We hope that somebody is going to recuperate us!
Interview with 0100101110101101.ORG

[german version at: http://www.heise.de/tp/deutsch/inhalt/sa/5572/1.html]

Tilman Baumgaertel: 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 knew that it was the biggest museum of net.art.

So, during these 48 hours of opening, we downloaded all the stuff of
their site. This was not as simple as it seems, it took us 26 hours.
Then we put it on our website and sent an e-mail with just the URL
repeated hundreds of times to several mailing lists and newspapers.

Baumgaertel: Did you get a reaction from Hell.com?

0100101110101101.ORG. Yes, only two hours later, the people of Hell.com
send us, and to the company that is hosting our site in Canada, an
e-mail, 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 of copyright… whatever. We
didn't do anything, we left it there, and it is still there.

Everybody was talking about this action for weeks, so it created a
public debate that was a publicity stunt for us and, of course, for them
too. We had a huge amount of visits from all the people who wanted to
see Hell.com, but couldn't.

Baumgaertel: 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: You can always be more radical than you are. But
that for sure would be interpreted as an explicit political action, as
an assault against something. But we are not against anything. We are
not some kind of anarchists, that want to bring down web art. We just
work with what we find and try to transmit and propagate our ideas.

The thing with Hell.com now doesn't interest us 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! It's just a design exhibition. There is no idea behind it, no
content. I rather agree with Duchamp's idea of non-retinal art. We
present our work without computers, if yesterday there was no projector
to show the website, it wouldn't be a problem, because our work is not
supposed to be aesthetic but ethic, based on contents.

Baumgaertel: 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, first of all was the feeling that Hell.com
was exactly the opposite of what we think that the web could and should
be, but this is not really our own idea. That's what every hacker do.
The difference between us and hackers (in the popular and
"misunderstood" meaning of the word) is that we try to show that our
kind of activism is congenital to cyberspace, you don't have to be a
"hacker", because we have entered the "infoware" age. Hardware and
software ages are finished, now you don't have to be an hacker anymore,
you've got enough tools to transmit your ideas without "technical
abilities".

Baumgaertel: 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 example, and put them together, you create art. If you take two
paintings of these chairs and put them together, it's something else,
call it meta-art, anti-art or activism. It's the same on the net. What
is interesting to us is not the creation of art, but the discussion and
subversion of art. We should call it "artivism"?

Baumgaertel: 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 a work of art, the
operation has a value in itself. If you work with contents that are not
art, it becomes more difficult to distinguish the operation from the
content. If you steal the CNN site, you are acting against CNN. There
are many people doing this kind of hacktivism, think of groups like
RTMark and Mongrel, and they are doing great things. But we are not
interested in doing this kind of hacktivism. We work on other
contradictions like originality and reproduction, authorship and
network, copyright and plagiarism. You don't have to be explicitly
political to do something political.

Baumgaertel: So again, you do agree that these acts of
recontextualization make only sense as an art practise?

0100101110101101.ORG: Yes. In the beginning it was important for us to
make these ideas clear, because these are the presupposition of our way
of thinking. Now we can change directions and work with other stuff. The
New York Times said it was against the commercialisation of net.art, but
that wasn't our point at all.

Baumgaertel: 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 commercialisation of net art.

0100101110101101.ORG: When we copied Hell.com it wasn't a pay-per-view
site yet, it was just copyrighted and password protected. Anyway before
Hell.com and after Art.Teleportacia we did a lot of clones of other
people's sites, we used to do "hybrids" of the pages by other
net.artists that had nothing to do with "commercialisation".

Baumgaertel: 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 80's and 90's - with
artists such as Sherri Levine, for example?

0100101110101101.ORG: That is a good question. On the web you can do
these kind of actions very freely, without destroying the original,
because there is no original; it's not that we care that much about
"originals", not at all - in fact our off-line works were against
"originals" - but the paradigms of the "real world" are so rooted that
you will never change anything, you'll always be the umpteenth
anti-artist. On the contrary, on the net, you feel that you can change
something, you have the power of influence. This discussion on
originality hasn't meaning any longer in the net, Duchamp did it only
with reproductions of works of art, we do it with the works themselves
since the copy in the net is exactly the same as the original. Everybody
can use the data on the net. When we clone Jodi, we don't destroy their
work, we re-use it.

Baumgaertel: Did they ever complain to you?

0100101110101101.ORG: No. They must be upset, because we deconstruct
their site. In Jodi's site, for example, there is an index, but it's
hidden, so it is very hard to navigate the site, and you get lost all
the time just clicking and clicking. We just took the index and put it
on the opening page, so that you can see exactly where the different
parts and sections are. When you copy a site you learn a lot of things
about its authors. You see what the hierarchical and chronological order
of the site is. It is very interesting.

Baumgaertel: So are you saying that you are basically teaching yourself
how to be net artists by copying other people's sites?

0100101110101101.ORG: No, we use them interactively. We don't think that
clicking on a website is interaction. That is just doing what you are
supposed to do. It's not the work of art being "interactive", it's the
beholder that can use it interactively. Interaction is when you use
something in a way that has not been predicted by its author.

Baumgaertel: 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: We didn't invent anything, we only made it
explicit. Of course, we don't claim any kind of copyright for our way of
doing. Anybody can download whole sites. You just need some software,
and you don't have to be worried about copyright infringements. Our
point is that there is a different 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 of the things you can do with these works. You can
modify them, you can add things, you can put them in a different order,
you can even destroy them, you can do anything you want. We would like
to see some more of this kind of interaction on the net. Because the way
net.art is developing now is really the same direction as the normal art
scene. You have artists with names and surnames, biographies and works,
and they are geniuses, and that's the surplus value of what they do.

Baumgaertel: As far as I know, no net artist has called him- or herself
a genius so far…

0100101110101101.ORG: But in thirty years they will be. Jodi will be
called the Leonardo da Vinci of net.art and Antiorp will be the Van Gogh
and Vuk the Warhol… 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 for real!".

The point is that on the net, as well as in the real world, there is not
"geniuses", inspired by the muse, there is only a huge, endless exchange
of information and influences. The "knowledge" is only a big plagiarism.
Even in the "real world" there are a lot of people doing interesting
things about these topics, like Piero Cannata on Michelangelo and
Pollock, like Aleksander Brener, who created a new painting over the
Malevich's one…

Baumgaertel: …and took away the possibility for people to look at
Malevich' "Black Square"…

0100101110101101.ORG: Well, they can look at it in catalogues.

Baumgaertel: Brener is considered to be this Anti-Christ of contemporary
art now, the scary anti-artist. Where do you place yourself?

0100101110101101.ORG: We don't consider ourselves "artists" but
"beholders". We are not against art, we are not anti-artists. We have
seen what happened to Dada or Surrealism and all the other historical
avant-garde, it doesn't matter if you call yourself an artist or an
anti-artist, the only thing we care about are "contents".

Baumgaertel: So you might as well stop doing what you are doing, because
it will be recuperated anyway….

0100101110101101.ORG: This obsession of "being recuperated" is just a
Situationists paranoia. If nobody gives a shit about what you do is not
necessarily because you are so radical, but more probably because you
don't have anything to say. Anyway if you meant "recuperate" as
"becoming rich", we hope that somebody is going to recuperate us!