________________________________________________________________________________ I hope that somebody is going to recuperate us Interview with 100101010101.org ?: You got known in the net scene, because you made a complete copy of the art site hell.com, and put it on your site. Tell me what you did exactly... 0100101110101101.org: We are subscribed to the net art list „Rhizome“. There we heard that they would open a door to hell.com for 48 hours, for a show called „surface“. It was only for Rhizome subscribers, and you needed a password to look at it. We had never seen hell.com, but we had heard about it, and we thought that it was a normal museum of net art. So, during these 48 hourse, we downloaded all the stuff on their site. This was not as simple as it seems. Everybody’s saying: OK, so you took the site. But I’d like to challenge all those so-called net artists to download something like that site. It tooks us 26 hours. Then we put it on our website and sent an email with just the URL repeated hunderts of times to all mailing lists and newspapers and newsgroups. ?: Did you get a reaction from hell.com? 0100101110101101.org. Yes, only two hours later, the people of hell.com send us an email, saying that we were in copyright violation of all the artists and hell.com itself, and that we had to take down the site immediately. They charged us with international law, copyright, whatever. They wrote that to us and to the company that is hosting our site in Canada. Of course, we didn’t do anything; we left it there, and it is still there. A lot of people talked about this action, and everybody was on our side, so I think it made them look stupid. All the thousands of people who wanted to see hell.com, but couldn’t, were very happy that they could see it on our site. The New York Times published an article about it, and there were discussions on nettime and Rhizome, so I guess it was a lot of publicity for them. ?: Then again, if you have closed site, you probably don’t want that much publicity. I am not so sure how these international laws, that you mentioned, could be executed, by the way. They could probably get your provider to throw you out, but I think you are taking advantage of the fact that you are dealing with some american artists, who can’t afford to hire a bunch of lawyers to sue you in Europe. If you would have done the same thing with the site of CNN, they would have sued your ass of in ten minutes, and you would have taken the site down in no time... 0100101110101101.org: But that for sure would be interpretated as hackers’ behaviour, as an assault against something. But we are not against anything. We are not some kind of anarchists, who want to bring down web art or something. We just work with what we find, and what we like. The thing with hell.com now doesn’t seem such a good idea to me anymore. We had only two days, and when we saw it in the end it was so ugly, that we were very upset. If we would have known that it was so bad, we wouldn’t have copied it. To me hell.com is just a design exhibition. There is no idea behind it, no content. I rather agree with Duchamps idea of non-retinical art. In fact we present our work without computers. Yesterday there was no projector to show our website. For us it is not a problem, because I can transmit my idea just by talking to you. ?: So what was the idea behind taking this site? To access a formerly closed system, that was open only to a self-proclaimed elite, and make it accessible to everybody? 0100101110101101.org: Yes, and that is not really our new idea. That’s what every hacker does. The difference between us and hackers is that hackers are usually against something, they are negative. They react, we act. ?: That is a total misconception of what hackers are about and what hacker ethics are about... 0100101110101101.org: Maybe, I am not that familiar with hackers and their ethics. But I take a site like hell.com, because it is my interpretation of what they do. My interpretation of Jodi is to do a clone of Jodi. We think, that this is an exchange, a kind of interaction. ?: So why this fixation on art? Why not do the same operation with the website of CNN, for example? 0100101110101101.org: If you take two normal objects, like these chairs for exemple, and put them together, you create art. If you take two pictures and put them together, it is art about art. It’s the same on the net. What was interesting to us was not the creatation of art, but a discussion of art. ?: So would you agree, that what you are doing is only of interest, or only makes sense at all, because you are doing it within the art system? 0100101110101101.org: If you do what we do with an art work, the operation has a value in itself. If you work with content that is not art, it becomes more difficult to seperate the operation from the content. If you steal the CNN site, you are considered to be some kind of anarchist. But you cannot interact with CNN. That is what RT Mark are trying: there is some institution, and they are the anarchists, so they play some pranks on these institutions. That is very simple and not very innovative. I am more interested in ideas about art and its reproduction, about the author and about fakes. If you take George Bush ‘s site, it is a political hack. It is cyber-guerilla, but nobody is going to think: Oh, so Walter Benjamin was right... ?: So again, you do agree that these acts of recontextualization make only sense as an art practise? 0100101110101101.org: For now, I think. Maybe in the future, when people understand that we are not some anarchists, we can change directions and work with other stuff. But in the beginning it was important to make these ideas clear. The New York Times said it was against the commercialization of net art, but that wasn’t our point at all. ?: But the only pieces of yours that got talked about were your copies of hell.com and art.teleportacia by Olia Lialina, and they both had something to do with commerzialization of net art. 0100101110101101.org: But before hell.com we did a lot of clones of other people’s sites. We did „hybrids“ of the pages of Vuk Cosic and all these classics... ?: How is this different from, for example, Duchamp taking a picture of the Mona Lisa and drawing a moustache on it? And all the other acts of appropriation and re-appropriation, that went on all through the 20. century, and especially in the 80ies and 90ies - with artists such as Sherri Levine, for example? 0100101110101101.org: That is a good question. On the web you can do these things very freely, without destroying the original, because there is no original. Everybody can use the data on the net. When we clone Jodi, we don’t destroy their work. --- ?: Did they ever complain to you? 0100101110101101.org: No, they are ignoring us. I think they must be upset, because we deconstruct their site. For example, there is an index page on the site. But it is hidden, so it is very hard to navigate the site, and you get lost all the time, so if you look at the page, you are just clicking and clicking. So we just took the index and put it on the opening page. So you see exactly where the different parts and sections are. When you copy a site, you learn a lot of things about their authors. You see what the hierachical and even the chronological order of the site is. It is very interesting. I think if you want to learn painting, you start by copying other people’s paintings... ?: So are you saying that you are basically teaching yourself how to be net artists by copying other people’s sites? 0100101110101101.org: We use it in a interactive way. I don’t think that clicking on a website is interaction. That is just doing what you are supposed to do. To me interaction is when you are using something in a way, that has not been projected by its author. ?: But that is in the nature of the web anyway. Anybody can look at the source code of a website, and see how it has been done, and they don’t need some smart artist to do it for them... 0100101110101101.org: Of course, we don’t claim any kind of copyright. Anybody can download whole sites. You just need some software, and you don’t have to be worried about copyright infringements. Our point was that you have a way of behaving towards the work. You can choose your attitude, or what you want to do with the piece. You are not obliged to just look at it. You have the tools to do something else. Cloning is just one thing you can do with these works. You can modify them, you can add things, you can put them in a different order, you can do anything. We would like to see some more interaction on the net, some more energy, some more power. Because the way net art is developing now is really in the same direction as the normal art scene. You have artists with their names and their biographies and their works, and they are geniuses, and that’s the surplus value of what they do. ?: As far as I know, no net arist has called him- or herself a genius so far... 0100101110101101.org: But in thirty years, they will be. Jodi will called be the Leonardo da Vinci of net art and Antiorp will be the Van Gogh... ?: So what’s wrong with net artists getting their due? 0100101110101101.org: The same thing as in the real world. The artists getting nothing for what they have done, and the collectors make millions... ?: From what? From selling some net.art files? 0100101110101101.org: Well, it is not so much an economical problem. Nobody thinks of himself as a genius. Or maybe, in thirty years, if they hear it over and over again, they start to think: Well, maybe I am a genius. But that’s not the point. The point is that on the net, as well as in the real world, there are a lot of people doing interesting things, like Alexander Brenner, who don’t get recognized by this system that proclaims people to be geniuses (???) Brenner created new originals by paiting over historic paintings... ?: ...and took away the possibility for people to look at Malevich’ „Black Square“... 0100101110101101.org: Well, they can look at it in catalogues. ?: Brenner is considered to be this Anti-Christ of contemporary art now. Where do you place yourself? 0100101110101101.org: I am not against art. I am not an anti-artist. We have seen what happened to Dada or Surrealism or all the other historical avantgardes. They all got completely absorbed by the system. So it doesn’t matter if you call yourself an artist or an anti-artist, because they will absorb you anyway. ?: So you might as well stop doing what you are doing, because it will be recuperated anyway.... 0100101110101101.org: Oh yes, everybody will be recuperated. I hope, someone is going to recuperate us... ________________________________________________________________________________ no copyright 1999 rolux.org - no commercial use without permission. is a moderated mailing list for the advancement of minor criticism. more information: mail to: majordomo@rolux.org, subject line: , message body: info. further questions: mail to: rolux-owner@rolux.org. archive: http://www.rolux.org