il invite à la réflexion et au dialogue. Quand les sites d’entreprises se transforment en magazines d’information et de divertissement, quand les mastodontes de l’info-spectacle, des télécommunications, de l’informatique et de l’armement investissent le réseau, le Web indépendant propose une vision libre du monde, permet de contourner la censure économique de l’information, sa confusion avec la publicité et le publi- reportage, sa réduction à un spectacle abrutissant et manipulateur.

Pourtant le Web indépendant et contributif est menacé ; menacé par la fuite en avant technologique qui rend la création de sites de plus en plus complexe et chère, par l’écrasante puissance publicitaire du Web marchand, et bientôt par les accès dissymétriques, les Network Computers, les réseaux privés, le broadcasting, destinés à cantonner le citoyen au seul rôle de consommateur. Déjà la presse spécialisée, si avide des publicités d’annonceurs qui récupèrent à leur profit la formidable richesse du Web contributif, et fascinée par les enjeux techniques et commerciaux de l’Internet, réserve quelques maigres lignes aux sites indépendants, occulte l’enjeu culturel du réseau, expédie rapidement la mort des sites pionniers du Web artisanal, quand elle glose en long et en large sur le nouveau site de tel vendeur de soupe. La création d’un site personnel y est présentée aux utilisateurs comme une motivation très annexe, loin derrière les possibilités d’utilisation en ligne de sa carte de crédit.

Nous invitons donc les utilisateurs à prendre conscience de leur rôle primordial sur l’Internet : lorsqu’ils montent leur propre site, lorsqu’ils envoient des commentaires, critiques et encouragements aux webmestres, lorsqu’ils s’entraident dans les forums et par courrier électronique, ils offrent une information libre et gratuite que d’autres voudraient vendre et contrôler. La pédagogie, l’information, la culture et le débat d’opinion sont le seul fait des utilisateurs, des webmestres indépendants et des initiatives universitaires et associatives.

6 http://www.uzine.net/article60.html 64

ON THE ABC OF TACTICAL MEDIA7

(1997) David Garcia and Geert Lovink

Tactical Media are what happens when the cheap 'do it yourself' media, made possible by the revolution in consumer electronics and expanded forms of distribution (from public access cable to the internet) are exploited by groups and individuals who feel aggrieved by or excluded from the wider culture. Tactical media do not just report events, as they are never impartial they always participate and it is this that more than anything separates them from mainstream media.

A distinctive tactical ethic and aesthetic that has emerged, which is culturally influential from MTV through to recent video work made by artists. It began as a quick and dirty aesthetic although it is just another style it (at least in its camcorder form) has come to symbolize a verite for the 90's.

Tactical media are media of crisis, criticism and opposition. This is both the source their power, ("anger is an energy" : John Lydon), and also their limitation. their typical heroes are; the activist, Nomadic media warriors, the pranxter, the hacker,the street rapper, the camcorder kamikaze, they are the happy negatives, always in search of na enemy. But once the enemy has been named and vanquished it is the tactical practitioner whose turn it is to fall into crisis. Then (despite their achievements) its easy to mock them, with catch frases of the right, "politically correct" "Victim culture" etc. More theoretically the identity politics, media critiques and theories of representation, that became the foundation of much western tactical media are themselves in crisis. These ways of thinking are widely seen as, carping and repressive remnants of an outmoded humanism.

To believe that issues of representation are now irrelevant is to believe that the very real life chances of groups and individuals are not still crucially affected by the available images circulating in any given society. And the fact that we no longer see the mass media as the sole and centralized source of our self definitions might make these issues more slippery but that does not make them redundant.

Tactical media a qualified form of humanism. A useful antidote to both, what Peter Lamborn Wilson described, as "the unopposed rule of money over human beings". But also as an antidote to newly emerging forms of technocratic scientism which under the banner of post-humanism tend to restrict discussions of human use and social reception.

What makes Our Media Tactical? In 'The Practice of Every Day Life' De Certueau analyzed popular culture not as a 'domain of texts or artifacts but rather as a set of practices or operations performed on textual or text like structures'. He shifted the emphasis from representations in their own right to the 'uses' of representations. In other words how do we as consumers use the texts and artifacts that surround us. And the answer, he suggested, was 'tactically'. That is in far more creative and rebellious ways than had previously been imagined. He described the process of consumption as a set of tactics by which the weak make use of the strong. He characterized the rebellious

7 http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9705/msg00096.html 65 user (a term he preferred to consumer) as tactical and the presumptuous producer (in which he included authors, educators, curators and revolutionaries) as strategic. Setting up this dichotomy allowed him to produce a vocabulary of tactics rich and complex enough to amount to a distinctive and recognizable aesthetic. Na existential aesthetic. An aesthetic of Poaching, tricking, reading, speaking, strolling, shopping, desiring. Clever tricks, the hunter's cunning, maneuvers, polymorphic situations, joyful discoveries, poetic as well as warlike.

Awareness of this tactical/strategic dichotomy helped us to name a class of producers of who seem uniquely aware of the value of these temporary reversals in the flow of power. And rather than resisting these rebellions do everything in their power to amplify them. And indeed make the creation of spaces, channels and platforms for these reversals central to their practice. We dubbed their (our) work tactical media.

Tactical Media are never perfect, always in becoming, performative and pragmatic, involved in a continual process of questioning the premises of the channels they work with. This requires the confidence that the content can survive intact as it travels from interface to interface. But we must never forget that hybrid media has its opposite its nemesis, the Medialen Gesamtkunstwerk. The final program for the electronic Bauhaus.

Of course it is much safer to stick to the classic rituals of the underground and alternative scene. Bu tactical media are based on a principal of flexible response, of working with different coalitions, being able to move between the different entities in the vast media landscape without betraying their original motivations. Tactical Media may be hedonistic, or zealously euphoric. Even fashion hypes have their uses. But it is above all mobility that most characterizes the tactical practitioner. The desire and capability to combine or jump from one media to another creating a continuous supply of mutants and hybrids. To cross boarders, connecting and re-wiring a variety of disciplines and always taking full advantage of the free spaces in the media that are continually appearing because of the pace of technological change and regulatory uncertainty.

Although tactical media include alternative media, we are not restricted to that category. In fact we introduced the term tactical to disrupt and take us beyond the rigid dichotomies that have restricted thinking in this area, for so long, dichotomies such as amateur Vs professional, alternative Vs mainstream. Even private Vs public.

Our hybrid forms are always provisional. What counts are the temporary connections you are able to make. Here and now, Not some vaporware promised for the future. But what we can do on the spot with the media we have access to. Here in Amsterdam we have access to local TV, digital cities and fortresses of new and old media. In other places they might have theater, street demonstrations, experimental film, literature, photography.

Tactical media's mobility connects it to a wider movement of migrant culture. Espousedby the proponents of what Nie Ascherson described as the stimulating pseudo science of Nomadism. 'The human race say its exponants are entering a new epoch of movement and migration. The subjects of history once the settled farmers and citizens,

66 have become the migrants,the refugees the gastarbeiters, the asylum seekers, the urban homeless.'

An exemplery example of the tactical can be seen in the work of the Polish artist Krzystof Wodiczko who 'perceives how the hordes of the displaced that now occupy the public space of cities squares, parks or railway station concourses which were once designed by a triumphant middle class to celebrate the conquest of its new political rights and economic liberties. Wodiczko thinks that these occupied spaces form new agoras. Which should be used for statements. 'The artist', he says, 'needs to learn how to operate as a nomadic sophist in a migrant polis.'

Like other migrant media tactitions Wodiczko has studied the techniques by which the weak become stronger than the opressors by scatering, by becoming centreless, by moving fast across the physical or media and virtual landscapes. 'The hunted mustdiscover the ways become the hunter.'

But capital is also radically deterritorialized. This is why we like being based in a building like De Waag, an old fortress in the center of Amsterdam. We happily accept the paradox of *centers* of tactical media. As well as castles in the air, we need fortresses of bricks and mortar, to resist a world of unconstrained nomadic capital. Spaces to plan not just improvise and the possibility of capitalizing on acquired advantages, has always been the preserve of 'strategic' media. As flexible media tacticians, who are not afraid of power, we are happy to adopt this approach ourselves.

Every few years we do a Next 5 Minutes conference on tactical media from around the world. Finally we have a base (De Waag) from which we hope to consolidate and build for the longer term. We see this building as a place to plan regular events and meetings, including coming The Next 5 Minutes. We see the coming The Next 5 Minutes (in january 1999), and discussions leading up to it, as part of a movement to create an antidote to what Peter Lamborn Wilson described, as 'the unopposed rule of money over human beings.'

THE DIGITAL ARTISANS MANIFESTO8

(1997) Richard Barbrook e Pit Schultz

Making The Future

1. We are the digital artisans. We celebrate the Promethean power of our labour and imagination to shape the virtual world. By hacking, coding, designing and mixing, we build the wired future through our own efforts and inventiveness.

2. We are not the passive victims of uncontrollable market forces and technological changes. Without our daily work, there would be no goods or services to trade. Without our animating presence, information technologies would just be inert metal, plastic and silicon. Nothing can happen inside cyberspace without our creative labour. We are the only subjects of history.

3. The emergence of the Net signifies neither the final triumph of economic alienation nor the replacement of humanity by machines. On the contrary, the information revolution is the latest stage in the emancipatory project of modernity. History is nothing but the development of human freedom.

4. We will shape the new information technologies in our own interests. Although they were originally developed to reinforce hierarchical power, the full potential of the Net and computing can only be realised through our autonomous and creative labour. We will transform the machines of domination into the technologies of liberation.

5. We will contribute to the process of democratic emancipation. As digital artisans, we will come together to promote the development of our trade. As citizens, we will participate within republican politics. As Europeans, we will help to break down national and ethnic barriers both inside and outside of our continent.

The Present Moment

6. Freedom today is now often just the choice between commodities rather the ability to determine our own lives. Over the past two hundred years, the factory system has dramatically increased our material wealth at the cost of removing all meaningful participation in work. Even poorer members of European societies can now live better than the kings and aristocrats of earlier times. However the joys of consumerism are usually constrained by the boredom of most jobs.

7. Since 1968, the desire for increased monetary rewards has increasingly been supplemented by demands for increased autonomy at work. In the European Union and elsewhere, neo-liberals have tried to recuperate these aspirations through their policies of marketisation and privatisation. If we are talented workers in the ‘cutting-edge’ industries like hypermedia and computing, we are promised the possibility of becoming

8 http://www.imaginaryfutures.net/2007/04/16/the-digital-artisans-manifesto-by-richard-barbrook-and-pit- schultz/ 68 hip and rich entrepreneurs by the Californian ideologues. They want to recruit us as members of the ‘virtual class’ which seeks to dominate the hypermedia and computing industries.

8. Yet these neo-liberal panaceas provide no real solutions. Free market policies don’t just brutalise our societies and ignore environmental degradation. Above all, they cannot remove alienation within the workplace. Under neo- liberalism, individuals are only allowed to exercise their own autonomy in deal-making rather than through making things. We cannot express ourselves directly by constructing useful and beautiful virtual artifacts.

9. For those of us who want to be truly creative in hypermedia and computing, the only practical solution is to become digital artisans. The rapid spread of personal computing and now the Net are the technological expressions of this desire for autonomous work. Escaping from the petty controls of the shopfloor and the office, we can rediscover the individual independence enjoyed by craftspeople during proto-industrialism. We rejoice in the privilege of becoming digital artisans.

10. We create virtual artifacts for money and for fun. We work both in the money- commodity economy and in the gift economy of the Net. When we take a contract, we are happy to earn enough to pay for our necessities and luxuries through our labours as digital artisans. At the same time, we also enjoy exercising our abilities for our own amusement and for the wider community. Whether working for money or for fun, we always take pride in our craft skills. We take pleasure in pushing the cultural and technical limits as far forward as possible. We are the pioneers of the modern.

11. The revival of artisanship is not a return to a low-tech and impoverished past. Skilled workers are best able to assert their autonomy precisely within the most technologically advanced industries. The new artisans are better educated and can earn much more money. In earlier stages of modernity, factory labourers symbolised of the promise of industrialism. Today, as digital artisans, we now express the emancipatory potential of the information age. We are the promise of history.

12. We not only admire the individualism of our artisan forebears, but also we will learn from their sociability. We are not petit-bourgeois egoists. We live within the highly collective institutions of the market and the state. For many people, autonomy over their working lives has often also involved accepting the insecurity of short- term contracts and the withdrawal of welfare provisions. We can only mitigate these problems through our own collective action. As digital artisans, we need to come together to promote our common interests.

13. We believe that digital artisans within this continent now need to form their own craft organisation. In early modernity, artisans enhanced their individual autonomy by organising themselves into trade associations. We proclaim that the collective expression of our trade will be: the European Digital Artisans Network (EDAN).

The Aims of EDAN

14. We urge everyone who is working within hypermedia, computing and associated professions on this continent to join EDAN. We call on digital artisans to form branches

69 of the network in each of the member states of the European Union and its associated countries. By forming EDAN, we will also be creating a means of forging links between European digital artisans and those from elsewhere in the world. We will strive for cooperation in work and in play with our fellow artisans in all countries.

15. We believe that the principal task of EDAN is to enhance the exercise of our craft skills. By collaborating together, we can protect ourselves against those who wish to impose their self- interests upon us. By having a strong collective identity, we will enjoy more individual autonomy over our own working lives.

16. EDAN will celebrate our creative genius as digital artisans. The network will act as the collective memory about the achievements of digital artisans within Europe. It will publicise outstanding ‘masterpieces’ of craft skill made by its members among the trade and to the wider public.

17. The network will be the social meeting-place for digital artisans from across Europe. EDAN will organise festivals, conferences and congresses where we can meet to organise, discuss and party. We believe that digital artisans should express their collective identity by regularly celebrating together in private and public.

18. EDAN will collect detailed knowledge about the trade in the different regions of Europe. It will aim to provide information about best practice in contracts, copyright agreements and other business arrangements to its members. The network will also be a source of contacts in each locality for digital artisans looking for work in different areas of Europe.

19. We believe that what cannot be organised by our own autonomous efforts can only be provided through democratic political institutions. The network will lobby for changes in local, national and European legislation which can enhance our working lives as digital artisans. As concerned citizens, we will also support the fullest development of public welfare services.

20. EDAN will campaign for European governments to put more resources into the theoretical and practical education of digital artisans in schools and universities. The network will facilitate links between educational institutions teaching hypermedia and computing across the continent. EDAN also believes that publicly-funded research is necessary for the fullest development of our industry.

21. EDAN will urge the European Union to launch a public works programme to build a broadband fibre- optic network linking all households and businesses. We believe in the principle of universal service: everyone should have Net access at the cheapest possible price. No society can call itself truly democratic until all citizens can directly exercise their right to media freedom over the Net.

22. We will campaign for the creation of ‘electronic public libraries’ where on-line educational and cultural resources are made accessible to everyone for free. Public investment in digital methods of delivering life-long learning is needed to create an information society. The Net should become the encyclopedia of all knowledge: the primary resource for the new Enlightenment.

23. We believe that the role of the hi-tech gift economy should be further enhanced. As the history of the Net has shown, d.i.y. culture is now an essential part of the process of social development. Without hacking, piracy, shareware and open architecture systems, the limitations of the money-commodity economy would have prevented the construction of the Net. EDAN also supports open access as means of people beginning to learn the skills of hypermedia and computing. The promotion of d.i.y. culture within the Net is now a precondition for the successful construction of cyberspace.

24. We are the digital artisans. We are building the information society of the future. We have come together to advance our collective interests and those of our fellow citizens. We are organised as the European Network of Digital Artisans. Join us.

Digital Artisans of Europe Unite!

THE PIRAN NETTIME MANIFESTO9

(1997) Pit Schultz (Berlin), Geert Lovink (Amsterdam), Critical Art Ensemble (Chicago), Diana McCarty (Budapest), Marko Peljhan (Ljubljana), Oliver Marchart (Wien) e Peter Lamborn Wilson (New York)

"Why do you rob banks?" "Because that's where the money is." (Willie Sutton, famous bank robber)

Last week Nettimers frolicked in the real space/time continuum on the Slovenian coast in the town of Piran where the following bullets were established:

· Nettime declares Information War. · We denounce pan-capitalism and demand reparations. Cyberspace is where your bankruptcy takes place. · Nettime launches crusade against data barbarism in the virtual holy land. · We celebrate the re-mapping of the Ex-East/Ex-West and the return to geography. · We respect the return to "alt.cultures" and pagan software structures ("It's normal!"). · Deprivatize corporate content, liberate the virtual enclosures and storm the content castles! · Refuse the institutionalization of net processes. · We reject pornography on the net unless well made. · We are still, until this day, rejecting make-work schemes and libertarian declarations of independence. · NGOs are the future oppressive post-governments of the world. · We support experimental data transfer technology. · Participate in the Nettime retirement plan, zero work by age 40. · The critique of the image is the defense of the imagination. · Nettime could be Dreamtime.

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MANIFESTO: THREAD BARING ITSELF IN TEN QUICK POSTS10

(1998) Mark Amerika

1. Now that Postmodernism is dead and we're in the process of finally burying it, something else is starting to take hold in the cultural imagination and I propose that we call this new phenomenon Avant-Pop.

2. Whereas it's true that certain strains of Postmodernism, Modernism, Structuralism and Post-Structuralism, Surrealism, Dadaism, Futurism, Capitalism and even Marxism pervade the new sensibility, the major difference is that the artists who create Avant- Pop art are the Children of Mass Media (even more than being the children of their parents who have much less influence over them). Most of the early practitioners of Postmodernism, who came into active adult consciousness in the fifties, sixties and early seventies, tried desperately to keep themselves away from the forefront of the newly powerful Mediagenic Reality that was rapidly becoming the place where most of our social exchange was taking place. Despite its early insistence on remaining caught up in the academic and elitist art world's presuppositions of self- institutionalization and incestuality, Postmodernism found itself overtaken by the popular media engine that eventually killed it and from its remains Avant-Pop is now born.

3. Avant-Pop artists have had to resist the avant-garde sensibility that stubbornly denies the existence of a popular media culture and its dominant influence over the way we use our imaginations to process experience. At the same time, A-P artists have had to work hard at not becoming so enamored of the false consciousness of the Mass Media itself that they lose sight of their creative directives. The single most important creative directive of the new wave of Avant-Pop artists is to enter the mainstream culture as a parasite would sucking out all the bad blood that lies between the mainstream and the margin. By sucking on the contaminated bosom of mainstream culture, Avant-Pop artists are turning into Mutant Fictioneers, it's true, but our goal is and always has been to face up to our monster deformation and to find wild and adventurous ways to love it for what it is. The latter strains of Postmodernism attempted to do this too but were unable to find the secret key that led right into the mainstream cell so as to facilitate and accelerate the rapid decomposition of the host's body. This is all changing as the emerging youth culture, with its deep-rooted cynicism and nomadic movement within the "dance of biz", now has the power to make or break the economic future of decrepit late-capitalism. Avant-Pop artists themselves have acquired immunity from the Terminal Death dysfunctionalism of a Pop Culture gone awry and are now ready to offer their own weirdly concocted elixirs to cure us from this dreadful disease ("information sickness") that infects the core of our collective life.

4. Now whereas Avant-Pop artists are fully aware of their need to maintain a crucial Avant-sensibility as it drives the creative processing of their work and attaches itself to the avant-garde lineage they spring from, they are also quick to acknowledge the need

10 http://www.altx.com/manifestos/avant.pop.manifesto.html 73 to develop more openminded strategies that will allow them to attract attention within the popularized forms of representation that fill up the contemporary Mediascape. Our collective mission is to radically alter the Pop Culture's focus by channeling a more popularized kind of dark, sexy, surreal, and subtly ironic gesturing that grows out of the work of many 20th century artists like Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Lenny Bruce, Raymond Federman, William Burroughs, William Gibson, Ronald Sukenick, Kathy Acker, the two Davids (Cronenberg and Lynch), art movements like Fluxus, Situationism, Lettrism and Neo-Hoodooism, and scores of rock bands including the Sex Pistols, Pere Ubu, Bongwater, Tackhead, The Breeders, Pussy Galore, Frank Zappa, Sonic Youth, Ministry, Jane's Addiction, Tuxedo Moon and The Residents. The emerging wave of Avant-Pop artists now arriving on the scene find themselves caught in this struggle to rapidly transform our sick, commodity-infested workaday culture into a more sensual, trippy, exotic and networked Avant-Pop experience. One way to achieve this would be by creating and expanding niche communities. Niche communities, many of which already exist through the zine scene, will become, by virtue of the convergent electronic environments, virtual communities. By actively engaging themselves in the continuous exchange and proliferation of collectively- generated electronic publications, individually- designed creative works, manifestos, live on-line readings, multimedia interactive hypertexts, conferences, etc., Avant-Pop artists and the alternative networks they are part of will eat away at the conventional relics of a bygone era where the individual artist- author creates their beautifully- crafted, original works of art to be consumed primarily by the elitist art-world and their business- cronies who pass judgement on what is appropriate and what is not. Literary establishment? Art establishment? Forget it. Avant-Pop artists wear each other's experiential data like waves of chaotic energy colliding and mixing in the textual-blood while the ever-changing flow of creative projects that ripple from their collective work floods the electronic cult-terrain with a subtle anti-establishment energy that will forever change the way we disseminate and interact with writing.

5. Avant-Pop artists welcome the new Electronic Age with open arms because we know that this will vastly increase our chances of finding an audience of like-minded individuals who we can communicate and collaborate with. The future of writing is moving away from the lone writer sitting behind a keyboard cranking out verse so that one day he or she may find an editor or agent or publisher who will hype their work to those interested in commercial literary culture. Instead, the future of writing will feature more multi-media collaborative authoring that will make itself available to hundreds if not thousands of potential associates around the world who will be actively internetworking in their own niche communities. Value will depend more on the ability of the different groups of artist-associates to develop a reputation for delivering easily accessible hits of the Special Information Tonic to the informationally-sick correspondent wherever he or she may be (one of the other great things about to make Avant- Pop the most exciting movement-chemistry of the 20th century and into the 21st Century is that our audience will be both immediate and global, all in one breath). Writers who continue to support an outmoded concept of the lone writer dissociated from the various niche communities at their disposal will eventually lose touch with the nanosecond speed at which the movement-chemistry wanders and will find their own work and its individually-isolated movement decelerating into turtle-like oblivion. Can you imagine what The Futurists would have done with an Information Superhighway?

6. Antonin Artaud, founder of The Theater of Cruelty, once said that "I am the enemy of the theater. I have always been. As much as I love the theater, I am, for this very reason, equally it's enemy." Avant-Pop artists are the enemy of pop culture and the avant-garde, both domains seemingly so far-fetched in a world that celebrates itself with live TV wars, rampant economic disenfranchisement and nanosecond identity changes. Our lineage, the bloodbath of cultural history we swim in, includes Artaud, Lautreamont, Jarry, Rimbaud, Futurism, Situationism, Fluxus, Abstract Expressionism, Henry Miller, Gertrude Stein, William Burroughs, Terry Southern, Surfiction, Metafiction, Postmodernism in all its gruesome details, Laugh-In, Saturday Night Live, Beavis and Butthead, SLACKER, Coltrane Miles Dizzy Don Cherry, feminist deconstruction, the list goes on. We will sample from anything we need. We will rip-off your mother if she has something we find appropriate for our compost-heap creations.

7. We don't give a shit about your phony social reality either. "Once upon a time" doesn't interest us whether your setting is the past (historical fiction), the present (contemporary classics) or the future (cyberhype). We prefer to lose ourselves in the exquisite realms of spacy sex and timeless narrative disaster, the thrill of breaking down syntax and deregulating the field of composition so that you no longer have to feel chained to the bed of commercial standardization. The emerging youth culture's ability to align itself with intuitive intelligence and non-linear narrative surfing is just one sign of where the Avant-Pop artist's audience is situated. Soon the Data Superhighway will finally once and for all do away with the high-priced middlemen, and artists will reap the benefits of their own hard-earned labor. The distribution formula will radically change from Author - Agent - Publisher - Printer - Distributor - Retailer - Consumer to a more simplified and direct Author (Sender) - Interactive Participant (Receiver)

Avant-Pop artists and their pirate signals promoting wild station identifications are ready to expand into your home right now, just log on, click around and find them. It's all up to YOU, the interactive Avant-Pop artist/participant.

8. Postmodernism changed the way we read texts. The main tenet of Postmodernism was: I, whoever that is, will put together these bits of data and form a Text while you, whoever that is, will produce your own meaning based off what you bring to the Text. The future of Avant-Pop writing will take this even one step further. The main tenet that will evolve for the Avant-Pop movement is: I, whoever that is, am always interacting with data created by the Collective You, whoever that is, and by interacting with and supplementing the Collective You, will find meaning. In an Information Age where we all suffer from Information Sickness and Overload, the only cure is a highly-potent, creatively-filtered tonic of (yes) textual residue spilled from the depths of our spiritual unconscious. Creating a work of art will depend more and more on the ability of the artist to select, organize and present the bits of raw data we have at our disposal. We all know originality is dead and that our contaminated virtual realities are always already readymade and ready for consumption! In a nod to Duchamp's Armory Show scandal, the questions we need to ask ourselves are 1. who are we sharing the cultural-toilet with and 2. what are we filling it up with?

9. Avant-Pop artists are already doing a lot of this stuff already. It's impossible to name them all but a random sampling would include Mark Leyner, Ricardo Cortez Cruz, William Gibson, William Vollmann, Larry McCaffery, Ronald Sukenick, Kim Gordon, Doug Rice, Derek Pell, Kim Deal, Darius James, Lauren Fairbanks, Jello Biafra, Lisa Suckdog, Eurudice, Nile Southern, Takayuki Tatsumi, John Bergin, John Shirley, Bruce Sterling, Richard Linklater, Don Webb, The Brothers Quay, Lance Olsen, Curt White, Eugene Chadbourne, King Missile, David Blair, and many, many others.

10. Without even knowing it, the Avant-Pop movement has been secretly generating interest and support for a few years now but has recently become more exposed with the successful breakthrough of the sub-pop alternative music scene, the publication of alternative trade paperbacks like Black Ice Books, and the release of low-budget alternative media projects like *Wax, Or The Discovery of Television Among the Bees*. The future of fiction is *now* as we, its most active practitioners, automatically unwrite it.

INTRODUCTION TO NET.ART (1994-1999)11

(1999) Natalie Bookchin e Alexei Shulgin

1. net.art at a Glance A. The Ultimate Modernism 1. Definition a. net.art is a self-defining term created by a malfunctioning piece of software, originally used to describe an art and communications activity on the internet. b. net.artists sought to break down autonomous disciplines and outmoded classifications imposed upon various activists practices. 2. 0% Compromise a. By maintaining independence from institutional bureaucracies b. By working without marginalization and achieving substantial audience, communication, dialogue and fun c. By realizing ways out of entrenched values arising from structured system of theories and ideologies d. T.A.Z. (temporary autonomous zone) of the late 90s: Anarchy and spontaneity 3. Realization over Theorization a. The utopian aim of closing the ever widening gap between art and everyday life, perhaps, for the first time, was achieved and became a real, everyday and even routine practice. b. Beyond institutional critique: whereby an artist/individual could be equal to and on the same level as any institiution or corporation. c. The practical death of the author

B. Specific Features of net.art 1. Formation of communities of artists across nations and disciplines 2. Investment without material interest 3. Collaboration without consideration of appropriation of ideas 4. Privileging communication over representation 5. Immediacy 6. Immateriality 7. Temporality 8. Process based action 9. Play and performance without concern or fear of historical consequences 10. Parasitism as Strategy a. Movement from initial feeding ground of the net b. Expansion into real life networked infrastructures 11. Vanishing boundaries between private and public 12. All in One: a. Internet as a medium for production, publication, distribution, promotion, dialogue, consumption and critique b. Disintegration and mutation of artist, curator, pen-pal, audience, gallery, theorist, art collector, and museum

11 http://easylife.org/netart/ 77

2. Short Guide to DIY net.art A. Preparing Your Environment 1. Obtain access to a computer with the following configuration: a. Macintosh with 68040 processor or higher (or PC with 486 processor or higher) b. At least 8 MB RAM c. Modem or other internet connection 2. Software Requirements a. Text Editor b. Image processor c. At least one of the following internet clients: Netscape, Eudora, Fetch, etc. d. Sound and video editor (optional)

B. Chose Mode 1. Content based 2. Formal 3. Ironic 4. Poetic 5. Activist

C. Chose Genre 1. Subversion 2. Net as Object 3. Interaction 4. Streaming 5. Travel Log 6. Telepresent Collaboration 7. Search Engine 8. Sex 9. Storytelling 10. Pranks and Fake Identity Construction 11. Interface Production and/or Deconstruction 12. ASCII Art 13. Browser Art, On-line Software Art 14. Form Art 15. Multi-User Interactive Environments 16. CUSeeMe, IRC, Email , ICQ, Mailing List Art

D. Production

3. What You Should Know A. Current Status 1. net.art is undertaking major transformations as a result of its newfound status and institutional recognition. 2. Thus net.art is metamorphisizing into an autonomous discipline with all its accouterments: theorists, curators, museum departments, specialists, and boards of directors.

B. Materialization and Demise

1. Movement from impermanence, immateriality and immediacy to materialization a. The production of objects, display in a gallery b. Archiving and preservation 2. Interface with Institutions: The Cultural Loop a. Work outside the institution b. Claim that the institution is evil c. Challenge the institution d. Subvert the institution e. Make yourself into an institution f. Attract the attention of the institution g. Rethink the institution h. Work inside the institution 3. Interface with Corporations: Upgrade a. The demand to follow in the trail of corporate production in order to remain up-to-date and visible b. The utilization of radical artistic strategies for product promotion

4. Critical Tips and Tricks for the Successful Modern net.artist A. Promotional Techniques 1. Attend and participate in major media art festivals, conferences and exhibitions. a. Physical b. Virtual 2. Do not under any circumstances admit to paying entry fees, travel expenses or hotel accommodations. 3. Avoid traditional forms of publicity. e.g. business cards. 4. Do not readily admit to any institutional affiliation. 5. Create and control your own mythology. 6. Contradict yourself periodically in email, articles, interviews and in informal off-the-record conversation. 7. Be sincere. 8. Shock. 9. Subvert (self and others). 10. Maintain consistency in image and work.

B. Success Indicators: Upgrade 2 1. Bandwidth 2. Girl or boy friends 3. Hits on search engines 4. Hits on your sites 5. Links to your site 6. Invitations 7. E-mail 8. Airplane tickets 9. Money

5. Utopian Appendix (After net.art) A. Whereby individual creative activities, rather than affiliation to any hyped art movement becomes most valued.

1. Largely resulting from the horizontal rather than vertical distribution of information on the internet. 2. Thus disallowing one dominant voice to rise above multiple, simultaneous and diverse expressions.

B. The Rise of an Artisan 1. The formation of organizations avoiding the promotion of proper names 2. The bypassing of art institutions and the direct targeting of corporate products, mainstream media, creative sensibilities and hegemonic ideologies a. Unannounced b. Uninvited c. Unexpected 3. No longer needing the terms "art" or "politics" to legitimize, justify or excuse one's activities

C. The Internet after net.art 1. A mall, a porn shop and a museum 2. A useful resource, tool, site and gathering point for an artisan a. Who mutates and transforms as quickly and cleverly as that which seeks to consume her b. Who does not fear or accept labeling or unlabeling c. Who works freely in completely new forms together with older more traditional forms d. Who understands the continued urgency of free two-way and many-to-many communication over representation

LOWTECH MANIFESTO12

(1999) Redundant Technology Initiative

A rant approximating the content of this document was delivered to an audience of new media artists and activists by James Wallbank, Coordinator of Redundant Technology Initiative, at The Next 5 Minutes conference in Amsterdam, March 1999. At RTI we don't want anyone to see this statement as set in stone - hey, this is new media! So if you can suggest any development of this text, or you have any reactions, please get in touch. "Lowtech" means technology that is cheap or free. Technology moves on so fast that right now we can recover low-end Pentiums and fast Macintoshes from the trash. Lowtech upgrades every year. But we don't have to pay for it. Lowtech includes hardware and software. We advocate freeware and low cost software. We particularly advocate the use of low cost, open source operating systems. High technology doesn't mean high creativity. In fact sometimes the restrictions of a medium lead to the most creative solutions. Independence is important. Don't lock your creativity into a box you don't control. Access is important. Don't lock your creativity into a format we can't see. High tech artworks market new PCs. Even if they aren't meant to. Artworks that make use of new, expensive technology can't avoid being, in part, sales demonstrations. Part of the message of an online video stream, whatever its content, is "Hey, isn't it time for an upgrade?". Communicators concerned with the meaning and context of what they do may want to avoid this. We're skeptical about the consumerist frenzy associated with information technology. Lowtech questions the two year upgrade cycle. A lot of people say that new media is revolutionary. They say the net is anarchic and subversive. But how subversive can you be in an exclusive club, with a $1000 entrance fee? Lowtech counters exclusivity. Lowtech is street level technology. Text is great for communicating. Write down what you want to say. Make it clear and simple and non-exclusive. Email is still the "killer app". Fast, low cost global communication for the ordinary citizen is genuinely something new. HTML is good for lots more than web pages. Now you can author all sorts of graphical stuff with a plain text editor. Use the web for plain text and images. It's simple and cheap and quick and it works.

12 http://lowtech.org/projects/n5m3/ 81

A FEW THINGS I KNOW ABOUT NEEN 13

(2000-2006) Miltos Manetas

Neen stands for Neenstars: a still-undefined generation of visual artists. Some of them belong to the contemporary art world; others are software creators, web designers, and video game directors or animators.

Our official theories about reality—quantum physics, etc.—proved that the taste of our life is the taste of a simulation. Machines help us feel comfortable with this condition: they simulate the simulation we call Nature. Opening the door of your room or clicking on a folder on your computer's desktop will send you to similar destinations—two versions of reality that are seemingly perfect and dense, but they will start dissolving after you analyze them.

Computing is to Neen as what fantasy was to surrealism and freedom to communism. It creates its context, but it can also be postponed. Neenstars buy the newest products and they study how to create momentum. They glorify machines, but they get easily bored with them. Sometimes they prefer just watching others operating them. Neenstars find their pleasure in the in-between actions. Neen is about losing time on different operating systems.

Neenstars love copying in the same way that the city of Hong Kong multiplies its most successful buildings. The same, but a little different: Names, Clothes, Style, Art, and Architecture are important for Neenstars. So they create all that from scratch, as if what has been done before them is not so important.

Neen is very sentimental, but it is not about identity, although Neenstars occasionally use their identities as passwords in order to obtain certain privileges. Because the identity of a Neenstar is his state of mind, he is free to use the identity of another Neenstar if he needs to do so. But this works also on reverse: a Neenstar can create artwork for another Neenstar and that is the major difference between Neen and contemporary art.

While in contemporary art you need to be yourself all the time, a certain type of "hero" who is polishing always his image until he becomes a mirror of his lifetime, in Neen, you are a kind of "screen." A Neenstar projects a temporary self that stays always under construction and moves from the present to past and future without limitations. And because a Neenstar will publish everything on the web, his state of mind reflects the public taste. Neenstars are public personas.

If fantasy brought surrealists to the ridiculous and revolution drove communists to failure, it will be curious to observe where computing will bring Neen.

13 http://www.manetas.com/txt/neenmanifesto.html 82

MANIFESTO FOR AGILE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT14

(2001) Kent Beck, Mike Beedle, Arie van, Bennekum, Alistair Cockburn, Ward, Cunningham, Martin Fowler, Robert C. Martin, Steve Mellor, Dave Thomas, James Grenning, Jim Highsmith, Andrew Hunt, Ron Jeffries, Jon Kern, Brian Marick, Ken Schwaber, and Jeff Sutherland

The Agile Manifesto was written in February of 2001 by seventeen independent-minded software practitioners. While the participants didn't agree about much, they found consensus around four main values.

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

14 https://www.agilealliance.org/AGILE101/THE-AGILE-MANIFESTO/ 83

DISPERSION

(2002) Seth Price “The definition of artistic activity occurs, first of all, in the field of distribution.” Marcel Broodthaers

One of the ways in which the Conceptual project in art has been most successful is in claiming new territory for practice. It’s a tendency that’s been almost too successful: today it seems that most of the work in the international art system positions itself as Conceptual to some degree, yielding the “Conceptual painter,” the “DJ and Conceptual artist,” or the “Conceptual web artist.” Let’s put aside the question of what makes a work Conceptual, recognizing, with some resignation, that the term can only gesture toward a thirty year-old historical moment. But it can’t be rejected entirely, as it has an evident charge for artists working today, even if they aren’t necessarily invested in the concerns of the classical moment, which included linguistics, analytic philosophy, and a pursuit of formal dematerialization. What does seem to hold true for today’s normative Conceptualism is that the project remains, in the words of Art and Language, “radically incomplete”: it does not necessarily stand against objects or painting, or for language as art; it does not need to stand against retinal art; it does not stand for anything certain, instead privileging framing and context, and constantly renegotiating its relationship to its audience. Martha Rosler has spoken of the “asif” approach, where the Conceptual work cloaks itself in other disciplines (philosophy being the most notorious example), provoking an oscillation between skilled and de-skilled, authority and pretense, style and strategy, art and not-art. Duchamp was not only here first, but staked out the problematic virtually single- handedly. His question “Can one make works which are not ‘of art’” is our shibboleth, and the question’s resolution will remain an apparition on the horizon, always receding from the slow growth of practice. One suggestion comes from the philosopher Sarat Maharaj, who sees the question as “a marker for ways we might be able to engage with works, events, spasms, ructions that don’t look like art and don’t count as art, but are somehow electric, energy nodes, attractors, transmitters, conductors of new thinking, new subjectivity and action that visual artwork in the traditional sense is not able to articulate.” These concise words call for an art that insinuates itself into the culture at large, an art that does not go the way of, say, theology, where while it’s certain that there are practitioners doing important work, few people notice. An art that takes Rosler’s as-if moment as far as it can go. Not surprisingly, the history of this project is a series of false starts and paths that peter out, of projects that dissipate or are absorbed. Exemplary among this garden of ruins is Duchamp’s failure to sell his Rotorelief optical toys at an amateur inventor’s fair. What better description of the artist than amateur inventor? But this was 1935, decades before widespread fame would have assured his sales, and he was attempting to wholly transplant himself into the alien context of commercial science and invention. In his own analysis: “error, one hundred percent.” Immersing art in life runs the risk of seeing the status of art—and with it, the status of artist—disperse entirely.

These bold expansions actually seem to render artworks increasingly vulnerable. A painting is manifestly art, whether on the wall or in the street, but avant-garde work is often illegible without institutional framing and the work of the curator or historian. More than anyone else, artists of the last hundred years have wrestled with this trauma of context, but theirs is a struggle that necessarily takes place within the art system. However radical the work, it amounts to a proposal enacted within an arena of peer- review, in dialogue with the community and its history. Reflecting on his experience running a gallery in the 1960s, Dan Graham observed: “if a work of art wasn’t written about and reproduced in a magazine it would have difficulty attaining the status of ‘art’. It seemed that in order to be defined as having value, that is as ‘art’, a work had only to be exhibited in a gallery and then to be written about and reproduced as a photograph in an art magazine.” Art, then, with its reliance on discussion through refereed forums and journals, is similar to a professional field like science. What would it mean to step outside of this carefully structured system? Duchamp’s Rotorelief experiment stands as a caution, and the futility of more recent attempts to evade the institutional system has been well demonstrated. Canonical works survive through documentation and discourse, administered by the usual institutions. Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, for example, was acquired by (or perhaps it was in fact ‘gifted to’) the Dia Art Foundation, which discreetly mounted a photograph of the new holding in its Dan Graham-designed video-café, a tasteful assertion of ownership. That work which seeks what Allan Kaprow called “the blurring of art and life” work which Boris Groys has called biopolitical, attempting to “produce and document life itself as pure activity by artistic means,” faces the problem that it must depend on a record of its intervention into the world, and this documentation is what is recouped as art, short-circuiting the original intent. Groys sees a disparity thus opened between the work and its future existence as documentation, noting our “deep malaise towards documentation and the archive.” This must be partly due to the archive’s deathlike appearance, a point that Jeff Wall has echoed, in a critique of the uninvitingly “tomblike” Conceptualism of the 1960s. Agreement! A paragraph of citations, a direction, the suggestion that one is getting a sense of things. What these critics observe is a popular suspicion of the archive of high culture, which relies on cataloguing, provenance, and authenticity. Insofar as there is a popular archive, it does not share this administrative tendency. Suppose an artist were to release the work directly into a system that depends on reproduction and distribution for its sustenance, a model that encourages contamination, borrowing, stealing, and horizontal blur. The art system usually corrals errant works, but how could it recoup thousands of freely circulating paperbacks? It is useful to continually question the avant-garde’s traditional romantic opposition to bourgeois society and values. The genius of the bourgeoisie manifests itself in the circuits of power and money that regulate the flow of culture. National bourgeois culture, of which art is one element, is based around commercial media, which, together with technology, design, and fashion, generate some of the important differences of our day. These are the arenas in which to conceive of a work positioned within the material and discursive technologies of distributed media. Distributed media can be defined as social information circulating in theoretically unlimited quantities in the common market, stored or accessed via portable devices such as books and magazines, records and compact discs, videotapes and DVDs, personal computers and data diskettes. Duchamp’s question has new life in this space, which has greatly expanded during the last few decades of global corporate sprawl. It’s space into which the work of art must project itself lest it be outdistanced entirely by these

85 corporate interests. New strategies are needed to keep up with commercial distribution, decentralization, and dispersion. You must fight something in order to understand it. Mark Klienberg, writing in 1975 in the second issue of The Fox, poses the question: “Could there be someone capable of writing a science-fiction thriller based on the intention of presenting an alternative interpretation of modernist art that is readable by a non-specialist audience? Would they care?” He says no more about it, and the question stands as an intriguing historical fragment, an evolutionary dead end, and a line of inquiry to pursue in this essay: the intimation of a categorically ambiguous art, one in which the synthesis of multiple circuits of reading carries an emancipatory potential. This tendency has a rich history, despite the lack of specific work along the lines of Klienberg’s proposal. Many artists have used the printed page as medium; an arbitrary and partial list might include Robert Smithson, Mel Bochner, Dan Graham, Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner, Stephen Kaltenbach, and Adrian Piper, and there have been historical watersheds like Seth Siegelaub and John Wendler’s 1968 show Xeroxbook. The radical nature of this work stems in part from the fact that it is a direct expression of the process of production. Market mechanisms of circulation, distribution, and dissemination become a crucial part of the work, distinguishing such a practice from the liberal-bourgeois model of production, which operates under the notion that cultural doings somehow take place above the marketplace. However, whether assuming the form of ad or article, much of this work was primarily concerned with finding exhibition alternatives to the gallery wall, and in any case often used these sites to demonstrate dryly theoretical propositions rather than address issues of, say, desire. This points to a shortcoming of classical conceptualism. Benjamin Buchloh points out that “while it emphasized its universal availability and its potential collective accessibility and underlined its freedom from the determinations of the discursive and economic framing conventions governing traditional art production and reception, it was, nevertheless, perceived as the most esoteric and elitist artistic mode.” Kosuth’s quotation from Roget’s Thesaurus placed in an Artforum box ad, or Dan Graham’s list of numbers laid out in an issue of Harper’s Bazaar, were uses of mass media to deliver coded propositions to a specialist audience, and the impact of these works, significant and lasting as they were, reverted directly to the relatively arcane realm of the art system, which noted these efforts and inscribed them in its histories. Conceptualism’s critique of representation emanated the same mandarin air as did a canvas by Ad Reinhart, and its attempts to create an Art Degree Zero can be seen as a kind of negative virtuosity, perhaps partly attributable to a New Left skepticism towards pop culture and its generic expressions. Certainly, part of what makes the classical avant-garde interesting and radical is that it tended to shun social communication, excommunicating itself through incomprehensibility, but this isn’t useful if the goal is to use the circuits of mass distribution. In that case, one must use not simply the delivery mechanisms of popular culture, but also its generic forms. When Rodney Graham releases a CD of pop songs, or Maurizio Cattelan publishes a magazine, those in the art world must acknowledge the art gesture at the same time that these products function like any other artifact in the consumer market. But difference lies within these products! Embodied in their embrace of the codes of the culture industry, they contain a utopian moment that points toward future transformation. They could be written according to the code of hermeneutics: “Where we have spoken openly we have actually said nothing. But where we have written something in code and in pictures, we have concealed the truth…”

But let’s say your aesthetic program spans media, and that much of your work does not function properly within the institutionalized art context. This might include music, fashion, poetry, filmmaking, or criticism, all crucial artistic practices, but practices which are somehow stubborn and difficult, which resist easy assimilation into a market- driven art system. The film avant-garde, for instance, has always run on a separate track from the art world, even as its practitioners may have been pursuing analogous concerns. And while artists have always been attracted to music and its rituals, a person whose primary activity was producing music, conceived of and presented as Art, would find ‘art world’ acceptance elusive. The producer who elects to wear several hats is perceived as a crossover at best: the artist-filmmaker, as in the case of Julian Schnabel; the artist as entrepreneur, as in the case of Warhol’s handling of Interview magazine and the Velvet Underground; or, as with many of the people mentioned in this essay, artist as critic, perhaps the most tenuous position of all. This is the lake of our feeling. One could call these niches “theatrical,” echoing Michael Fried’s insistence that “what lies between the arts is theater… the common denominator that binds… large and seemingly disparate activities to one another, and that distinguishes these activities from the radically different enterprises of the Modernist art.” A practice based on distributed media should pay close attention to these activities, which, despite lying between the arts, have great resonance in the national culture. Some of the most interesting recent artistic activity has taken place outside the art market and its forums. Collaborative and sometimes anonymous groups work in fashion, music, video, or performance, garnering admiration within the art world while somehow retaining their status as outsiders, perhaps due to their preference for theatrical, distribution-oriented modes. Maybe this is what Duchamp meant by his intriguing throwaway comment, late in life, that the artist of the future will be underground. If distribution and public are so important, isn’t this, in a sense, a debate about “public art”? It’s a useful way to frame the discussion, but only if one underlines the historical deficiencies of that discourse, and acknowledges the fact that the public has changed. The discourse of public art has historically focused on ideals of universal access, but, rather than considering access in any practical terms, two goals have been pursued to the exclusion of others. First, the work must be free of charge (apparently economic considerations are primary in determining the divide between public and private]. Often this bars any perceptible institutional frame that would normally confer the status of art, such as the museum, so the public artwork must broadly and unambiguously announce its own art status, a mandate for conservative forms. Second is the direct equation of publicness with shared physical space. But if this is the model, the successful work of public art will at best function as a site of pilgrimage, in which case it overlaps with architecture. The problem is that situating the work at a singular point in space and time turns it, a priori, into a monument. What if it is instead dispersed and reproduced, its value approaching zero as its accessibility rises? We should recognize that collective experience is now based on simultaneous private experiences, distributed across the field of media culture, knit together by ongoing debate, publicity, promotion, and discussion. Publicness today has as much to do with sites of production and reproduction as it does with any supposed physical commons, so a popular album could be regarded as a more successful instance of public art than a monument tucked away in an urban plaza. The album is available everywhere, since it employs the mechanisms of free market capitalism, history’s most sophisticated distribution system to date. The monumental model of public art is invested in an anachronistic notion of communal appreciation transposed from the church to the museum to the outdoors, and this notion

87 is received skeptically by an audience no longer so interested in direct communal experience. While instantiated in nominal public space, mass-market artistic production is usually consumed privately, as in the case of books, CDs, videotapes, and Internet “content.” Television producers are not interested in collectivity, they are interested in getting as close as possible to individuals. Perhaps an art distributed to the broadest possible public closes the circle, becoming a private art, as in the days of commissioned portraits. The analogy will only become more apt as digital distribution techniques allow for increasing custom ization to individual consumers. The monumentality of public art has been challenged before, most successfully by those for whom the term ‘public’ was a political rallying point. Public artists in the 1970s and 1980s took interventionist praxis into the social field, acting out of a sense of urgency based on the notion that there were social crises so pressing that artists could no longer hole up in the studio, but must directly engage with community and cultural identity. If we are to propose a new kind of public art, it is important to look beyond the purely ideological or instrumental function of art. As Art and Language noted, “radical artists produce articles and exhibitions about photos, capitalism, corruption, war, pestilence, trench foot and issues.” Public policy, destined to be the terminal as-if strategy of the avant-garde! A self-annihilating nothing. An art grounded in distributed media can be seen as a political art and an art of communicative action, not least because it is a reaction to the fact that the merging of art and life has been effected most successfully by the “consciousness industry”. The field of culture is a public sphere and a site of struggle, and all of its manifestations are ideological. In Public Sphere and Experience, Oscar Negt and Alexander Kluge insist that each individual, no matter how passive a component of the capitalist consciousness industry, must be considered a producer (despite the fact that this role is denied them). Our task, they say, is to fashion “counter-productions.” Kluge himself is an inspiration: acting as a filmmaker, lobbyist, fiction writer, and television producer, he has worked deep changes in the terrain of German media. An object disappears when it becomes a weapon. The problem arises when the constellation of critique, publicity, and discussion around the work is at least as charged as a primary experience of the work. Does one have an obligation to view the work first-hand? What happens when a more intimate, thoughtful, and enduring understanding comes from mediated discussions of an exhibition, rather than from a direct experience of the work? Is it incumbent upon the consumer to bear witness, or can one’s art experience derive from magazines, the Internet, books, and conversation? The ground for these questions has been cleared by two cultural tendencies that are more or less diametrically opposed: on the one hand, Conceptualism’s historical dependence on documents and records; on the other hand, the popular archive’s eversharpening knack for generating public discussion through secondary media. This does not simply mean the commercial cultural world, but a global media sphere which is, at least for now, open to the interventions of non- commercial, non-governmental actors working solely within channels of distributed media. A good example of this last distinction is the phenomenon of the “Daniel Pearl Video,” as it’s come to be called. Even without the label PROPAGANDA, which CBS helpfully added to the excerpt they aired, it’s clear that the 2002 video is a complex document. Formally, it presents kidnapped American journalist Daniel Pearl, first as a mouthpiece for the views of his kidnappers, a Pakistani fundamentalist organization, and then, following his off-screen murder, as a cadaver, beheaded in order to underline the gravity of their political demands.

One of the video’s most striking aspects is not the grisly, though clinical, climax (which, in descriptions of the tape, has come to stand in for the entire content), but the slick production strategies, which seem to draw on American political campaign advertisements. It is not clear whether it was ever intended for TV broadcast. An apocryphal story indicates that a Saudi journalist found it on an Arabic-language website and turned it over to CBS, which promptly screened an excerpt, drawing heavy criticism. Somehow it found its way onto the Internet, where the FBI’s thwarted attempts at suppression only increased its notoriety: in the first months after its Internet release, “Daniel Pearl video,” “Pearl video,” and other variations on the phrase were among the terms most frequently submitted to Internet search engines. The work seems to be unavailable as a videocassette, so anyone able to locate it is likely to view a compressed data-stream transmitted from a hosting service in the Netherlands (in this sense, it may not be correct to call it “video”). One question is whether it has been relegated to the Internet, or in some way created by that technology. Does the piece count as “info-war” because of its nature as a proliferating computer file, or is it simply a video for broadcast, forced to assume digital form under political pressure? Unlike television, the net provides information only on demand, and much of the debate over this video concerns not the legality or morality of making it available, but whether or not one should choose to watch it—as if the act of viewing will in some way enlighten or contaminate. This is a charged document freely available in the public arena, yet the discussion around it, judging from numerous web forums, bulletin boards, and discussion groups, is usually debated by parties who have never seen it. This example may be provocative, since the video’s deplorable content is clearly bound up with its extraordinary routes of transmission and reception. It is evident, however, that terrorist organizations, alongside transnational corporate interests, are one of the more vigilantly opportunistic exploiters of “events, spasms, ructions that don’t look like art and don’t count as art, but are somehow electric, energy nodes, attractors, transmitters, conductors of new thinking, new subjectivity and action.” A more conventional instance of successful use of the media-sphere by a non-market, non- government organization is Linux, the open-source computer operating system that won a controversial first prize at the digital art fair Ars Electronica. Linux was initially written by one person, programmer Linus Torvalds, who placed the code for this “radically incomplete” work on-line, inviting others to tinker, with the aim of polishing and perfecting the operating system. The Internet allows thousands of authors to simultaneously develop various parts of the work, and Linux has emerged as a popular and powerful operating system and a serious challenge to profitdriven giants like Microsoft, which recently filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission to warn that its business model, based on control through licensing, is menaced by the open-source model. Collective authorship and complete decentralization ensure that the work is invulnerable to the usual corporate forms of attack and assimilation, whether enacted via legal, market, or technological routes (however, as Alex Galloway has pointed out, the structure of the World Wide Web should not itself be taken to be some rhizomatic utopia; it certainly would not be difficult for a government agency to hobble or even shut down the Web with a few simple commands). Both of these examples privilege the Internet as medium, mostly because of its function as a public site for storage and transmission of information. The notion of a mass archive is relatively new, and a notion which is probably philosophically opposed to the traditional understanding of what an archive is and how it functions, but it may be that, behind the veneer of user interfaces floating on its surface—which generate most of the

89 work grouped under the rubric “web art”—the Internet approximates such a structure, or can at least be seen as a working model. With more and more media readily available through this unruly archive, the task becomes one of packaging, producing, reframing, and distributing; a mode of production analogous not to the creation of material goods, but to the production of social contexts, using existing material. Anything on the internet is a fragment, provisional, pointing elsewhere. Nothing is finished. What a time you chose to be born! An entire artistic program could be centered on the re-release of obsolete cultural artifacts, with or without modifications, regardless of intellectual property laws. An early example of this redemptive tendency is artist Harry Smith’s obsessive 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music, which compiled forgotten recordings from early in the century. Closer to the present is my own collection of early video game soundtracks, in which audio data rescued by hackers and circulated on the web is transplanted to the old media of the compact-disc, where it gains resonance from the contexts of product and the song form: take what’s free and sell it back in a new package. In another example, one can view the entire run of the 1970s arts magazine Aspen, republished on the artist-run site ubu.com, which regularly makes out-of-print works available as free digital files. All of these works emphasize the capacity for remembering, which Kluge sees as crucial in opposing “the assault of the present on the rest of time,” and in organizing individual and collective learning and memory under an industrialist- capitalist temporality that works to fragment and valorize all experience. In these works, resistance is to be found at the moment of production, since it figures the moment of consumption as an act of re-use. It’s clear from these examples that the readymade still towers over artistic practice. But this is largely due to the fact that the strategy yielded a host of new opportunities for the commodity. Dan Graham identified the problem with the readymade: “instead of reducing gallery objects to the common level of the everyday object, this ironic gesture simply extended the reach of the gallery’s exhibition territory.” One must return to Fountain, the most notorious and most interesting of the readymades, to see that the gesture does not simply raise epistemological questions about the nature of art, but enacts the dispersion of objects into discourse. The power of the readymade is that no one needs to make the pilgrimage to see Fountain. As with Graham’s magazine pieces, few people saw the original Fountain in 1917. Never exhibited, and lost or destroyed almost immediately, it was actually created through Duchamp’s media manipulations— the Stieglitz photograph (a guarantee, a shortcut to history), the Blind Man magazine article—rather than through the creation-myth of his finger selecting it in the showroom, the status-conferring gesture to which the readymades are often reduced. In Fountain’s elegant model, the artwork does not occupy a single position in space and time; rather, it is a palimpsest of gestures, presentations, and positions. Distribution is a circuit of reading, and there is huge potential for subversion when dealing with the institutions that control definitions of cultural meaning. Duchamp distributed the notion of the fountain in such a way that it became one of art’s primal scenes; it transubstantiated from a provocative objet d’art into, as Broodthaers defined his Musée des Aigles: “a situation, a system defined by objects, by inscrip tions, by various activities…” The last thirty years have seen the transformation of art’s “expanded field” from a stance of stubborn discursive ambiguity into a comfortable and compromised situation in which we’re well accustomed to conceptual interventions, to art and the social, where the impulse to merge art and life has resulted in lifestyle art, a secure gallery practice

90 that comments on contemporary media culture, or apes commercial production strategies. This is the lumber of life. This tendency is marked in the discourses of architecture and design. An echo of Public Art’s cherished communal spaces persists in the art system’s fondness for these modes, possibly because of the Utopian promise of their appeals to collective public experience. Their “criticality” comes from an engagement with broad social concerns. This is why Dan Graham’s pavilions were initially so provocative, and the work of Daniel Buren, Michael Asher, and Gordon Matta-Clark before him: these were interventions into the social unconscious. These interventions have been guiding lights for art of the last decade, but in much the same way that quasi-bureaucratic administrative forms were taken up by the Conceptualists of the 1960s, design and architecture now could be called house styles of the neo-avant-garde. Their appearance often simply gestures toward a theoretically engaged position, such that a representation of space or structure is figured as an ipso facto critique of administered society and the social, while engagement with design codes is seen as a comment on advertising and the commodity. One must be careful not to blame the artists; architecture and design forms are all-too- easily packaged for resale as sculpture and painting. However, one can still slip through the cracks in the best possible way, and even in the largest institutions. Jorge Pardo’s radical Project, an overhaul of Dia’s ground floor which successfully repositioned the institution via broadly appealing design vernaculars, went largely unremarked in the art press, either because the piece was transparent to the extent of claiming the museum’s bookstore and exhibiting work by other artists, or because of a cynical incredulity that he gets away with calling this art. A similar strain of disbelief greeted the construction of his own house, produced for an exhibition with a good deal of the exhibitor’s money. It seems that the avant-garde can still shock, if only on the level of economic valorization. This work does not simply address the codes of mass culture, it embraces these codes as form, in a possibly quixotic pursuit of an unmediated critique of cultural conventions. An argument against art that addresses contemporary issues and topical culture rests on the virtue of slowness, often cast aside due to the urgency with which ones work must appear. Slowness works against all of our prevailing urges and requirements: it is a resistance to the contemporary mandate of speed. Moving with the times places you in a blind spot: if you’re part of the general tenor, it’s difficult to add a dissonant note. But the way in which media culture feeds on its own leavings indicates the paradoxical slowness of archived media, which, like a sleeper cell, will always rear its head at a later date. The rear-guard often has the upper hand, and sometimes delay, to use Duchamp’s term, will return the investment with massive interest. One question is whether everything remains always the same; whether it is in fact possible that by the age MfcW Green. From Zen and the Art of Macintosh. of forty a person has seen all that has been and will ever be. In any case, must this person consult some picture or trinket to understand that identity is administered, power exploits, resistance is predetermined, all is hollow? To recognize…the relative immutability of historically formed discursive artistic genres, institutional structures, and distribution forms as obstacles that are ultimately persistent (if not insurmountable) marks the most profound crisis for the artist identified with a model of avant-garde practice. (-critic)

So the thread leads from Duchamp to Pop to Conceptualism, but beyond that we must turn our backs: a resignation, in contrast to Pop’s affirmation and Conceptualism’s interrogation. Such a project is an incomplete and perhaps futile proposition, and since one can only adopt the degree of precision appropriate to the subject, this essay is

91 written in a provisional and exploratory spirit. An art that attempts to tackle the expanded field, encompassing arenas other than the standard gallery and art world- circuit, sounds utopian at best, and possibly naïve and undeveloped; this essay may itself be a disjointed series of naïve propositions lacking a thesis. Complete enclosure means that one cannot write a novel, compose music, produce television, and still retain the status of Artist. What’s more, artist as a social role is somewhat embarrassing, in that it‘s taken to be a useless position, if not a reactionary one: the practitioner is dismissed as either the producer of over-valued decor, or as part of an arrogant, parasitical, self-styled elite. But hasn’t the artistic impulse always been utopian, with all the hope and futility that implies? To those of you who decry the Utopian impulse as futile, or worse, responsible for the horrible excesses of the last century, recall that each moment is a Golden Age (of course the Soviet experiment was wildly wrong-headed, but let us pretend—and it is not so hard—that a kind of social Dispersion was its aim). The last hundred years of work indicate that it’s demonstrably impossible to destroy or dematerialize Art, which, like it or not, can only gradually expand, voraciously synthesizing every aspect of life. Meanwhile, we can take up the redemptive circulation of allegory through design, obsolete forms and historical moments, genre and the vernacular, the social memory woven into popular culture: a private, secular, and profane consumption of media. Production, after all, is the excretory phase in a process of appropriation.

With thanks to Bettina Funcke

FLAT AGAINST THE WALL15

(2007) Olia Lialina

(In the footnotes) you can see some remarks and thoughts that came to my mind during the panel (Media Art Undone at Transmediale.07) and when I was making this HTML document. I'd like to share with you some observations, show examples and make statements which we hopefully can discuss during the panel. First on New Media in general In my opinion there is no need to get rid of this term because computers are not new any more16. No need to look for another more abstract name or to update the connotations of the newand pedal opposition to the old. The task is to keep the field. And to negotiate its importance both inside and outside. New media as a field of research and artistic practice is very valuable because it demands from the artists and audience to notice computer technologies that are getting more and more transparent and invisible, and to reflect on them17. Another issue that I'm not against of attracting attention to, especially attention of the artists, is however about names and terminology. Working in New Media means to be very closely attached to a particular medium, thats why I'm suspicious about people who call themselves New Media artists or New Media workers. That's too general. Net artist or web artist or game artist, or software artist, satellite jockey, home computer musician sounds appropriate and appealing. If today you introduce yourself as a media artist it says only at what events you show your works and from what institutions you may be getting grants, but does not say anything about your work, area of expertise or source of inspiration. Words and names are indeed important in New Media. There is a gap in between net art and web art, for example. And I find it productive to talk about it, at least sometimes18. But not now. Let's look briefly at net art in the light of our theme: transitions and broadening the context. Net Art in New Media and Contemporary Art I'd say that in its current state Net Art is a wonderful example of migration that is possible (or inevitable?) in between art markets. Recently Net Art changed form being an art form in New Media to a subject in Contemporary Art. It can be seen as a break-

15 http://art.teleportacia.org/observation/flat_against_the_wall/ 16With New Media I mean a field of study that has developed around cultural practices with the computer playing a central role as the medium for production, storage and distribution. 17 Timothy Druckery showed his deepest disgust to the term New Media, which is typical for those who see computers and networks as tools in a row: pencil, video camera, computer, connected computer. Actually, I'm also not a fan of this word combination, but inside this field I find respect of scholars and artists to digital and networking culture. 18 No, it was the last time I talked about it in public. I swear that in the future I will discuss it only with my students, closest friends and family members. Public discussions about terms always end up with somebody saying things like: "The bullet from a gun is a medium, so are policemen media artists?" There is a big mess with words, and every attempt to bring clarity is in fact not more than a projection of somebody's fears or interests or fantasies. We all the time mix up politics, technology, arts, culture. Media theory and digital culture, tools and media, networks and modems ...Beautiful evidence of this confusion I found in the Transmediale survey questionnaire: "Which media do you use on a regular basis?" Books or WLAN?: In the German version on the flip side of the sheet, the anonymous author used Internet instead of WWW. 93 through or a big step back. In any case it is the right moment to notice it. Let me uncover three preconditions for this transition. 1. Big audience For a long time it did not make sense to show net art in real space: museums or galleries. For good reasons you had to experience works of net artists on your own connected computer. Yesterday for me as an artist it made sense only to talk to people in front of their computers, today I can easily imagine to apply to visitors in the gallery because in their majority they will just have gotten up from their computers. They have the necessary experience and understanding of the medium to get the ideas, jokes, enjoy the works and buy them. 2. Mature medium Not only the audience is mature now, but the medium itself. The Web is an every day environment. I'm happy to see that my favorite medium is not going to die despite bad prognoses convoying it for more than ten years. And at the same time I don't find the right place for myself there anymore. Because there is a right place for everything and everybody already arranged. To me it appears futile trying to tell stories to users who are very busy watching youtube or writing blogs. I could challenge the technology, but this is not very interesting to a audience overloaded with "rich user experience". I would like to experiment, but even this became a guided tour, as artists online are now supposed to make mash-ups with interfaces kindly provided by the internet behemoths. Users are really busy and the medium is totally invisible, and if I want to attract attention of users to their online environment and make the work about the WWW, I'll better do it offline. Net Art today is finding its way out of the network. In different senses actually19. 3. Slim computers Good relations of net art and gallery spaces today would not work of course without flat computers. Not flat screens, but flat computers. "Computer for Arts", as the British computer seller Torch Computers names these devices. Their guidelines show the way how computers should appear in contemporary art: • The whole appearance must be as plain and uncluttered as possible • There should be no manufacturer's marks or logos visible when hung on the wall • The screen should be capable of being hung in eitherportrait or landscape orientation, with no cabling or connectors visible in either mode • The screen, with its integrated computer, must be as slim as possible and lie flat against the wall • The bezel should be as narrow as possible • The bezel should be offered in any colour required by the artist • The unit should run as quietly as possible, generating as little heat as possible. It also comes with only one button. You press this button and art piece starts. Reducing a computer to a screen, to a frame that can be fixed on the wall with one nail, marries gallery space with advanced digital works. Wall, frame, art work. And the art world is in order again.

19 When the discussion was opened, one person in the audience asked why we (artists or panel participants?) don't elaborate on mass media aspects, don't make critical works about mass media. I don't have a good answer to this question and not sure that I remember it correctly, but it made me think that the difficult relations with the Web today or the confusion around it can be well explained by the fact that the Web indeed became mass medium. It is not not only mature, but a part of the mass media system, which demands from artists and researchers to adjust their view on it. 94

So, experienced audiences, artists and gallery-friendly computers make the transition of Net Art from New Media to Contemporary Art very explainable. The audience recognizes and values internet aesthetics. Artists make works about the internet, gallerists see a nice way to present and sell. Everything works smooth and comfortable Comfort for all parties is a feature of Contemporary Art. New Media does not know this word. In New Media artists fight, curators suffer, audience gets angry. And that's how it should be. Net Art this season is not a part of New Media, and that's fine. But if New Media becomes a theme in Contemporary Art and dissolves there, this would be a real loss20. Blog Art Another curious development, a process in the counter direction: A year or two ago I thought that a new phenomenon named "Blog Art" has to be born. Blogs became a popular format and artists like Abe Linkoln, Marisa Olson, JODI, Dragan Espenschied, myself, others, maybe even many others, went into special relations with blogs; misusing them and brining to extremes. Experiments were (and are) great, but they did not grow into anything bigger, I mean there is no Blog Art movement in New Media. But there is a big scene of artists who would never call themselves Blog Artists, though they really are, because they produce art for blogs. Art for blogs or Blog Art is curious digital objects, mainly gadgets, that are equal to their description and promo photos. To appear in a blog like We Make Money Not Art or rhizome.org is the highest point in the existence of many artworks. Being featured on a prominent blog is not just a step on the way to real exhibitions, though it is about real objects21. Those artworks are not such an interesting subject by themselves, but blogs as the exhibition platform number one for both online and offline art is obviously a topic for New Media.

20 At Transmediale exhibition was a similar installation of flat screens for the work Still Living by Antoine Schmitt: I think Caitlin Jones represents a new generation of Contemporary Art curators, who, as I define it for myself, "studied JODI at university". For them Net Art and other digital culture phenomenas were a part of their education, they have an appropriate ground to depart in a constantly emerging field. If you have seen this year's Transmediale exhibition and others from the field formerly known as (New) Media Art, you will see that my "would be" is not fitting. There is no tension or "work in progress" or step onto a new territory. What we see are well presented art objects properly using digital technologies: camera tracking, animation, data visualization and accousticallization… 21 Inke Arns noticed that media art is getting a part of contemporary art, there should not be borders. Diedrich Diederichsen assumed that soon we will deal with more general divisions: institutional art scene and market art scene. Florian Cramer from the audience pointed our attention to the idea that the conflict lies in between copyright and "free culture". I rather think there are two types of events: those visited by Regine Debatti or Tom Moody and those that are not. 95

THE ZERO DOLLAR LAPTOP MANIFESTO22

(2007) James Wallbank

The zero dollar laptop is here!

The zero dollar laptop is widely available to individuals in the developed world. It's also available to businesses, governmental organisations and NGOs. It's also available in the developing world. Distribution is ramping up.

The zero dollar laptop comes in a variety of specifications.

The current typical specification of the zero dollar laptop in the UK is around 500 mHz, with 256mB RAM, a 10 gigabyte hard disk, a network card, a CD-ROM, a USB port and a screen capable of displaying at least 800x600 pixels in 16-bit colour. Many zero dollar laptops are better specified. (Its close cousin, the zero dollar desktop typically runs at 1000 mHz or faster.)

The zero dollar laptop is constantly being upgraded - so by next year its specification will be even more powerful.

The zero dollar laptop is powered with free, open source software. Users can get involved as deeply as they want - the software packages available include easy to use graphical applications, more complex professional applications, and expert level programming languages.

Free software upgrades for the zero dollar laptop are constantly being made available, from a huge variety of software producers.

The zero dollar laptop is not intended simply for multimedia entertainment. Though it can an educational playground, it can also be a genuinely useful production platform.

The zero dollar laptop allows kids to learn and adults to produce. (Only when people are able to use computers to produce their own data does information communication technology become genuinely empowering.)

The zero dollar laptop has already been distributed. (You weren't told about it at the time of distribution.)

Individuals, businesses and non-profit organisations can all have a say in how the zero dollar laptop is rolled out in their local area. It's not up to government think-tanks, multinational NGOs or national policy boards.

The zero dollar laptop is available to individuals, education organisations, NGOs and businesses alike.

22 https://jaromil.dyne.org/journal/zero_dollar_laptop.html 96

The carbon footprint of the zero dollar laptop is zero.

You, as an individual, may already own a zero dollar laptop.

What's it doing? Sitting on your shelf, unused, because you've already upgraded?

Your employer or your school may own a large number of zero dollar laptops.

What are they doing? Are they getting recycled responsibly (i.e. destroyed) by the company that supplied them? (That's often the company that just happens to be supplying the next generation of laptops.)

Perhaps surprisingly, you may not know how to install or operate the zero dollar laptop.

You may never have installed a free, open source operating system. You may never have installed any operating system.

Nowadays it's quite easy. You can download a full version of the Linux operating system appropriate for the specification of your zero dollar laptop for free. It's entirely legal.

Many versions of Linux are user-friendly[1]. There are lots of help resources online, and there are likely to be local people who'll be happy to give you advice.

You may be unaware of lightweight window-managers that use memory more efficiently[2]. You may never have used powerful, compatible free office and productivity software[3]. It may surprise you to discover that free software can be better than software you can buy.

You may be reluctant to invest time, of which you may only have a little, rather than invest money - of which you may have plenty.

Think about the longer-term consequences: buy software and you'll have to pay again and again. Invest time learning about free software, and you'll never have to pay for software again.

For the sake of the planet, and for the sake of a fair, just, and cohesive society, isn't it about time you learned? Then maybe you could teach someone else.

You may ask, “Why isn't someone doing something to roll out the zero dollar laptop?” In developed-world economies and cultures we're familiar with centralised solutions. We're less familiar with localised, decentralised, do-it-yourself solutions. In this case, that “someone” is you.

Decentralised solutions like the zero dollar laptop may not seem to be as efficient as centralised solutions. However, efficiency isn't everything. Solutions of this character are more robust, more responsive to local circumstances, greener, more flexible, and they encourage local skill development and independence.

You may have to spend unpaid time learning about and implementing the distribution of a few zero dollar laptops in your area. Think about the contacts you'll make and the skills you'll learn. Think about the skills you'll help to develop, the lives you may transform, the fun you'll have.

The emergence of the zero dollar laptop as a key computing platform for empowering individuals, stimulating creativity, overcoming poverty and enriching our shared culture is entirely feasible without any additional research, design, or manufacture.

We already have all the tools we need - all we need to manufacture is the will to act locally; all we need to replace is the software on our hard drives; all we need to develop is the content of our minds.

GUERILLA OPEN ACCESS MANIFESTO23

(2008) Aaron Swartz

Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.

There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost.

That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It's outrageous and unacceptable.

"I agree," many say, "but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it's perfectly legal — there's nothing we can do to stop them." But there is something we can, something that's already being done: we can fight back.

Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.

Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.

But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It's called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn't immoral — it's a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.

Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they

23 https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt 99 have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies.

There is no justice in following unjust laws. It's time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.

We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.

With enough of us, around the world, we'll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we'll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?

100

THE LO-FI MANIFESTO24

(2008) Karl Stolley

/* Preamble */ The time has come to reject expensive consumer and prosumer software that hinders the extensibility of digital discourse and limits digital production literacy to programs and file formats that are destined for disruptive upgrades or obsolescence.

Digital scholars in the loosely defined fields of rhetoric and composition, computers and writing, and technical communication should create free and open source artifacts that are software- and device-independent. Discourse posted on the open Web can hardly be considered free if access requires costly software or particular devices.

Additionally, the literacies and language we develop through engaging in digital scholarship and knowledge-making should enable us to speak confidently, unambiguously, and critically with one another about the intricacies and methods of digital production.

And as teachers, we should actively work to provide students with sustainable, extensible production literacies through open, rhetorically grounded digital practices that emphasize the source in “free and open source.”

/* Defining Lo-fi Technologies */ Lo-fi production technologies are stable and free. They consist of and/or can retrograde to: Plain text files (.txt, .xml, .htm, .css, .js, etc.) Plain text editors (Notepad, TextEdit, pico/nano, vi, etc.) Standardized, human-readable forms of open languages expressed in plain text (XML, XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc.) Single-media files (image, audio, video) in open formats Despite their humble, decades-old base technology (plain text), innovative uses of lo-fi technologies can be remarkably hi-fi, as in the case of AJAX (whose most famous application may be Google’s Gmail service).

/* Lo-fi is LOFI */ “Lo-fi” describes a preferred set of production technologies that digital producers should strive to command, but as an acronym, LOFI outlines four principles of digital production that are essential for the advancement, extension, and long-term preservation of digital discourse:

Lossless: Discourse presented through lo-fi production technologies neither degrades nor becomes trapped in the production itself. Text migrates and transforms from a single source (e.g., XML, or an application of XML) to any number of other devices and artifacts; images, video, and other media elements maintain their integrity as individual files that are orchestrated with one another at a reader’s moment of access, not at the producer’s moment of File > Import or File > Save.

24 http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/12.3/topoi/stolley/ 101

Open: Lo-fi artifacts’ source code and media elements are available for inspection, revision, and extension outside the scope of any one piece of production software and any one producer. Openness includes and encourages end-user/reader customization and repurposing. Flexible: Discourse artfully and rhetorically created with lo-fi production technologies can be experienced unobtrusively in multiple ways by different users equipped with a wide variety of conventional, mobile, and adaptive devices—all from a single artifact. No plugins, special downloads, or device-/reader-specific artifacts are required. In(ter)dependent: Lo-fi production technologies direct orchestration (like a recipe), not composition (like a TV dinner), allowing users and their devices full control to render (or not) and perhaps repurpose the media elements that constitute a digital artifact.

/* Manifesto */ 1. Software is a poor organizing principle for digital production. 2. Digital literacy should reach beyond the limitations of software. 3. Discourse should not be trapped by production technologies. 4. Accommodate and forgive the end user, not the producer. 5. If a hi-fi element is necessary, keep it dynamic and unobtrusive. 6. Insist on open standards and formats, and software that supports them.

/* References */ Berners-Lee, Tim, & Fischetti, Mark. (2000). Weaving the Web: The original design and ultimate destiny of the World Wide Web. New York: HarperBusiness. Hunt, Lachlan. (2007, December 4). A preview of HTML 5. A List Apart: For People Who Make Websites No. 250. Retrieved April 26, 2008 from http://www.alistapart.com/articles/previewofhtml5/ Kay, Alan. User interface: A personal view. In Randall Packer & Ken Jordan (Eds.), Multimedia: From Wagner to virtual reality (pp. 121-131). New York: W.W. Norton. Krug, Steve. (2006). Don’t make me think: A common sense approach to Web usability (2nd ed.). Berkeley: New Riders. Maeda, John. (2006). The laws of simplicity. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Olsson, Tommy. (2007, February 6). Graceful degradation & progressive enhancement. Accessites.org: The Art of Accessibility. Retrieved February 1, 2008, from http://accessites.org/site/2007/02/graceful-degradation-progressive-enhancement/3/ Zeldman, Jeffrey. (2007). Designing with Web standards (2nd ed.). Berkeley: New Riders. /* Validate this Page */

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MEDIA ART 2.0 25

(2009) Aristarkh Chernyshev, Roman Minaev, Alexei Shulgin

Today, when any critical artistic statement is drained of its power within the rigid frameworks of the unilateral capitalist world, a critical artist can no longer create while contemptuously looking down at commercial art and design that is governed exclusively by market laws.

At the same time as it becomes smarter and more refined, capitalism intrudes into most revolutionary, autonomous, and secluded areas of human activity. This is not to suggest that avant-garde art creation always stood in opposition to capitalism. The modernists, taking part in the evolution of design, worked in factories developing furniture and fabrics in order to bring art to the masses. Parallel to the evolution of Dada, the readymade, and later, pop art, the theory and philosophy of art and culture contemplated the balance between the poles of capitalism and art, unique and mass-produced objects, high and low culture, professional and amateur, practical and dysfunctional. As the newest weapon of capitalism, information technologies dictate new social and cultural contexts and within these, uncover new challenges.

Our answer to the dilemma: Media Art 2.0

Media Art 2.0 goes beyond the limits of new media art

New media art today consists overwhelmingly of one-of-a-kind works presented by the authors themselves at festivals and specialized exhibitions. As a rule, such pieces are high-maintenance and complex in configuration — and thus are destined to remain in a media art ghetto. We propose all-in-one plug-and-play solutions. Media Art 2.0 presents art objects as technological products that are ready to be consumed here and now by anyone.

Media Art 2.0 is market-friendly art

We produce a limited number of copies (like Ferrari) and sell them at affordable prices (like Sony). This is possible because we develop our own reliable electronic devices and thus do not depend on overly complex multi-functional digital systems. Each piece has a unique edition number and the authentic signatures of its authors. We also offer limited lifetime warranties for our products.

Media Art 2.0 goes beyond the know-how of IT corporations

These corporations are not capable of transcending the pragmatism of their products. While attempting to enrich their products with artistic qualities, corporate designers follow the path of banal adornment — decoration with gold, Swarowski crystals, and

25 https://www.wired.com/2008/02/media-art-20/ 103 diamonds — which raises the price and renders the products “exclusive.” Such an approach does not make a mobile phone or an MP3 player a work of art. Limited lifetime of electronics contradicts the apparently “eternal” value of the decorative materials.

Media Art 2.0 is the answer to the stagnation of the art market

It proposes a solution when the art market acquiesces to the demands of traditional art forms and is incapable of digesting truly contemporary artistic ideas. Our products harmoniously combine actual art, up-to-date techno-culture, design, and media art. We return to the roots of the avant-garde and occupy our own niche in the system of capitalist production and consumption. We address advanced consumers who are not satisfied by mass products – whether cool design gadgets or the endlessly reproduced traditional art forms.

Media Art 2.0 is the avant-garde of today

We return to art the things that design borrowed from art at the beginning of the 20th century: the search for new form and content; the artistic experiment as play; and the joy of everyday life. We live in a world of visual interfaces. Televisions, print advertisements, politics, shop-windows, show-business, internet services, bank systems are primarily interfaces whose task is to shape the process of information transfer and the translation of ideas. Working with visual interfaces, we make them visible and tangible. We uncover the structures of today’s world. This approach fills our products with a critical charge. In answering the challenges of today, we flush clean the media channels and establish new standards. By infiltrating public spaces and private homes, we bring art and alternative aesthetics into people´s everyday lives.

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PIRATES OF THE INTERNET UNITE!26

(2009) Miltos Manetas

“A man was stopped yesterday at the boarder of Italy and France, his computer was scanned and pirated material was found, mostly Adobe software and songs by Beatles. The man was arrested at the spot”

From a poem to a drug, from an piece of software to a music record and from a film to a book, everything that’s famous and profitable, owns much of its economic value to the manipulation of the Multitudes. People haven’t asked to know what the Coca-Cola logo looks like, neither have they asked for the melody of “Like a Virgin”. Education, Media and Propaganda teach all that the hard way; by either hammering it on our brains or by speculating over our thirst, our hunger, our need for communication and fun and most of all, over our loneliness and despair. In the days of Internet, what can be copied can be also shared. When it comes to content, we can give everything to everyone at once.

Around this realization, a new social class is awakening. This is not a working class but a class of Producers. Producers are pirates and hackers by default; they recycle the images, the sounds and the concepts of the World. Some of it they invent but most they borrow from others.

Because information occupies a physical part of our bodies, because it is literary “installed” on our brain and can’t be erased at wish, people have the right to own what is projected on them: They have the right to own themselves! Because this is a global World based on inequality and profit, because the contents of a song, a movie or a book are points of advantage in a vicious fight for survival, any global citizen has the moral right to appropriate a digital copy of a song, a movie or a book. Because software is an international language, the secrets of the World are now written in Adobe and Microsoft: we should try hack them. Finally, because poverty is the field of experimentation for all global medicine, no patents should apply.

Today, every man with a computer is a Producer and a Pirate. We all live in the Internet, this is our new country, the only territory that makes sense to defend and protect . The land of the Internet is one of information. Men should be able to use this land freely, corporations should pay for use - a company is definitely not a person.

Internet is now producing “Internets”, situations that exist not only online but also in real space, governed by what is happening online. This is the time for the foundation of an global Movement of Piracy. The freedom of infringing copyright, the freedom of sharing information and drugs: these are our new “Commons”. They are Global Rights and as such, Authorities will not allow them without a battle. But this will be a strange battle because this is the first time the Multitudes disrespect the Law instinctively and on a global scale.

26 https://www.wired.com/2009/10/yet-another-pirate-manifesto/ 105

Today, an army of teenagers is copying, the adults are copying and even the senior citizens, people from the Left and from the Right are copying. Everyone with a computer is copying something; like a novel Goddess Athena, Information wants to break free from the head of Technology and it assists us on our enterprise.

Pirates of the Internet Unite!

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THE CULT OF DONE MANIFESTO27

(2009) Bre Pettis and Kio Stark

1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.

2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get done.

3. There is no editing stage.

4. Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.

5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.

6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.

7. Once you’re done you can throw it away.

8. Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.

9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.

10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.

11. Destruction is a variant of done.

12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.

13. Done is the engine of more.

27 http://www.manifestoproject.it/bre-pettis-and-kio-stark/ 107

UBERMORGEN.COM manifesto28

(2009) UBERMORGEN.COM (Hans Bernhard and LIZVLX)

1. our work is curiosity driven research. sampling is our basic principle of production. it is visual. it is textual. we code recombinations. we modify your plain-text. The UM.BOOK**: we relabeled a peter weibel text as an hans ulrich obrist text. then we transformed a hans ulrich obrist interview with matthew barney into an interview by peter weibel with UBERMORGEN.COM. we have no political agenda in our work. this is true for our ideas, research and production. the perception of our work is out of our control and we do not intend to control that either. we have no intention, no goals. we feed our own curiosity we are non-ideological. our primary goal is research for our own interests. We experiment in the legal, technological, social, economical field; satisfying our own personal needs. From this independent perspective we can freely investigate into whatever we are interested in. we understand the things that happen around us and to us. We analyze system configurations and we then recombine our findings, the facts and the fiction into false originals, foriginal stories. we contextualize technology with pseudo-politics, social messages with commerce. we are not bound to any medium. although in most cases the core of a project or a work is digital and happens online, it beginns as a small concept text, some images and some code. it is carried on in a huge cloud of research data. the transfer of the digital to the physical transforms online actions into supercharged images (prints/photos), installations and sculptures. our goal: we impact your personal and individual experience to look for the emotional kick and feedback, to outsource responsibility to involve the audience emotionally what we do is not pop art it is rock art.

28 http://www.ubermorgen.com/manifesto/ 108 we are children of the 1980s. we are the first internet-pop-generation. we grew up with radical Michael Milken, the king of junk bonds and mythical Michael Jackson, the king of junk pop. during the 1990s we loaded ourselves with technology, we call it digital cocaine, with mass media hacking, underground techno, hardcore drugs, rock&roll lifestyle and net.art jet set. our neuronal networks and brain structures were similar to the global synthetic network we helped building up and maintained subversive activity within. and then they got infected: waves of mania and depression ran through the technical, social and economic structures. contemporary high-tech societies deal with hardcore brains using bio-chemical agents to control the internal information flow, we call them psychotropic drugs. but how can we treat a mentally ill global network?

2. we are not activists. we are actionists in the communicative and experimental tradition of viennese actionism - performing in the global media, communication and technological networks, our body is the ultimate sensor and the immediate medium. we have enough free time to think. things happen. we do not control them. the thing that interests us supermassively is the concept of authority. be it corporate authority or governmental authority. totalitarianism, the way masses and individuals respond to a manipulative oppression and the psychotic mass belief in „they way things are“ always seems to catch our attention. we call it - citing William Gibson - 'consensual hallucination'. some examples: GWEI – Google Will Eat Itself – deconstructing the totalitarianism of shareholder value by creating a autocannibalistic model. [V]ote-auction– commercialized democracy, cutting out the middle man, online transactions, directly selling and buying of votes as future business model. Superenhanced– physical governmental oppression, NLP (neuro linguistic programming) and the fascism of newspeak in the area of war prisoners, enhanced interrogations, detainees, child imprisonment, Supermax facilites and extraordinary renditions. we do not know how our work is contextualized and perceived in the art world or the real world. for that matter we do not appreciate reading articles, reviews or theory about our work. we programmatically avoid visting exhibitions in art galleries and museums, and online we rarely read or look at work. we leave that up to others. you categorize, qualify and contextualize us. but in the so called real world our work has legal impact. We are always in a lot of legal trouble, professionally, personally and artistically. we learned that these issues were easy to resolve. we call it intended unconsciousness. some of these legal controversies serve as precedents to demonstrate internet legislation. for example: during the vote-auction project a U.S injunction was sent via email to a

109 swiss domain registrar. they then turned off our domain on no legal basis - U.S court orders are not valid in switzerland (sic!) - this case was used by the ICANN board and in various law publications to discuss domain legislation issues. our affirmative artistic reaction was to produce the Injunction Generator, a software that automatically generates such court orders and sends them to domain registries, owners, lawyers and journalists to shut down targeted domains. in some other cases friendly police officers and state agents were happy to find out that they are not dealing with dark minded criminals but rather with „interesting“ artists - surely in some cases we do not state who we are or talk about our artistic intention, i.e. the Voteauction project where we positioned ourselves as perverted eastern european business people trying to exploit U.S. democracy - but usually governmental agencies prefer to have a nice conversation rather than a criminal investigation. this argument only goes for pretty much all of mainland europe – the US and partially the UK are slightly more threatening. but in all other cases, fuck them all!

Sosumi our legal policy: anyone who wants to sue us, threaten us or what: have you get your court order or whatever the fuck you want, get in line and wait until we serve you. just be aware that there are about 15 others waiting with priority, so your chances are very limited. financially, we are deeply in debt, this is very helpful when people want to hot you with legal bombshells - they go after you in order to hurt you by taking money from you. but we ain’t got no money, so there is nothing you can take from us. blood from a turnip. we are not gonna get got. for this reason we rarely show up in court or even send a lawyer to represent us, we just let them do it by themselves and generate more documents which we then use for our work. on the real life level it is a love-hate relationship: on the individual level, users and recipients usually react very strongly to our stuff. we welcome all kinds of reactions: fan-mail, hate-mail, legal mail. as artists we see it as our responsibility to communicate. to talk about our research findings, to contextualize images, texts, etc. communication is part of our 8-5 job but it is not our priority or passion. this is different if it concerns our media hacking activities, where multi-layered communication is an integral part of the performance. on the art market we are happy to hold one of the digital art and actionism positions where content is random and not random, where concept is important but at the same time the surface is queen. we develop new ways of showcasing our real new media art - new ways that are rather low-tech than high tech superendeavours.

3. our relationship to mass media.

110 we have no respect for news-journalists, thats for sure. most of them are real scumbags and very unreliable and highly unethical. but, to our favor, they are very easy to manipulate - or as we call it „work with“. so for us the press release is an artform.

. television is the best conventional mass medium. they are closest to what we call a shock marketing channel - pumping information into users brains causing a short shock after which the channel to the brain is open and unfiltered. . newspapers are boring. . magazines are usually not interested in our work. . books are heavy and eternal. but they are an art medium not a mere information transporter. . the internet is real-time. that helps coz the faster the wheel is spinning, the easier it is to turn a complicated issue into a story made out of slogans and a couple of images. our media hacking strategy is scalable - with media hacking we mean the intrusion into massmedia with lo-tech means and a good story, so only courage, intelligence and some technological know how is required. from an estimated 500 million eyeballs audience worldwide for the Vote-auction project to 0/zero mass media audience for our Net.Art piece Black n White, it is all in the game. and we dont work with expectations, we dont depend on audience. the days when a large audience was a thrill are long gone. it does not help, it does not kick, the only real artistic production happens with input-feedbacks, when you send out information and you know you will not be able to control it anymore, the information lives on in mass media, it gets manipulated and opportunistically used by journalists, politicians, lawyers and business-people and other artists, they mold the information like a sculpture, they abuse it, the combine it and re- contextualize it. then the story comes back to you through the media and you can spin it, kick in abstract or surreal content and send it out again to a huge audience. this works best if the audience is very large, this quarantees the attention and focus of the journalist and the publishing house. this is the media hacking performance, this is acting in the eye of the mass media storm. so on different scales we perform. we experiment. we develop and use a new media strategy for each new project. during the EKMRZ trilogy we used a combination of attacks: with GWEI – Google Will Eat Itself we targeted about 30-40 opinion leaders. then we waited three months until the story made it’s way to the top mass media outlets and then down again to the blogosphere, schoolbooks and documentaries. this process is still ongoing. with Amazon Noir – The Big Book Crime we used official press-releases by third parties and our own release. this was the classical way by intention, although unintentionally one third-party pressrelease was published 6 weeks before the official date, this created chaos and confusion on both sides and turned out to be nice for everyone. for The Sound of eBay we worked with only lo-level media art scene promotion. only our core audience was informed about the project and they know about it. no fuss, no exagerations. we are still waiting for feedback.

111

4. awareness and the effects of our work on politics and society.. we are not interested in awareness, and we are not interested in having a direct impact on politics, society, military, business or technology. though we do think that our research might have a long term impact. but this is so out of our reach and it is purely speculative, so we dont think about that much. maybe our projects have scientific and educational value. this would explain the scientific articles, legal studies, dissertations and master thesis. knowing or learning about the actual impact of our work would present us with borders and boundaries of how far we can go or what we can actually achieve. it could become role-model art. we dont want that. the people can change things in a political or activist way, not the art or the artists. we have to focus on our work and give up on the rest. we chill, relax and take it easy. we have done our job. we are artists, we need to be free of responsibility, to not have to think about consequences, to not limit ourselves just because it could have an effect on this or that, or could be used for us or against us or other people. we learned that very early. hacking optimizes the attacked system, we accept that, and we learned to not give a fuck about it. again awareness and political affairs. if art and art production politicizes itself, it becomes politics and ceases to be art. awareness really sucks because everybody knows about a certain topic, but still they are not doing anything about it and neither give a fuck really. if there is impact of a story or a project of ours, we dont neglect it, but they are simply a sideproduct which we learned to accept and tolerate. but it is most def. interesting to talk to and communicate with people emotionally, directly, personally, fake-personally and right into the core. this is still why we love working with the net. doing stuff like the Generators. they are pieces of software that generate foriginal documents - forged originals. for example: court orders, drug prescriptions, bankstatements or rendition orders and enhanced interrogation scripts. this gives us the chance to target every single inividual, be it enemy or friend, on a pseudo-personal basis. we get them in their home, in front of their laptop or at their workplace looking at their workstations. this is when a user is vulnerable. this is when they are a good target. people using our generators from their homes have no reason to lie to our software. they welcome the infiltration and produce their own reality tv show. at least that is what they are interested in. we never lie. we work with research, fact and fiction, recombinations of these and with artistic surplus values. we lure users into being interested in finding out if what they are being sucked into is real or not, we mirror their interests and watch them through the invisible mirror.

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THE DEAD DROPS MANIFESTO29

(2010) Aram Bartholl

Dead Drops is an anonymous, offline, peer to peer file-sharing network in public space. Anyone can access a Dead Drop and everyone may install a Dead Drop in their neighborhood/city. A Dead Drop must be public accessible. A Dead Drop inside closed buildings or private places with limited or temporary access is not a Dead Drop. A real Dead Drop mounts as read and writeable mass storage drive without any custom software. Dead Drops don’t need to be synced or connected to each other. Each Dead Drop is singular in its existence. A very beautiful Dead Drop shows only the metal sheath enclosed type-A USB plug and is cemented into walls.You would hardly notice it. Dead Drops don’t need any cables or wireless technology. Your knees on the ground or a dirty jacket on the wall is what it takes share files offline. A Dead Drop is a naked piece of passively powered Universal Serial Bus technology embedded into the city, the only true public space. In an era of growing clouds and fancy new devices without access to local files we need to rethink the freedom and distribution of data. The Dead Drops movement is on its way for change!

Free your data to the public domain in cement! Make your own Dead Drop now! Un- cloud your files today!!!

29 https://deaddrops.com/dead-drops/manifesto/ 113

THE HARDWARE HACKER MANIFESTO30

(2010) Cody Brocious (Daeken)

My name is Cody and I'm a hardware hacker. It started at the age of five, taking apart a toy computer to figure out how it worked. I live for that thrill of discovery and rush of power that I feel when I figure out what makes something tick, then figure out how to bend it to my will. This has led to me hacking everything from game consoles to phones.

It used to be that this was what people did: if something was wrong with a device, it was acceptable to take it apart, figure out how it worked, and fix whatever was wrong with it. That's no longer the case; we're still there -- in growing numbers, to boot -- but what's changed is that it's no longer acceptable. As companies have made devices more and more locked down, making hardware hacking even more important than ever, there's a growing segment of the population that believes we're pirates. Who are we to modify these devices against the company's will?

It all comes down to one simple question: once you've purchased something, do you own it? While this may seem like a silly question, it's the entire crux of the argument for hardware hacking. If you believe that the purchaser owns the good, then they have the right to do with it what they want.

I exercise that right on a daily basis, whether with my jailbroken phone, my Wii running homebrew media player software, or -- now -- my hacked brain-computer interface. The last case is interesting, because it's the first time I've ever been called a pirate by a representative of the company producing the hardware I hacked:

Piracy is a vexed question but in its worst form it is still basically taking what someone has spent a lot of time and money on, and denying them some or all of the rewards for doing it. If the developer is being reasonable about it then it's tough to justify piracy. It costs a lot to get something developed and into the market, and next to nothing to copy or crack it. It discourages people from taking the risks in the first place, and we're all the poorer for the things that didn't get done because they would be too easy to steal.

In this case, I purchased a brain-computer interface outright, then proceeded to reverse- engineer it and release details of how to communicate with it. In the week since I released this, I've been called a selfish pirate more than I'd like to recall. All of this because I decided to exercise my right to use my hardware the way I want.

Why should we have to ask permission to use what we've spent our money on? Let's see an absurd extension of this logic: Why should Ford lose out on the rewards of building the car, when you don't go to an authorized service station to get your oil changed?

30 http://blog.9while9.com/manifesto-anthology/hardware-hacker.html 114

Let me make this crystal clear: once you sell me something, I will do whatever I want with it. Period. I'll take it apart, I'll patch it, I'll make it do things you never imagined, and I'll tell everyone who will listen exactly how to do the same. It's mine, and every device you've purchased is yours too; don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

I am a hardware hacker and this is my manifesto. We've always been here and we will always be here; you can fight to keep us out, but we'll fight even harder to get back in. I assure you we'll win.

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POSTINTERNET: ART AFTER THE INTERNET31

(2011) Marisa Olson

The forehistory of the article you are now reading is that Foam asked me to write an update to an essay I wrote in 2008 for LACMA’s Words Without Pictures book (Aperture/Thames & Hudson); the lengthy title of which was, ‘Lost Not Found: The Circulation of Images in Digital Visual Culture.’ One of my aims with that piece was to bring to the attention of a wider art audience the existence of a thriving group of artists whose work employed the internet self-reflexively–to both celebrate and critique the internet, primarily in their posts to a number of group ‘surf blogs,’ including Nasty Nets, the original ‘pro surfer’ blog, of which I am a co-founder, along with artists John Michael Boling, Joel Holmberg, and Guthrie Lonergan. I tried, in the essay ‘Lost Not Found’, to pry existing conversation about this work away from the oversimplified, often dismissive diagnosis of pro-surfer work as a mutant digital strain of that genre silhouetted by the phrase ‘found photography,’ and hold this work up against other notions about the ways in which quotidian content circulates within the space of flows we know as the net. As I said there, these Pro-Surfers are engaged in an enterprise distinct from the mere appropriation of found photography. They present us with constellations of uncannily decisive moments, images made perfect by their imperfections, images that add up to portraits of the web, diaristic photo essays on the part of the surfer, and images that certainly add up to something greater than the sum of their parts. Taken out of circulation and repurposed, they are ascribed with new value, like the shiny bars locked up in Fort Knox. The theoretical ‘money shot’ of the essay resided in my statement that ‘the work of pro- surfers transcends the art of found photography insofar as the act of finding is elevated to a performance in its own right, and the ways in which the images are appropriated distinguishes this practice from one of quotation by taking them out of circulation and reinscribing them with new meaning and authority.’ Nonetheless, there were many important artists I did not have the space to highlight, and one important term I still have yet to elucidate: Postinternet. In his recent essay, ‘Within Post-Internet’ (pooool. info, 2011), Louis Doulas sets the scene: While Post-Internet is a term still awkwardly vague to many, it was first conceived by artist Marisa Olson, most widely encountered in a 2008 interview conducted through the website We Make Money Not Art. Her definition acknowledges that internet art can no longer be distinguished as strictly computer/internet based, but rather, can be identified as any type of art that is in some way influenced by the internet and digital media. While there has now been a fair amount of writing about the term, and a fair number of artists, curators, and scholars have clung to it, I have yet to publish a statement of my own outlining what I meant in coining the term ‘Postinternet Art,’ and how I’ve seen it develop in the five years since I did so. This will be that essay. In fact, what I want is to give you a historiography that is aware of the conditions of its own production, as I simultaneously present you with an image philosophy of art influenced by the internet.

31 http://www.marisaolson.com/texts/POSTINTERNET_FOAM.pdf 116

My original statement to We Make Money Not Art’s Régine Debatty was that ‘I think it’s important to address the impacts of the internet on culture at large, and this can be done well on networks but can and should also exist offline.’ This is a point that I’d been trying to hammer-home to anyone who cared to listen for the previous 3-4 years. When appointed Editor & Curator at Rhizome, in 2005, my first agenda was to change the organization’s mission statement to assert its support of not only internet-based art, but all art that engages with the internet. Shortly afterwards, Rhizome Executive Director Lauren Cornell invited me to join her on a net art panel at Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) that also included artists Cory Arcangel, Michael Bell-Smith, and Wolfgang Staehle, and curators Michael Connor and Caitlin Jones as respondents. The panel was preceded by Time Out-NY’s [2006] publication of a roundtable discussion among us artists about the state of net art practice. In both the article and live discussion, I made the point that I felt what I was making was ‘art after the internet.’ Pressed for an explanation, at the panel, I said that both my online and offine work was after the internet in the sense that ‘after’ can mean both ‘in the style of’ and ‘following.’ For illustration, I referred to the concept of postmodernity coming not at the end of modernity, but after (and with a critical awareness of) modernity. I’m not the only person to have discussed concepts similar to the postinternet. Indeed, Guthrie Lonergan spoke in a 2008 Rhizome interview with curator Thomas Beard of ‘internet aware art,’ which he described as a way ‘to take the emphasis o" the internet and technology, but keep my ideas [about them] intact.’ Interestingly, this compelled him to make what he called ‘Objects that aren’t objects,’ i.e. a t-shirt or a book whose primary purpose is to be the vehicle of internet content. In 2009, curator Gene McHugh was awarded a Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant to keep an ambitious blog (recently published in paperback format by LINK Editions) called Post Internet, which took my term and Lonergan’s as points of departure in critiquing and historically- contextualizing contemporary work that might be considered postinternet. McHugh sees the postinternet situation as one in which ‘the internet is less a novelty and more a banality,’ a presence that is now a given; a generally less phenomenal phenomenon. Meanwhile, artists like Harm van den Dorpel began identifying themselves in their bios as postinternet artists, and others began writing about their own take on the term, as in Artie Vierkant’s ‘The Image Object Post-Internet,’ whose own salient definition of the term calls it ‘a result of the contemporary moment: inherently informed by ubiquitous authorship, the development of attention as currency, the collapse of physical space in networked culture, and the infinite reproducibility and mutability of digital materials.’ These are all tell-tale network conditions that have both pre-internet precursors and contemporary offine manifestations; furthermore, this historically-aware, continuum- synthesizing definition of the postinternet is itself exemplary of postinternet thought, insofar as it reflects this awareness. I lay out the history of this discussion in this way for several reasons. I feel that it is important to be selfaware and transparent while one plows forward with the work of articulating a set of practices and communities greater than herself. This essay is an open work and I can only aspire to be what Rancière might call an Ignorant Historiographer. I also feel that postinternet artistic practices (as opposed to everyday postinternet material culture) have not only a special kind of relevance or currency, but that they are also part and parcel of an as-yet unspoken, totalizing, near-universal set of conditions that applies to all art as much as it implicates all art in transporting the network conditions under which we live. This is a brisk responsibility ripe with

117 opportunity, though many artists will undoubtedly fail or elect not to recognize and exercise it. But the final, if not the most obvious reason to be metaenunciative in sketching this historiography is that no observer of a post-epoch can tell you precisely when they arrived there, only where they arrived. No one can tell you what they ate for lunch on the day that ‘postinternetism’ struck, or what shoes they were wearing when the big news dropped. With the exception of 9/11, there is no degree-zero for this or any other post-epoch, only a categorical here-and-now that will persist until it doesn’t; until it becomes stale and the air smells of another mode. If it weren’t so stale to speak of paradigm change, one would here invoke Thomas Kuhn… Certainly, art history is not without its Posts. We’ve managed to solder this recursive prefix onto a number of names for movements and practices within the field at large. Whether we speak of the postmodern or the postphotographic, when we pop a ‘post’ on the front end of a thing, we place a priority on priorness. But the time-delay between the conjoined terms should be measured in the context of the near-future, not a vast remove. Afterall, looking at a histogram of the forms and ideas that have influenced art practice and its discourses, postmodernity may now sit much closer to modernity than it does to us today. Just ask Bourriaud: postmodernity is dead, long live altermodernity! Far more interesting than the life and death of this nomenclature are the changes to which they bear witness. To call a thing a post-thing is to say that the thing is itself precisely because of the thing. We could quite exhaustively consider the ways in which my postmodern sweatshirt is postmodern (beginning at the very least with the conditions of its production and not ending before irony), but the ‘post-’ says it all. Because of the modern conditions of which my sweatshirt transports a critical awareness, my sweatshirt is postmodern. Propter hoc ergo post hoc. The notion of the postinternet encapsulates and transports network conditions and their critical awareness as such, even so far as to transcend the internet. The expectation of ‘afterness’ preempts the root of the post thing, as a sort of simultaneously taxonomic/ taxidermic lacquer is poured over ‘the modern,’ or ‘the photo,’ stopping it dead in its tracks... In fact, pour some on the tracks, too, so we can also obsess about how we arrived at this frozen position! Afterall, the pervasiveness of network conditions is such that the postinternet (as a conceptual vehicle) drives and spills across planes of practice and territories of discourse in just as rapidly seering a way as Richard Dawkins meant to imply when he argued that the concept of evolution was such a totalizing theory as to sizzle through all fields like a ‘universal acid,’ from philosophy to astronomy, from theology to zoology. Such is the universality of the postinternet, in this postinternet moment. As I initially conceived it, the descriptor postinternet encapsulates an image philosophy. If we want to split hairs about it, we could call it a post-ekphrastic image philosophy – one that comes after the understanding that images are capable of not only illustrating and describing, but also theorizing themselves, even on their own terms; even as they bring themselves into resolution for the first time. Art history is less the peculiar beast it looks like, and more simply beastly. In its all-too-often restrictive, self-congratulatory, near-sighted life cycle, all a piece of writing in this genre must do is simply regurgitate the historiographic origin myths that preceded it, and perhaps embellish itself with a new exemplary kernel or two. Just as easily as it writes itself, art history so often leaves out the women or ethnic minorities or lesscool-kids that were left out in previous iterations, and its readers all too often accept these new narratives as dogma, as Alpha and Omega – outside of which there must be nothing worth noting; and they celebrate its writers not as scribes delicately lifting and reproducing from extant discourses, but as

118 demigods they don’t realize are barely alit and carefully kindled by their own greasy self-anointment. In the postinternet era this phenomenon often manifests in the di"erence between critics who blog and bloggers who style themselves [self-appointed] critics. Despicable as the latter may be, they are also among the savviest internet users. Understanding that media, themselves (perhaps because they are all extensions of other media – and of ourselves – as McLuhan taught us) perform a sort of evolutionary ring cycle, they often flip-flop their flippant love-it/hate-it take on an artist’s work as frequently as they refresh their homepage. Yet these character flaws in the artworld’s online manifestations are not reasons to dismiss the internet or deny the postinternet. They are simply online reflections of a broader culture; one that just so happens to be internet-obsessed. Take as a more specific example the performative lecture given a few years ago by artist Cory Arcan gel and curator Hanne Mugaas, entitled ‘Art History According to the Internet.’ The couple presented their audience with an answer to the question, What would you know about art history if all you knew about its major artists was what YouTube videos came up as a result of querying their names. In this sense, they were channelling the concepts McHugh recalls: ‘What Seth Price called “Dispersion.” What Oliver Laric called “Versions”.’ The results were mostly short sound bites like Andy Warhol answering that, yes, he likes Jasper Johns because he makes good lunches. As funny as the lecture was, one very unfunny thing about it was that only one woman was included in their list: Tracey Emin. Her YouTube incarnation was a poorly-shot camcorder video of a superfan waiting in line at the Tate Modern for Emin to sign a copy of her newest book. When I asked Arcangel and Mugaas about the absence of women, they replied simply that it was not an intentional choice, but rather that they let a widely-accepted primer determine the list of names for which they searched, and then they showed only those for which they found results; both steps filtered-out women, as history is wont to do. In this sense, Arcangel and Mugaas performed art history, par excellence, by reenacting its cycles of filtration and info-trickling. They also demonstrated the internet’s systemic tendency to model the logic of its creators, however hegemonic it may be. (Cf. Christiane Paul, ‘The Database as System and Cultural Form: Anatomies of Cultural Narratives.’). The postinternet may be ahistorical insofar as it has no degree-zero, but if it could come to arrive at performing posthistorically – that is, to be critically aware of the problems historically reenacted with each new strata of historiographic sediment, then we might really get somewhere. For now, academies are slow to discover, sociallycontract to accept, and begin churning-out so-called seminal texts on by-then-dated artwork. Scholars forbid or aggressively dissuade their pupils from writing about hitherto unknown (i.e. pre- canonized) artists, which halts progress, stunts egos, and flagellates the notion of original research, even as it traditionally purports to call for it. The terribly good news (or wonderfully awful news) is that the academy as we know it is plunging into a state of unsustainability – not leastly because of its inability to respond to the socio-economic conditions concomitant with network culture. Meanwhile, as a defense mechanism to this prohibition on contemporary thinking, we scurry to invent epistemological trajectories – drawing lines between charted points in a constellation and soundingout echoes in the space of contemporary practice. I believe it is as much this defense mechanism as it is an overlapping set of aesthetic concerns or formal traits that has landed us the photo → film → new media storyline most widely recited today. Afterall, there are other realist media to which new media could easily be compared rather than contrasted. But the postinternet is a moment, a condition, a property, and a quality that

119 encompasses and transcends new media. Under this rubric, we should say of the internet what Allan Sekula said of photography, in Reading an Archive; that is, ‘We need to understand how photography works within everyday life in advanced industrial societies: the problem is one of materialist cultural history rather than art history.’ This is one place in which the arc from photography to the internet holds. Artistic practice within the two media are not the only practices possible under these scopic regimes. While art is not exclusive of such things, the media ecologies under scrutiny here are also the site of a vast array of commercial, political, libidinal, economic, and rhetorical functions. It seems almost trite to point this out, given that Walter Benjamin schooled us on the collapse of auratic distance, in mechanical reproduction, so long ago, but I’ll say that, by the same token, art made within these spheres sadly continues to be dismissed as merely vernacular, as seemingly-excess, or as weak because of its (however mythical) origin in the everyday. As Boris Groys laments (‘On the New,’ 2002), ‘only the extraordinary is presented to us as a possible object of our admiration;’ while I might argue that this relatability is, in fact, a reason to celebrate such work. In Louis Doulas’s aforementioned essay, “Within Post-Internet,’ he highlights a 2011 tweet from artist Harm van den Dorpel, in which the self-described postinternet artist asks, ‘Doesn’t the impact of the internet on arts reach far beyond art that deals with the internet?’ Indeed, the impact of the internet reaches far beyond such art, and far beyond art itself, to all of the exigencies and banalities of life in network culture. Doulas is the founder of Pool (pooool.info), ‘a platform dedicated to expanding and improving the discourse between online and offine realities and their cultural, societal, and political impact on one another.’ It is one of many DIY spaces cropping up, from the surf blog to the online journal to the offine reading groups now devoted to looking not only at these interrelations, but also at the increasing fusion of these seemingly disparate realities. In a sense, this recalls Lonergan’s jest, in the Beard Rhizome interview, that ‘I think it’s hilarious to hear that phrase – ‘DIY’ – all the time now, because it makes me think of Punk, and the web is so mild and boring...’ Nonetheless, there has been a vigorous movement (perhaps even more so since the 2008 interview) to self-publish, mass-distribute, and memetically-infiltrate the world at large with one’s commentary in contemporary digital visual culture. In a word, the project of these enterprises may be described as quite postinternet. One is always prone to making such claims, but we might say that the World Wide Web is, now more than ever, mirroring globalization as reflected in the tone of online collaboration. No longer is the content of this activity strapped with the heavy burden of represente ing the medium itself (the self-imposed burden of all nascent media struggling to move beyond ‘mere representations;’ in this case, representations about working at a distance). We’ve entered the more mature ‘something more’ phase in which it may be a given that two artists are working simultaneously in di"erent spaces; we’re ready to move on and say something more with the internet, not just talk about it. So what does postinternet art taste like, the aesthetician might ask? The sense- experience of art that is postinternet, that is made and distributed within the postinternet, or that we might say is of the postinternet era, is an art of conspicuous consumption (Cf. Marisa Olson, ‘Lost Not Found’). By sheer virtue of making things, the critically selfaware internet user makes postinternet art. These may or may not have the look and feel of Lonergan’s ‘objects that aren’t objects.’ Afterall, Vierkant quite astutely pointed-out that ‘Post-Internet objects and images are developed with concern to their particular materiality as well as their vast variety of methods of presentation and dissemination.’ As so often happens in such articles, this author has surpassed her wordcount just as she is prepared to serve-up examples of recent, provocative, or interesting postinternet

120 work. But given the ubiquitous nature of network culture and the increasing level of critical internet-awareness on the part of users of all demographics, it is very tempting to wipe one’s hands of this wordcount issue not only by calling for the conversation to continue in other places, amongst other voices, but generally to make a much larger argument. We are now in a postinternet era. Everything is alwaysalready postinternet. Just as there was once an epoch in which cultural producers and consumers were informed that they were in the postmodern, whether or not they were hip to it, we can now say that all works are postinternet (albeit to a lesser or greater degree of reflexivity) because all works produced now are produced in the postinternet era. On that note, let the images and portfolios on the adjacent pages, the books positioned near this volume, and even the next websites you visit or billboards you next see serve as illustrations of the universality of this condition. If ‘Lost Not Found’ was about an artistic scene, stumble with me now upon this scenario in which we are already prefigured: the postinternet.

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WE, THE WEB KIDS 32

(2012) Piotr Czerski

There is probably no other word that would be as overused in the media discourse as ‘generation’. I once tried to count the ‘generations’ that have been proclaimed in the past ten years, since the well-known article about the so-called ‘Generation Nothing’; I believe there were as many as twelve. They all had one thing in common: they only existed on paper. Reality never provided us with a single tangible, meaningful, unforgettable impulse, the common experience of which would forever distinguish us from the previous generations. We had been looking for it, but instead the groundbreaking change came unnoticed, along with cable TV, mobile phones, and, most of all, Internet access. It is only today that we can fully comprehend how much has changed during the past fifteen years. We, the Web kids; we, who have grown up with the Internet and on the Internet, are a generation who meet the criteria for the term in a somewhat subversive way. We did not experience an impulse from reality, but rather a metamorphosis of the reality itself. What unites us is not a common, limited cultural context, but the belief that the context is self-defined and an effect of free choice. Writing this, I am aware that I am abusing the pronoun ‘we’, as our ‘we’ is fluctuating, discontinuous, blurred, according to old categories: temporary. When I say ‘we’, it means ‘many of us’ or ‘some of us’. When I say ‘we are’, it means ‘we often are’. I say ‘we’ only so as to be able to talk about us at all. 1. We grew up with the Internet and on the Internet. This is what makes us different; this is what makes the crucial, although surprising from your point of view, difference: we do not 'surf' and the internet to us is not a 'place' or 'virtual space'. The Internet to us is not something external to reality but a part of it: an invisible yet constantly present layer intertwined with the physical environment. We do not use the Internet, we live on the Internet and along it. If we were to tell our bildnungsroman to you, the analog, we could say there was a natural Internet aspect to every single experience that has shaped us. We made friends and enemies online, we prepared cribs for tests online, we planned parties and studying sessions online, we fell in love and broke up online. The Web to us is not a technology which we had to learn and which we managed to get a grip of. The Web is a process, happening continuously and continuously transforming before our eyes; with us and through us. Technologies appear and then dissolve in the peripheries, websites are built, they bloom and then pass away, but the Web continues, because we are the Web; we, communicating with one another in a way that comes naturally to us, more intense and more efficient than ever before in the history of mankind. Brought up on the Web we think differently. The ability to find information is to us something as basic as the ability to find a railway station or a post office in an unknown city is to you. When we want to know something - the first symptoms of chickenpox, the reasons behind the sinking of 'Estonia', or whether the water bill is not suspiciously high - we take measures with the certainty of a driver in a SatNav-equipped car. We know that we are going to find the information we need in a lot of places, we know how to get to those places, we know how to assess their credibility. We have learned to

32 https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120229/04124217912/we-web-kids-manifesto-anti-acta- generation.shtml 122 accept that instead of one answer we find many different ones, and out of these we can abstract the most likely version, disregarding the ones which do not seem credible. We select, we filter, we remember, and we are ready to swap the learned information for a new, better one, when it comes along. To us, the Web is a sort of shared external memory. We do not have to remember unnecessary details: dates, sums, formulas, clauses, street names, detailed definitions. It is enough for us to have an abstract, the essence that is needed to process the information and relate it to others. Should we need the details, we can look them up within seconds. Similarly, we do not have to be experts in everything, because we know where to find people who specialise in what we ourselves do not know, and whom we can trust. People who will share their expertise with us not for profit, but because of our shared belief that information exists in motion, that it wants to be free, that we all benefit from the exchange of information. Every day: studying, working, solving everyday issues, pursuing interests. We know how to compete and we like to do it, but our competition, our desire to be different, is built on knowledge, on the ability to interpret and process information, and not on monopolising it. 2. Participating in cultural life is not something out of ordinary to us: global culture is the fundamental building block of our identity, more important for defining ourselves than traditions, historical narratives, social status, ancestry, or even the language that we use. From the ocean of cultural events we pick the ones that suit us the most; we interact with them, we review them, we save our reviews on websites created for that purpose, which also give us suggestions of other albums, films or games that we might like. Some films, series or videos we watch together with colleagues or with friends from around the world; our appreciation of some is only shared by a small group of people that perhaps we will never meet face to face. This is why we feel that culture is becoming simultaneously global and individual. This is why we need free access to it. This does not mean that we demand that all products of culture be available to us without charge, although when we create something, we usually just give it back for circulation. We understand that, despite the increasing accessibility of technologies which make the quality of movie or sound files so far reserved for professionals available to everyone, creativity requires effort and investment. We are prepared to pay, but the giant commission that distributors ask for seems to us to be obviously overestimated. Why should we pay for the distribution of information that can be easily and perfectly copied without any loss of the original quality? If we are only getting the information alone, we want the price to be proportional to it. We are willing to pay more, but then we expect to receive some added value: an interesting packaging, a gadget, a higher quality, the option of watching here and now, without waiting for the file to download. We are capable of showing appreciation and we do want to reward the artist (since money stopped being paper notes and became a string of numbers on the screen, paying has become a somewhat symbolic act of exchange that is supposed to benefit both parties), but the sales goals of corporations are of no interest to us whatsoever. It is not our fault that their business has ceased to make sense in its traditional form, and that instead of accepting the challenge and trying to reach us with something more than we can get for free they have decided to defend their obsolete ways. One more thing: we do not want to pay for our memories. The films that remind us of our childhood, the music that accompanied us ten years ago: in the external memory network these are simply memories. Remembering them, exchanging them, and developing them is to us something as natural as the memory of 'Casablanca' is to you. We find online the films that we watched as children and we show them to our children,

123 just as you told us the story about the Little Red Riding Hood or Goldilocks. Can you imagine that someone could accuse you of breaking the law in this way? We cannot, either. 3. We are used to our bills being paid automatically, as long as our account balance allows for it; we know that starting a bank account or changing the mobile network is just the question of filling in a single form online and signing an agreement delivered by a courier; that even a trip to the other side of Europe with a short sightseeing of another city on the way can be organised in two hours. Consequently, being the users of the state, we are increasingly annoyed by its archaic interface. We do not understand why tax act takes several forms to complete, the main of which has more than a hundred questions. We do not understand why we are required to formally confirm moving out of one permanent address to move in to another, as if councils could not communicate with each other without our intervention (not to mention that the necessity to have a permanent address is itself absurd enough.) There is not a trace in us of that humble acceptance displayed by our parents, who were convinced that administrative issues were of utmost importance and who considered interaction with the state as something to be celebrated. We do not feel that respect, rooted in the distance between the lonely citizen and the majestic heights where the ruling class reside, barely visible through the clouds. Our view of the social structure is different from yours: society is a network, not a hierarchy. We are used to being able to start a dialogue with anyone, be it a professor or a pop star, and we do not need any special qualifications related to social status. The success of the interaction depends solely on whether the content of our message will be regarded as important and worthy of reply. And if, thanks to cooperation, continuous dispute, defending our arguments against critique, we have a feeling that our opinions on many matters are simply better, why would we not expect a serious dialogue with the government? We do not feel a religious respect for 'institutions of democracy' in their current form, we do not believe in their axiomatic role, as do those who see 'institutions of democracy' as a monument for and by themselves. We do not need monuments. We need a system that will live up to our expectations, a system that is transparent and proficient. And we have learned that change is possible: that every uncomfortable system can be replaced and is replaced by a new one, one that is more efficient, better suited to our needs, giving more opportunities. What we value the most is freedom: freedom of speech, freedom of access to information and to culture. We feel that it is thanks to freedom that the Web is what it is, and that it is our duty to protect that freedom. We owe that to next generations, just as much as we owe to protect the environment. Perhaps we have not yet given it a name, perhaps we are not yet fully aware of it, but I guess what we want is real, genuine democracy. Democracy that, perhaps, is more than is dreamt of in your journalism.

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A MANIFESTO FOR THE TRUTH33

(2013) Edward Snowden

In a very short time, the world has learned much about unaccountable secret agencies and about sometimes illegal surveillance programs. Sometimes the agencies even deliberately try to hide their surveillance of high officials or the public. While the NSA and GCHQ seem to be the worst offenders – this is what the currently available documents suggest – we must not forget that mass surveillance is a global problem in need of global solutions.

Such programs are not only a threat to privacy, they also threaten freedom of speech and open societies. The existence of spy technology should not determine policy. We have a moral duty to ensure that our laws and values limit monitoring programs and protect human rights.

Society can only understand and control these problems through an open, respectful and informed debate. At first, some governments feeling embarrassed by the revelations of mass surveillance initiated an unprecedented campaign of persecution to supress this debate. They intimidated journalists and criminalized publishing the truth. At this point, the public was not yet able to evaluate the benefits of the revelations. They relied on their governments to decide correctly.

Today we know that this was a mistake and that such action does not serve the public interest. The debate which they wanted to prevent will now take place in countries around the world. And instead of doing harm, the societal benefits of this new public knowledge is now clear, since reforms are now proposed in the form of increased oversight and new legislation.

Citizens have to fight suppression of information on matters of vital public importance. To tell the truth is not a crime.

33 http://original.antiwar.com/edward-snowden/2013/11/03/a-manifesto-for-the-truth/ 125

THE TALE OF LORD SNOWDEN AND MARQUIS D’ASSANGE34

(2013) UBERMORGEN.COM (Hans Bernhard and LIZVLX)

There was a time when Discipline and Punishment were carried out in secrecy and Surveillance and Exhaustion lead to Insanity. Everybody expected the birth of British Schizophrenia and large cracks started to show in the firmament of consensual hallucination. The world became fatally ill. GCHQ File *NEW* 'Target At The Centre' Leaked document : http://www.anony.ws/kVrq - Billboard: http://www.anony.ws/k0OQ - The Tale: http://pastebin.com/SaZ6QECE Nature found a new way to destabilize the perception of who and what humans are. Distributed paranoia penetrated all aspects of modern civilization and the human- machine networks lost their ability to self-regulate. Universal nature has never been controlled by individuals, corps or govs. Humanity keeps on watching the world tumble and spin into angst-driven states of emergency. They have always lived at the underbelly of this psychotic monster. But then, one day, geeky-boring Lord Snowden and pervert-genius Marquis d'Assange stepped up to take on this absurd creature, this natural phenomenon, this erratically behaving and already totally exhausted universal apparatus. Destruction, pain and knowledge are cornerstones of learning. Frantic agencies such as GCHQ and NSA must accept their destiny: Heaven's Gate style cult-suicide while wearing Nike Decades shoes and armband patches reading "GCHQ/NSA Away Team". 'The speed of light does not merely transform the world. It becomes the world.' Perpetrators against privacy will be considered mentally insane. Nobody can be guilty & mad legally, hence not punished on the grounds of insanity. A supranational mental health commission (public special jury) is to be installed to judge over those perpetrators within the chain of command. Discipline and Punishment by Michel Foucault is to be distributed as mandatory reading material in mental health institutions and in all governement agencies. Everybody must agree that the larger the crime, the more visible it has to become and megalomania is to be punished by death (decapitation by sword). GCHQ and NSA have to admit that they're powerless over privacy, they must come to believe that a power greater than themselves could restore their sanity and make a decision to turn their will and their existence over to the care of the people. After that they have to make a searching and fearless inventory of themselves and admit the exact nature of their wrongdoings. They have to become ready to have the people remove all defects of their system and humbly ask the people to remove their shortcomings, then make direct amends to the people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them. They have to continue to take inventory and when wrong promptly admit it and they must improve their contact with the people through publication and transparency and they have to carry this message and these steps to other agencies and to practice these principles in all their affairs. Over and over and over again. 'The invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck.'

34 https://pastebin.com/BbEgpTtk 126

BALCONISM35

(2014) Constant Dullaart

A new "-ism" calls for sovereign expression in the 21st century, acronyms, typos, leetspeak, and kaomoji included.

We are all outside on teh balcony now. Standing on a platform made out of a tweet into corporate versions of public space. We are not stored in a cloud, opaque or translucent to whomever. We publish, we get read. ok. Private publishing does not exist, we now know we always get read (hi). To select what we want to have read, and by whom, is our greatest challenge rly. For now and teh future. If you tolerate this, your children will be normalized. Outside, on the street, status updates in the air, checking into another spatial analogy of information exchange. Sometimes hard to reach, through tutorials, encryptions and principles. It is generous to be outdoors, watched by a thousand eyes recording us for the future, our actions to be interpreted as an office job. We need a private veranda above ground, a place for a breath of fresh air, out of sight for the casual onlooker, but great for public announcements. The balcony is both public and private, online and offline. It is a space and a movement at the same time. You can be seen or remain unnoticed, inside and outside. Slippers are ok on the balcony. Freedom through encryption, rather than openness. The most important thing is: you must choose to be seen. We are already seen and recorded on the streets and in trains, in emailz, chatz, supermarketz and restaurantz, without a choice. Remaining unseen, by making a clearer choice where to be seen. We are in the brave new now, get ready to choose your balcony, to escape the warm enclosure of the social web, to address, to talk to the people outside your algorithm bubble. U will not get arrested on the balcony, you and yours should have the right to anonymity on the balcony, although this might seem technically complicated. The balcony is a gallery, balustrade, porch and stoop. The balcony is part of the Ecuadorian embassy. Itz masturbating on the balcony when your local dictator passes by. AFK, IRL, BRB and TTYS. The balcony is the Piratebay memo announcing they will keep up their services by way of drones, or just Piratbyran completely. Publishing in a 403, publishing inside the referring link, and as error on a server. Balconism is IRC, TOR and OTR. Bal-Kony 2012. Balcony is Speedshows, online performances, Telecomix, Anonymous, Occupy and maybe even Google automated cars (def. not glass tho btw). Balconization, not Balkanization. The balcony- scene creates community rather than commodity. Nothing is to be taken seriously. Every win fails eventually. Proud of web culture, and what was built with pun, fun, wires, solder, thoughts and visions of equality. Nothing is sacred on the b4lconi. It is lit by screens, fueled by open networks, and strengthened by retweetz. On the balcony the ambitions are high, identities can be copied, and reality manipulated. Hope is given and inspiration created, initiative promoted and development developed. Know your meme, and meme what you know. I can haz balcony. Balconism is a soapbox in the park. The balcony is connected: stand on a balcony and you will see others. The balcony is connecting: you do not have to be afraid on the balcony, we are behind you, we are the masses, you can feel the warmth from the inside, breathing down your neck. Where

35 http://artpapers.org/feature_articles/feature3_2014_0304.html 127 privacy ceases to feel private, try to make it private. Ch00se your audience, demand to know to whom you speak if not in public, or know when you are talking to an algorithm. When you can, stay anonymous out of principle, and fun. And when you are in public, understand in which context and at what time you will and could be seen. Speak out on the balcony, free from the storefront, free from the single white space, but leaning into people's offices, bedrooms and coffee tables, leaning into virtually everywhere. On the balcony, contemporary art reclaims its communicative sovereignty through constant reminders of a freedom once had on the internet. Orz to the open internet builders and warriors. Learn how to do, then challenge how it is done. Encrypt. Encrypt well and beautifully. Art with too much theory is called Auditorium, and kitsch is called Living Room. Inspired by home-brew technologies and open network communications, create art in the spirit of the internet, resisting territories, be it institutional and commercial art hierarchies or commercial information hierarchies. The internet is every medium. Head from the information super highway to the balcony that is everywhere through the right VPN. The pool is always closed.

128

NEW CLUES36

(2015) Doc Searls & David Weinberger

Hear, O Internet.

It has been sixteen years since our previous communication.

In that time the People of the Internet — you and me and all our friends of friends of friends, unto the last Kevin Bacon — have made the Internet an awesome place, filled with wonders and portents.

From the serious to the lolworthy to the wtf, we have up-ended titans, created heroes, and changed the most basic assumptions about How Things Work and Who We Are.

But now all the good work we’ve done together faces mortal dangers.

When we first came before you, it was to warn of the threat posed by those who did not understand that they did not understand the Internet.

These are The Fools, the businesses that have merely adopted the trappings of the Internet.

Now two more hordes threaten all that we have built for one another.

The Marauders understand the Internet all too well. They view it as theirs to plunder, extracting our data and money from it, thinking that we are the fools.

But most dangerous of all is the third horde: Us.

A horde is an undifferentiated mass of people. But the glory of the Internet is that it lets us connect as diverse and distinct individuals.

We all like mass entertainment. Heck, TV’s gotten pretty great these days, and the Net lets us watch it when we want. Terrific.

But we need to remember that delivering mass media is the least of the Net’s powers.

The Net’s super-power is connection without permission. Its almighty power is that we can make of it whatever we want.

It is therefore not time to lean back and consume the oh-so-tasty junk food created by Fools and Marauders as if our work were done. It is time to breathe in the fire of the Net and transform every institution that would play us for a patsy.

36 http://newclues.cluetrain.com/ 129

An organ-by-organ body snatch of the Internet is already well underway. Make no mistake: with a stroke of a pen, a covert handshake, or by allowing memes to drown out the cries of the afflicted we can lose the Internet we love.

We come to you from the years of the Web’s beginning. We have grown old together on the Internet. Time is short.

We, the People of the Internet, need to remember the glory of its revelation so that we reclaim it now in the name of what it truly is.

- Once were we young in the Garden... a. The Internet is us, connected. 1. The Internet is not made of copper wire, glass fiber, radio waves, or even tubes. 2. The devices we use to connect to the Internet are not the Internet. 3. Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, and 中国电信 do not own the Internet. Facebook, Google, and Amazon are not the Net’s monarchs, nor yet are their minions or algorithms. Not the governments of the Earth nor their Trade Associations have theconsent of the networked to bestride the Net as sovereigns. 4. We hold the Internet in common and as unowned. 5. From us and from what we have built on it does the Internet derive all its value. 6. The Net is of us, by us, and for us. 7. The Internet is ours.

b. The Internet is nothing and has no purpose.

8. The Internet is not a thing any more than gravity is a thing. Both pull us together. 9. The Internet is no-thing at all. At its base the Internet is a set of agreements, which the geeky among us (long may their names be hallowed) call “protocols,” but which we might, in the temper of the day, call “commandments.” 10. The first among these is: Thy network shall move all packets closer to their destinations without favor or delay based on origin, source, content, or intent. 11. Thus does this First Commandment lay open the Internet to every idea, application, business, quest, vice, and whatever. 12. There has not been a tool with such a general purpose since language. 13. This means the Internet is not for anything in particular. Not for social networking, not for documents, not for advertising, not for business, not for education, not for porn, not for anything. It is specifically designed for everything. 14. Optimizing the Internet for one purpose de-optimizes it for all others 15. The Internet like gravity is indiscriminate in its attraction. It pulls us all together, the virtuous and the wicked alike.

c. The Net is not content.

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16. There is great content on the Internet. But holy mother of cheeses, the Internet is not made out of content. 17. A teenager’s first poem, the blissful release of a long-kept secret, a fine sketch drawn by a palsied hand, a blog post in a regime that hates the sound of its people’s voices — none of these people sat down to write content. 18. Did we use the word “content” without quotes? We feel so dirty.

d. The Net is not a medium.

19. The Net is not a medium any more than a conversation is a medium. 20. On the Net, we are the medium. We are the ones who move messages. We do so every time we post or retweet, send a link in an email, or post it on a social network. 21. Unlike a medium, you and I leave our fingerprints, and sometimes bite marks, on the messages we pass. We tell people why we’re sending it. We argue with it. We add a joke. We chop off the part we don’t like. We make these messages our own. 22. Every time we move a message through the Net, it carries a little bit of ourselves with it. 23. We only move a message through this “medium” if it matters to us in one of the infinite ways that humans care about something. 24. Caring — mattering — is the motive force of the Internet.

e. The Web is a Wide World.

25. In 1991, Tim Berners-Lee used the Net to create a gift he gave freely to us all: the World Wide Web. Thank you. 26. Tim created the Web by providing protocols (there’s that word again!) that say how to write a page that can link to any other page without needing anyone’s permission. 27. Boom. Within ten years we had billions of pages on the Web — a combined effort on the order of a World War, and yet so benign that the biggest complaint was the tag. 28. The Web is an impossibly large, semi-persistent realm of items discoverable in their dense inter-connections. 29. That sounds familiar. Oh, yeah, that’s what the world is. 30. Unlike the real world, every thing and every connection on the Web was created by some one of us expressing an interest and an assumption about how those small pieces go together. 31. Every link by a person with something to say is an act of generosity and selflessness, bidding our readers leave our page to see how the world looks to someone else. 32. The Web remakes the world in our collective, emergent image.

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- But oh how we have strayed, sisters and brothers...

a. How did we let conversation get weaponized, anyway? 33. It’s important to notice and cherish the talk, the friendship, the thousand acts of sympathy, kindness, and joy we encounter on the Internet. 34. And yet we hear the words “fag” and “nigger” far more on the Net than off. 35. Demonization of ‘them’ — people with looks, languages, opinions, memberships and other groupings we don’t understand, like, or tolerate — is worse than ever on the Internet. 36. Women in Saudi Arabia can’t drive? Meanwhile, half of us can’t speak on the Net without looking over our shoulders 37. Hatred is present on the Net because it’s present in the world, but the Net makes it easier to express and to hear. 38. The solution: If we had a solution, we wouldn’t be bothering you with all these damn clues. 39. We can say this much: Hatred didn’t call the Net into being, but it’s holding the Net — and us — back. 40. Let’s at least acknowledge that the Net has values implicit in it. Human values. 41. Viewed coldly the Net is just technology. But it’s populated by creatures who are warm with what they care about: their lives, their friends, the world we share. 42. The Net offers us a common place where we can be who we are, with others who delight in our differences. 43. No one owns that place. Everybody can use it. Anyone can improve it. 44. That’s what an open Internet is. Wars have been fought for less.

b. "We agree about everything. I find you fascinating!"

45. The world is spread out before us like a buffet, and yet we stickwith our steak and potatoes, lamb and hummus, fish and rice, or whatever. 46. We do this in part because conversation requires a common ground: shared language, interests, norms, understandings. Without those, it’s hard or even impossible to have a conversation. 47. Shared grounds spawn tribes. The Earth’s solid ground kept tribes at a distance, enabling them to develop rich differences. Rejoice! Tribes give rise to Us vs. Them and war. Rejoice? Not so much. 48. On the Internet, the distance between tribes starts at zero. 49. Apparently knowing how to find one another interesting is not as easy as it looks. 50. That’s a challenge we can meet by being open, sympathetic, and patient. We can do it, team! We’re #1! We’re #1! 51. Being welcoming: There’s a value the Net needs to learn from the best of our real world cultures.

c. Marketing still makes it harder to talk.

52. We were right the first time: Markets are conversations.

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53. A conversation isn’t your business tugging at our sleeve to shill a product we don’t want to hear about. 54. If we want to know the truth about your products, we’ll find out from one another. 55. We understand that these conversations are incredibly valuable to you. Too bad. They’re ours. 56. You’re welcome to join our conversation, but only if you tell us who you work for, and if you can speak for yourself and as yourself. 57. Every time you call us “consumers” we feel like cows looking up the word “meat.” 58. Quit fracking our lives to extract data that’s none of your business and that your machines misinterpret. 59. Don’t worry: we’ll tell you when we’re in the market for something. In our own way. Not yours. Trust us: this will be good for you. 60. Ads that sound human but come from your marketing department’s irritable bowels, stain the fabric of the Web. 61. When personalizing something is creepy, it’s a pretty good indication that you don’t understand what it means to be a person. 62. Personal is human. Personalized isn’t. 63. The more machines sound human, the more they slide down into the uncanny valley where everything is a creep show. 64. Also: Please stop dressing up ads as news in the hope we’ll miss the little disclaimer hanging off their underwear. 65. When you place a “native ad,” you’re eroding not just your own trustworthiness, but the trustworthiness of this entire new way of being with one another. 66. And, by the way, how about calling “native ads” by any of their real names: “product placement,” “advertorial,” or “fake fucking news”? 67. Advertisers got along without being creepy for generations. They can get along without being creepy on the Net, too.

d. The Gitmo of the Net.

68. We all love our shiny apps, even when they’re sealed as tight as a Moon base. But put all the closed apps in the world together and you have a pile of apps. 69. Put all the Web pages together and you have a new world. 70. Web pages are about connecting. Apps are about control. 71. As we move from the Web to an app-based world, we lose the commons we were building together. 72. In the Kingdom of Apps, we are users, not makers. 73. Every new page makes the Web bigger. Every new link makes the Web richer. 74. Every new app gives us something else to do on the bus. 75. Ouch, a cheap shot! 76. Hey, “CheapShot” would make a great new app! It’s got “in-app purchase” written all over it.

e. Gravity's great until it sucks us all into a black hole.

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77. Non-neutral applications built on top of the neutral Net are becoming as inescapable as the pull of a black hole. 78. If Facebook is your experience of the Net, then you’ve strapped on goggles from a company with a fiduciary responsibility to keep you from ever taking the goggles off. 79. Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple are all in the goggles business. The biggest truth their goggles obscure: These companies want to hold us the way black holes hold light. 80. These corporate singularities are dangerous not because they are evil. Many of them in fact engage in quite remarkably civic behavior. They should be applauded for that. 81. But they benefit from the gravity of sociality: The “network effect” is that thing where lots of people use something because lots of people use it. 82. Where there aren’t competitive alternatives, we need to be hypervigilant to remind these Titans of the Valley of the webby values that first inspired them. 83. And then we need to honor the sound we make when any of us bravely pulls away from them. It’s something between the noise of a rocket leaving the launchpad and the rip of Velcro as you undo a too-tight garment.

f. Privacy in an age of spies.

84. Ok, government, you win. You’ve got our data. Now, what can we do to make sure you use it against Them and not against Us? In fact, can you tell the difference? 85. If we want our government to back off, the deal has to be that if — when — the next attack comes, we can’t complain that they should have surveilled us harder. 86. A trade isn’t fair trade if we don’t know what we’re giving up. Do you hear that, Security for Privacy trade-off? 87. With a probability approaching absolute certainty, we are going to be sorry we didn’t do more to keep data out of the hands of our governments and corporate overlords.

g. Privacy in an age of weasels.

88. Personal privacy is fine for those who want it. And we all draw the line somewhere. 89. Q: How long do you think it took for pre-Web culture to figure out where to draw the lines? A: How old is culture? 90. The Web is barely out of its teens. We are at the beginning, not the end, of the privacy story. 91. We can only figure out what it means to be private once we figure out what it means to be social. And we’ve barely begun to re-invent that. 92. The economic and political incentives to de-pants and up-skirt us are so strong that we’d be wise to invest in tinfoil underwear. 93. Hackers got us into this and hackers will have to get us out.

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- To build and to plant

a. Kumbiyah sounds surprisingly good in an echo chamber. 94. The Internet is astounding. The Web is awesome. You are beautiful. Connect us all and we are more crazily amazing than Jennifer Lawrence. These are simple facts. 95. So let’s not minimize what the Net has done in the past twenty years: 96. There’s so much more music in the world. 97. We now make most of our culture for ourselves, with occasional forays to a movie theater for something blowy-uppy and a $9 nickel-bag of popcorn. 98. Politicians now have to explain their positions far beyond the one-page “position papers” they used to mimeograph. 99. Anything you don’t understand you can find an explanation for. And a discussion about. And an argument over. Is it not clear how awesome that is? 100. You want to know what to buy? The business that makes an object of desire is now the worst source of information about it. The best source is all of us. 101. You want to listen in on a college-level course about something you’re interested in? Google your topic. Take your pick. For free. 102. Yeah, the Internet hasn’t solved all the world’s problems. That’s why the Almighty hath given us asses: that we might get off of them. 103. Internet naysayers keep us honest. We just like ‘em better when they aren’t ingrates.

b. A pocket full of homilies.

104. We were going to tell you how to fix the Internet in four easy steps, but the only one we could remember is the last one: profit. So instead, here are some random thoughts… 105. We should be supporting the artists and creators who bring us delight or ease our burdens. 106. We should have the courage to ask for the help we need. 107. We have a culture that defaults to sharing and laws that default to copyright. Copyright has its place, but when in doubt, open it up 108. In the wrong context, everyone’s an a-hole. (Us, too. But you already knew that.) So if you’re inviting people over for a swim, post the rules. All trolls, out of the pool! 109. If the conversations at your site are going badly, it’s your fault. 110. Wherever the conversation is happening, no one owes you a response, no matter how reasonable your argument or how winning your smile. 111. Support the businesses that truly “get” the Web. You’ll recognize them not just because they sound like us, but because they’re on our side. 112. Sure, apps offer a nice experience. But the Web is about links that constantly reach out, connecting us without end. For lives and ideas, completion is death. Choose life. 113. Anger is a license to be stupid. The Internet’s streets are already crowded with licensed drivers. 114. Live the values you want the Internet to promote.

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115. If you’ve been talking for a while, shut up. (We will very soon.)

c. Being together: the cause of and solution to everyproblem.

116. If we have focused on the role of the People of the Net — you and us — in the Internet’s fall from grace, that’s because we still have the faith we came in with. 117. We, the People of the Net, cannot fathom how much we can do together because we are far from finished inventing how to be together. 118. The Internet has liberated an ancient force — the gravity drawing us together. 119. The gravity of connection is love. 120. Long live the open Internet. 121. Long may we have our Internet to love.

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USER DATA MANIFESTO 2.037

(2015) Frank Karlitschek

This manifesto aims at defining users’ fundamental rights to their own data in the Internet age. People ought to be free and should not have to pay allegiance to service providers.

1. User data means any data uploaded by a user for his or her own use.

Thus, users should have:

1. Control over user data access

User data should be under the ultimate control of the user. Users should be able to decide whom to grant direct access to their data and with which permissions and licenses such access should be granted.

Data generated or associated with user data (e.g. metadata) should also be made available to that user and put under their control just like the user data itself.

2. Knowledge of how user data is stored

When user data is uploaded to a specific service provider, users should be informed about the geographic location that specific service provider stores the data in, how long, in which jurisdiction that specific service provider operates and which laws apply.

This point is not relevant when users are able to store their own data on devices in their vicinity and under their direct control (e.g. servers) or when they rely on systems without centralised control (e.g. peer-to-peer).

3. Freedom to choose a platform

Users should always be able to extract their data from the service at any time without experiencing any vendor lock-in.

If users have these rights, they are in control of their data rather than being subjugated by service providers.

Many services that deal with user data at the moment are gratis, but that does not mean they are free (as in freedom). Instead of paying with money, users are paying with their allegiance to the service providers so that they can exploit user data (e.g. by selling them, licensing them or building a profile for advertisers).

37 https://userdatamanifesto.org/ 137

Surrendering privacy and other rights in this way may seem to many people a trivial thing and a small price to pay for the sake of convenience that these Internet services bring.

Service providers have thus been unwittingly compelled to turn their valuable Internet services into massive and centralised surveillance systems. It is of grave importance that people understand and realize this, since it forms a serious threat to the freedom of humanity and to the privacy of each individual.

Ultimately, to ensure that user data is under the users’ control, the best technical designs include peer-to-peer or distributed systems, and unhosted applications. Legally, that means terms of service should respect users’ rights and give them the possibility to exercise the datarights defined in this manifesto.

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WE LOST38

(2015) F.A.T. GOLD - Magnus Eriksson and Evan Roth.

Ten years separate the talk given by Frank Rieger and Rop Gonggrijp at the 2005 Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin and the one given by Peter Sunde of Piratbyrån and The Pirate Bay at Transmediale in the same city in 2015, but their message is the same - -- we lost. We, who believed the Internet could change society, that technology could take other paths than surveillance, centralization and consumerism. The battle is lost and the juggernaut of the security industry, power and capital has been unable to stop.

What is also lost is the potential of the now so popular artistic hacking practices at a time when the tech industry on the one hand supersedes any artistic attempt at parody of it when they make themselves look like idiots in more extravagant ways every day and on the other hand continues to be able to incorporate critic and creativity to make itself stronger.

Realizing that you lost can be a powerful thing both depressing and liberating.

There are different reactions to the realization that you lost. The first impulse is to give up. Giving up leads to cynicism, disconnection from social contexts or postponing any action until you "figured things out". Needless to say this is a dark path. But equally bad is denial of loss. Believing that if you just keep going, the next time you will really show them. It's just around the corner, just a few more projects away. Just have to try a little harder next time. The longer time passes the more the feeling that it won't happen keeps creeping up on you. The new projects and ideas seem just a little bit more hollow than the last ones. You should have stopped already a long time ago.

The more active reaction is to shut down. Determined, proactive, and with intent. There are different ways of shutting down. Piratbyrån burned the file sharing debate in a big book burning when it had run its course. KLF burned a million pounds when they left the music industry. Both The Pirate Bay themselves and their adversaries have been trying to shut it down for years but it keeps being reborn. Only by quiting forcefully before it is too late can a loss be turned into something else than a defeat.

But there is never a good point to shut down. Either you are too early and people think you are making a fuss about nothing and are just destroying the party with your negativity, or you are too late and no one cares anymore. The shutdown becomes a fade away and looses its liberatory powers. You need to shut something down that you still care deeply about. If you can't decide if it is the right thing to do or not, it probably is.

The context of the talk from Chaos Communication Congress of how we lost the war came out of the last great battles for privacy and against biometric identification in a Germany with the cold war still fresh in memory and from the fight against surveillance in a terrorism-frightened Netherlands. In the talk they project forward ten years to 2015. Technological limits for data retention that existed in 2005 are done away with and technical capacities for surveillance are infinite. Yet they also postpone the hope of a

38 http://fffff.at/we-lost/ 139 new resistance ten years into the future. Maybe in 2015 people have had enough and ten years of capacity building for technological resistance can change society. It is these promises of a large "prosecution of the criminals of the security industry in 2015" that sound the most depressing today. Ten years later we catch up with those predictions in Peter's talk that comes a few months after he came out of prison and his exhaustion from ten years of activism against copyright laws, trade agreements and in the backwaters of massive leaks of information about surveillance that led to absolutely nothing.

It would be unwise to predict ten years into the future again. But one thing is clear, tactics of the last 5 years whether legal, political, activist or artistic have resulted in little progress and have not kept up with the latest control measures. There's no use banging our heads against the wall anymore. Either your head will explode or they will simply open the door and let you in. Either way, no house will come crumbling down. It was as true in 2005 as when Peter says it in 2015. Let's face it, we lost, we all lost.

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BETA – MANIFEST FOR THE FUTURE ART MARKET39

(2016) Association of German Galleries and Art Dealers (BVDG) and Independent Collectors

1. The gallery’s authority on price setting will be constantly called into question.

“Only those who sell the emperor’s new clothes need to be scared of transparency: Who cares about costs when you offer the finest silk? People will reveal the price paid – either openly or subtly.” – Max Schreier, partnership content manager, Artsy

“There is no price setting authority in the internet age, even if people still act like there is. Global digital networks enable global research and reduce the role of the art gallery to that of a shop.” – Wolf Leiser, director, DAM Gallery

2. More artists become entrepreneurs – the gallery owners their business partners.

“I believe in the attitude ‘cooperation takes priority’, and structure many financial aspects of my gallery work transparently – internally and sometimes externally. For example, we take part in an art fair – and guess who pays for it? The artist and I split the costs and workload between us. This way we both retain control and share responsibility for the outcome.” – Kelani Nichole, TRANSFER NYC

3. Virtual reality will be able to simulate and potentially replace the live experiencing of art.

“Virtual reality will soon be able to represent existing artworks very realistically. The spatial experience made possible through technologies like stereoscopy and tracking enables the viewer to walk round artworks and installations on a 1:1 scale. But the medium doesn’t just offer simulation: its greatest potential lies in creating spaces and experiences beyond the laws of physics. In this realm, there is an almost unlimited scope for artistic opportunities.” – Philip Hausmeier, CEO of Metaphysics and founder of the Virtual Reality Berlin meet-ups

“Today’s digital images produce a reality indistinguishable from the photographed one. Virtual reality will completely convey the visual-haptic quality of artworks. This applies to digital works and to those transferred from the physical world. The poor

39 http://beta-manifest.de/en/index.html# 141 image will die out. There will be no difference between digital and physical aesthetics. Both will overlap in VR, which will be universally available online. The virtual space will be more important than the physical one. Things that do not exist there in high quality will hardly be valued.” – Tina Sauerländer, free curator and author, co-founder of Peer to Space

4. A high net appeal yields short-term results in the online marketing of art – but in the long term online sales, too will only be successful if there is a tangible place of desire.

“The same that applies to other producers and dealers has always applied gallerists and artists: multichannel. Personal contact is the best way to approach a purchaser, but in order to expand over a wider area you have to promote yourself accordingly – and the internet is ideal for this. A good website is a must; galleries without websites are only possible for as long as the demand for artworks is greater than the supply. But there will be a day when a desire for growth or increasing cost pressures require more extensive publicity work.” – Peter Niemann, Sammlung Haus N

“With an ever-increasing number of sources vying for attention, actors in the art market will have to manage various analogue and digital distribution channels. On top of this, new ‘live’ or VR formats offer an enormous potential for sharing experiences that are physically separated yet digitally unified. But can they replace direct encounters with art? When almost everything is digitally accessible, art fairs, exhibition openings, previews and ‘flash sales’ are needed in order to provide orientation and the incentive to buy.” – Katharina Bauckhage, founder, Artflash

5. Digital channels will pave the way for a new mainstream art market, but not effectively democratize the current one.

“Digitalization will not lead to a democratization of the art market, but to its ‘basification’. Nowadays, everyone with a smartphone can be a publisher. What has become democratized is the capacity to promote artworks and artists. The ability to buy something at one of the larger art fairs, however, remains a reserve of the wealthy – actual democratization would mean a dramatic fall in prices. To know that something exists isn’t the same as being able to afford it.” – Marc Spiegler, director, Art Basel

Almost half (49%) of those surveyed stated that they had purchased art online in the last 12 months. In 41% of those surveyed, the amount invested in this way was under 1,400 euros. 142

Most online art purchases are currently in the lower price segment of the market: in the companies surveyed, around 44% of the works sold were under $1,000, and around 97% were under $50,000.

6. Rankings will offer orientation to investors – and potentially mislead them.

“The art investor follows the art market like the stock market. Rankings can offer a certain amount of orientation, but they only index outcomes from the past and present – they are never able to look into the future. Rankings pose the greatest danger for those who purchase art with a view to gaining a return on investment. The fact that artists go in and out of fashion can’t be figured out by any ranking system.” – Euphemia von Kaler zu Lanzenheim, founder, curart online gallery

7. Copyright violation will become a business model: some will use it to increase visibility, others to assert commercial interests.

“The digital challenges the definition of ownership: How can you ‘own’ something when it can be freely copied and sent around the world within seconds? This makes it difficult to understand a digital file as something possessing value. Actually, the world has dreamed of this for a long time, always yearning for ‘the future’. Well, the future is already here: producers can now use an open register – a blockchain – to assert and verify intellectual property rights, transfer ownership and assign value to digital work.” – Masha McConaghy, co-founder of ascribe and BigchainDB.

“Copyright infringements are able to become business models in areas where the copy can replace the original – the recording industry could tell us all about it. It’s different in (analogue) art: the original is what counts. It is safe to assume that even in the digital art market, the original’s function as a communicator of attribution and exclusivity will still play a significant role. Blockchain and smart contracts will make the original intangible. The copy will remain – at least in a commercial sense – of little importance.” – Jakob Braeuer, art lawyer and partner, Bauschke Braeuer

8. More and more private collections will become publicly accessible – both online and offline.

“We are currently witnessing the growth of a new generation of collectors who want to share their collections and exchange views on art. But very few of them get the chance to display their works in museum-like settings. Platforms such as Independent Collectors offer the opportunity to ‘exhibit’ individual collections in a high-quality

143 context, thereby helping artists – especially young ones – to reach a larger audience. It would be absurd if the newest art were otherwise only publicly accessible a few years or decades later – when the large institutions ‘rediscover’ it.” – Karoline Pfeiffer, director, Independent Collectors

In 2015, among dealers who sell art online: 52% sold to new customers, 19% sold to known buyers that the gallery owner or gallery is not personally acquainted with, and 29% sold to personally known buyers/collectors.

46% of art buyers prefer to buy offline, yet over half (54%) of those surveyed would be as inclined or prefer to buy art online.

9. Social Media use will influence the sale of contemporary art more than traffic from “click and buy” platforms.

“Social media rules the world – so do we! For a new project space like the EIGEN + ART Lab, social media is a perfect tool for bringing our artists and projects to a wider audience in a modern, up-to-date way.” – Anne Schwanz, Johanna Neuschäffer, directors, EIGEN + ART Lab

Have you bought artworks from artists that you discovered on Instagram?

Have you bought specific artworks that you originally found on Instagram?

10. Talk of digitalization will be a thing of the past.

“The idea that digitalization is the solution we all crave is overestimated; it doesn’t reduce or simplify the work required. Ignoring the digital realm actually decreases the workload – but also customer numbers.” – Ivo Wessel, collector and software developer

“In five years, the digital will be so self-evident that people will no longer talk about ‘digitalization’. Do you hear anyone today speaking about ‘telephonization’?” – Christian Kaspar Schwarm, collector and founder of Independent Collectors

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SPEED SHOW LA: MANIFESTO40

(2016) Aram Bartholl

Statement:

A manifesto is a published verbal declaration of the intentions, motives, or views of the issuer, be it an individual, group, political party or government. A manifesto usually accepts a previously published opinion or public consensus and/or promotes a new idea with prescriptive notions for carrying out changes the author believes should be made. It often is political or artistic in nature, but may present an individual’s life stance. [Wikipedia]

Manifestos have always played an important role in art movements. The tutorial for how to become a successful artist could be “Step 1: Write a manifesto!…” Sometimes the manifesto itself becomes the art work, or in other cases the opposite happens. A kind of unwritten manifesto is in place, an art scene influencing and quoting each others’ work with their own set of rules and aesthetic ideas. It also happens that an art work has strong manifesto qualities itself or that a single piece represents a whole generation of art. Computer code is by definition a manifesto, a set of rules which are interpreted by the machine. While we’ve been looking at screens and talking about the Internet, the physical manifestation of art work has played a particularly important role over the last ten years.

The very first Speed Show took place in Berlin in the summer of 2010. Six years later, after many Speed Shows world wide and a couple years break, I am very pleased to present the first Speed Show in Los Angeles. More than 20 artists, international and local, from LA, will present a wide range of art from classic works to brand new pieces. It is again an interesting moment (like in 2010) to take a look at the different generations of net artist, Internet artists, art under the influence of the Internet etc … A lot has happened since 2010. Different art scenes developed and moved on, the art world got closer to the Internet and Snowden drained our comfortable bath of naivety. LA 2016! Time for a new manifesto?

40 https://jonaslund.biz/2016/02/12/speed-show-la-manifesto-curated-aram-bartholl/ 145

THE PERFECT MEDIUM USER41

(2016) Casey Gollan

“Great writing deserves a great audience.” —Medium A Adventurous but not un-curated Anxious but not without a support system Argumentative but not willing to burn bridges Athletic but not without the right gear B Brand partnerships but not poorly executed Buddhist but not religious C Charismatic but not born that way Complicit but not cynical Creative but not an artist Culture fit but not conformist

D Disruptive but not to power structures Dogmatic but not judgmental E Earnest but not self-aware Educated but not academic Efficient but not utilitarian Emotional but not nuanced Empathetic but not without trumpeting it Executive but not authoritarian Experimental but not avant-garde Extravagant but not without having earned it F Fun-loving but not spontaneous

G Greedy but not outwardly-so

41 https://medium.com/@caseyg/the-perfect-medium-user-4d2082cc495 146

H Hacker but not really a coder Hard-working but not on something that matters Humorous but not funny I Idealistic but not too idealistic In touch with nature but not during the work week Independent but not without plenty of savings Inoffensive but not safe for work Inspirational but not with any follow-through Interested but not enough hours in the day Interspersed with professional content but not elevated by it J Juvenile but not a bro

K Kindle but not over print L Libertarian but not into the singularity Longform but not substantial

M Male but not proud of it Mansplaining but not without qualification

N Navel-gazing but not without takeaways NDA’d but not in stealth mode Nomadic but not without a Macbook O Opportunistic but not even trying Overwhelmed but not in danger P Perfect recommendation but not without a referral link Persuasive but not lasting Press release but not formal Privileged but not doing anything about it

Q Quirky but not insolvent

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R Rational but not without an anecdote Rich but not relatively S Self-involved but not egomaniacal Self-promoting but not without full disclosure Selling something but not to everyone Shared but not read yet Sponsored content but not banner ads Straight but not homophobic Successful but not without precedent

T Transparent but not legible

U Unique but not too different Unpolished but not off-the-cuff V Vain but not anyone’s fault in this day and age

W Well-meaning but not going to happen White but not without heritage Worldly but not actually cultured

X Xenophobic but not against immigration reform Y Young but not youthful

Z Zen but not outside the office

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