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NOW YOU'RE IN MY COMPUTER
0100101110101101.ORG interviewed by Jaka Zeleznikar
> You work as a group and anonymously. Why did you decide for such way of presenting yourself to the public?The fact that 0100101110101101.ORG is a group was not decided by 0100101110101101.ORG, but by "you". 0100101110101101.ORG could be only one person, a couple or dozens of people. It is absolutely irrelevant how many and which individuals work to 0100101110101101.ORG. 0100101110101101.ORG isn't concerned with artistic individuality, identity, style or personality.
> In your early works you were interested in data duplication and simulation. What was your statement, how did you make this process of - to say in a simplified manner - copying as act of art?
The paradigms of modern art are in synthesis: novelty, originality, and authenticity. The Net has changed the paradigms of communication, therefore of culture and art. The new paradigms include accessibility, fruition, and duplication of information. Culture is pure manipulation and auto-replication, culture is essentially falsification. 0100101110101101.ORG is simply highlighting this process, without adding value to the action itself. 0100101110101101.ORG, in his declared non-originality, is paradoxically more authentic than hundreds of presumed creators. 0100101110101101.ORG has never produced anything. 0100101110101101.ORG only moves packages of information from one point to another, diverts their flow, observes changes, and eventually profits from it.
> Interaction is supposed to be a crucial part of net.art works. How do you relate to this idea of interactivity, and what is your idea of net.art?
"Interactivity" as it is usually meant, is a delusion, pure falsehood. When people reach a site - net.art or not, it doesn't matter - by their mouse clicks they choose one of the routes fixed by the author(s), they only decide what to see before and what after: this is not interactivity. It would be the same as stating that an exhibition in a museum is interactive because you can choose from which room to start, which works seeing before and which ones after. If net.art is interactive then Canova is interactive as well. 0100101110101101.ORG is showing that art in the web can really become "interactive ": the public must use it interactively. We must use an artwork in an unpredictable way, one that the author didn't foresee, to rescue it from its normal routine and re-use it in a different and novel way, otherwise all the paradigms of traditional art will impose themselves again.
> What kind of reactions have you received in response to the copies you made?
> Date: Mon, 10 May 1999 21:42:33 -0700
> From: JUSTICE@HELL.com
> Subject: WARNING1.0|||COPYRIGHT VIOLATION
>
> re:
> open_source_hell.com http://www.0100101110101101.ORG/hell.com
> cute...
>
> please immediately remove this material from your server
>
> you are in violation of international copyright laws which are clearly posted in the copyright
> information contained in our source code.
>
> also of note,
> it appears as though you have violated the copyrights of quite a few of our members
> individually:::::::::::::::
>
> http://www.0100101110101101.ORG
> on behalf of these individuals we request that you also remove these materials from your server
> as well
>
> it would make sense to use your "abilities" to attempt something *original*
>
> JUSTICE@HELL.COM
>
> Security\\\\
>
> http://HELL.COM> You bought the vaticano.org domain name and cloned the official Church site? Were some modifications made in the clone of the original site?
For a whole year "vaticano.org" was one of the (un)official organs of information of the Holy See. A huge site, aesthetically identical to the "real" one but with "slightly" modified contents. The detournement of the holy texts involved tens of people from the whole country, who were about to add German, Spanish and English language sections to the main, Italian one. For 12 months thousands of people visited "vaticano.org" and nobody realized that the contents of the site had been "re-touched ". Dozens of texts in which one could find everything: "heretical" proclamations, invented words, unpardonable errors and songs by 883 - an Italian teeny-bopper band - perfectly put in a "plausible" context. From the site it was possible to address letters directly to the Pope. Strange instructions "hijacked" pilgrims in the most remote places. A "Free Spirit Jubilee".
> How many visits did you get on this project? What were the reaction froms the church and visitors? At the end you had problems with the domain name...
vaticano.org-access.log:
total request = 4,210,542
total visits = 196,236Since an international law for copyright violation on the Internet is still to be created, the company that holds the official Holy See website, based in Rome, had the idea to buy a Server in Canada, where our vaticano.org site was hosted. It would have been sufficient to sue 0100101110101101.ORG's Canadian host provider, but somehow it didn't work. When the first year contract expired, Network Solutions - the company that sells Internet Domain Names - prevented 0100101110101101.ORG from renewing the contract of "vaticano.org", which had been regularly bought. Network Solutions refused all our attempts to pay for the domain and, after the contract expired, they immediately sold the domain name to a catholic association in Rome.
> From: Domain Registration Role Account domreg@internic.net
> Subject: Re: MODIFY DOMAIN vaticano.org
>
> Your request for MODIFY DOMAIN vaticano.org. could not be automatically processed.
>
> Your request has been queued for manual processing. This request will be processed in
> accordance with established procedures.> Probably the biggest media hoax was the invention of Darko Maver - the media created Balkan artist with shocking, explicitly violent works. A media and art system virus?
The "Darko Maver Case" isn't a media hoax, in fact he hasn't been invented to make fun of the media. Some journalists and magazines have actively taken part in his invention. The fact that media lie is not a big discovery, everybody knows it. Darko Maver is the demonstration that art is only a convention. For an artist to be considered an artist, and for his products to therefore be accepted as "works of art", it is enough to convince a certain number of people of the saleability of his idea, which is more important than the quality of the work itself. By convincing the knowledgeable persons who play crucial roles in the art system - journalists, critics, curators - it is relatively simple to prove that someone is an artist and establish his success.
0100101110101101.ORG has shown the mechanisms which hold contemporary art together, in order to make the way the institution works absolutely clear. This phenomena is commonly accepted or taken for granted and people undervalues its impact. If 0100101110101101.ORG hadn't claimed the prank, Darko Maver would still go on existing, setting many people buzzing through exhibitions, documentaries, catalogues and so on. Art is a sort of alchemy that, instead of changing metal into precious stone, transforms shit into gold. Potentially everything can be art, the point is only to know the rules of the game, and its tricks as well.
> What is your relation to Luther Blissett and who or what is Luther Blissett ?
0100101110101101.ORG won't answer to this question.
> Your latest work, life_sharing, is again completely computer based. You wish to explore the levels of representation, data nudity and shared distribution and production of artworks.
life_sharing is an anagram of File Sharing. life_sharing is a computer sharing its hard-disk with the whole world, making all its contents accessible via Internet. "All" means not a directory of the hard-disk but the whole content of the computer: programs, system, desktop, archives, tools, ongoing projects, mailboxes and so on. From the moment life_sharing started, every Internet user has free access, twenty-four hours a day to our computer. They can rummage through our archives, search for texts or files they're interested in, check what kind of software we work with, watch the "live" evolution of our projects and even read our private mail. Simulation, intellectual property, production and distribution of culture, the dualism between open and closed are some of the topics that this project wants to question.
> How do you see the relationship between aesthetics and functionality?
The functionality of a computer is an aesthetic quality: the beauty of configurations, the efficacy of software, the security of system, the distribution of data, are all characteristics of a new beauty. life_sharing is the result of aesthetic discipline applied everyday. It is the actualization of the idea of the 'total work of art' - gesamtkunstwerk - in other words, the dream of modeling reality through aesthetic canons.
> How do you relate to the Internet development, security, levels of permissions, privacy on the internet?
From now on the product of 0100101110101101.ORG will be its own visibility. life_sharing is the root under which will come other services, all directed to show to what degree our life can be monitored. We want to show as many forms of data as possible on us: not only in the transparency of the hard-disk, but also by analyzing economic transactions, the use of credit cards, physical movements and purchases. 0100101110101101.ORG will show the enormous amount of information that it is possible to find on a person in the present society.
> With group work you must somehow relate to the issue of copyright which was also the topic of your early works - which copyright model do you see as convenient?
0100101110101101.ORG's goal is not a complete abolition of copyright but its substitution with a license directly inspired by the GPL (Gnu General Public License, www.gnu.org), the license created explicitly for Free Software. Till now, the GPL has been applied only to software, with great success both economically and "culturally". 0100101110101101.ORG wish to apply the open source model also to all intellectual products. This is the result of political choices, and also technical and legal reasons. The idea of an open source license for intellectual products would grant the possibility of: (1) using the product; (2) modifying the product; (3)distributing copies, modified or not, of the product (freely or with payment); (4) combining the product, modified or not, with other products covered by the same open source license.
Until now, 0100101110101101.ORG hasn't placed a copyright on anything. If someone uses your music, your words or images, he is only doing you a favor. 0100101110101101.ORG's real strength is its visibility. Many people have spontaneously reused 0100101110101101.ORG (www.plagiarist.org, www.geocities.com/maxherman_2000/hell.html, www.message.sk/warped). If someone else profits from 0100101110101101.ORG, it's because of their own merit. In the end, it is doing the same kind of thing as we did: profit is always inevitably mutual.
January, 2001, Ljubljana. This interview by Jaka Zeleznikar was first published in the Slovenian weekly political/life-style magazine Mladina (www.mladina.si).