[A UK based artist has recently launched a series of sites with
domain names remarkably similar to those of some well known
London galleries. This interview was carried out by email in the
second week of June, just after the launch of the sites, which
are as follows.-MF]

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SERVICE 2000
29 Uncommissioned Web Sites

Available Now From the Following Locations:-

http://www.saatchigallery.org.uk
http://www.thelissongallery.co.uk
http://www.serpentinegallery.org.uk
http://www.richardsalmon.co.uk
http://www.gimpelfils.co.uk
http://www.anthonyreynolds.co.uk
http://www.anthonydoffay.co.uk http://www.annelyjuda.co.uk
http://www.laurentdelaye.co.uk
http://www.stephenfriedman.co.uk
http://www.waddingtongalleries.org.uk
http://www.michaelhue-williams.co.uk
http://www.victoriamiro.co.uk
http://www.sadiecoles.co.uk
http://www.gagosian.co.uk
http://www.whitecube.org.uk
http://www.turnerprize.org.uk http://www.thenationalgallery.org.uk
http://www.haywardgallery.org.uk
http://www.tategallery.org.uk http://www.halesgallery.co.uk
http://www.mattsgallery.org.uk
http://www.interimart.co.uk

http://www.anthonywilkinson.co.uk
http://www.rhodesmann.co.uk http://www.vilmagold.co.uk
http://www.luxgallery.org.uk
http://www.lauregenillard.co.uk
http://www.paulstolper.co.uk

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Matthew Fuller: You've effectively constructed a 'false' web ring of
some of the major private and publicly funded galleries in London. Do
you expect them to notice? How did you choose which galleries to target?
Is there any inter-relationship between them?

SERVICE 2000: Well, I suppose its possible they'll notice - I mean
eventually. When I first launched the sites (quietly) two weeks ago I
was afraid it would all go nuclear very quickly and the sites wouldn't
get much of a life. But I suspect that same lack of interest in the web
that has meant galleries haven't bothered to register the variants on
their own names has also afforded the project a certain amount of
protection. At one level they're just not that interested or informed
about this emergent culture. It's more true of the commercial than the
public spaces. But it tells you something about the way they are looking
at the web and not really getting it.

In terms of the galleries I chose to participate - well it was just a
matter of availability and my credit card limit. The letters ICA can
stand for many things and as a result there were no ICA domains left. So
hence, there's no ICA site in the piece. The others, it was pretty much
on the basis that they occured to me. If they were available, I
registered them. In terms of the relationship to one another - it's
actually geographical, it's a route that might be taken by someone
wandering round from gallery to gallery. When I was building the sites I
started at Euston Station, imagined myself going over the Saatchi
Gallery and progressed round from there. It's a trudge round some London
galleries.

Matthew Fuller: The sites on these domains have what must be some of the
crappest design going. There's untold animated gifs of opening and
closing envelopes, jumping bunnies, rainbow coloured horizontal rules,
and the music… did I clock Tubular Bells against a background of
dolphins for the Serpentine Gallery? Tasteful. Can you shame people into
submission?

SERVICE 2000: Actually the Serpentine has been given a cruel dose of
Jean Michel Jarre. (the famous bit from Oxygen) I don't know if I want
to shame the galleries. Just to make them aware of something.

Matthew Fuller: Christ, the granddaddy of all the bad love parade
techno. Painful. Do you consider that producing such top artwork on
sites whose domains are remarkably similar to those of well-known
galleries is a way of adding value to what is otherwise a straight act
of domain squatting? Presumably if the galleries want to 'buy their
names' back, they'll not just be coughing up for that, but for a bona
fide piece of web-art?

SERVICE 2000: I really don't consider this cybersquatting. It's
outreach. It's an outreach project targetted at galleries to help them
understand the significance of the internet as a communicative space.
Hence the top artwork. The commercial galleries haven't really engaged
with the web because they've failed to see how the web impacts on their
business. And to an extent it's also true of the public spaces.

I was really suprised that the Tate hadn't registered Tategallery in the
org.uk domain. I actually had about 60 hits on the name in the week
before I even posted anything up. Just people typing in the name on the
assumption that was where the site would be. People who wanted to find
out about the Tate. I suppose the tate rebranded as TATE and then forget
that everyone else in the country, the punters, think of them at 'The
Tate Gallery'.

That such a mismatch should occur between a gallery and its public -
that it wouldn't occur to them to register that and other variants. It
tells you something about how web-awareness stands in a gallery context
as opposed to a political or commercial context. Except of course for
the commercial gallery context - where there's even less of an
engagement with the web. Even very developed sites are little more than
catalogues. The Lisson has a go at something a bit more adventurous but
I mean, have you been to http://www.doffay.com lately?

The other thing that differentiates this project from cyber-squatting it
that whilst all the sites are for sale the domain names themselves
aren't. At the end of the piece I intend to give them to the galleries
I've targeted. It's what they get to take home for participating. It
really is an outreach project, on behalf of the internet.

Matthew Fuller: OK, so why the particular aesthetic for the sites? This
is a level of web-design only often achievable by scientists doing side-
line home-pages for their other interests in speculative fiction and
saddle sniffing. Could you not have done someting less knowingly dumb
with the material on the domains if the precise point is to make this
particular audience aware of the potential of this something?

SERVICE 2000: Well, I suppose on one level it has to be this awful to
really make that point clear. The point being - look, pay attention to
the culture you are in because if you don't then something this awful
can happen. It's a cautionary tale in that respect. A grey hat stategy,
I suppose. Also I do have a great affection for low-fi html, for all the
gifs and midi files on those physic students' home pages. It must be the
digital naive or something but I loves its garishness. The idea that
galleries, whose public image is so important to them in the way it aids
them construct value around art objects, should have these crappy sites
is I guess a way creating a somewhat entertaining contradiction. For
those in the know who are directed to these sites by word of mouth it's
probably just that. But, of course there is another audience for this
work. The 'genuine' surfers who reach my sites through search engines or
just tapping in the address on the off-chance. And I'm sure for them the
lo-fi design functions in a very different way - something approaching
shocked disbelief. I've had a few complaints from art historians who,
unaware of the status of the sites, complain that the quality of the
design reflects very badly on the galley and on London.

Matthew Fuller: Do you hope this this functions in some arse-about-face
way to land you a dealer?

SERVICE 2000: No, I'll get that from my SFMOMA show. And the email
drawings I'm doing next. Much more floggable than a gallery education
project.

Matthew Fuller: Nice that an art career is still that predicatable…

SERVICE 2000: I wish.

Matthew Fuller: How can you help people to find your sites, rather than
the more boring ones that some of the galleries have already got online?

SERVICE 2000: oh, check out alta vista or compuserve for names like
Anthony Doffay, Sadie Coles or Saatchi Gallery. In a number of cases my
sites score more highly than the official ones. Thus whilst I've had a
fair bit of traffic from people getting emailouts about the project -
I've also had a lot of hits from people using search engines. And since
it's a hermetic ring - once people are in….they can just surf on.

Matthew Fuller: Some of your previous work has been in part about
applying art methodologies to the web - ie: the drawings of sites, the
limited edition download, which in many ways revealed the procedural
awkwardness of these approaches have in a networked context. This time
you've switched it around - why? Or what relationships to the two modes
of work have?

SERVICE 2000: I take a lot of pleasure in bouncing things between online
and offline modes - and you're right that this is in large part to do
with exploring what happens if things are transferred or translated in
different ways. Making limited editioned digital works or hand drawing
web sites onto glass. But I'm not sure this project is such a reversal
of these earlier stategies, except in that rather than using the net as
a source of material it involves the creation of new content. Underlying
all of this is an interest in the operative and presentational
structures of the web and how it gets used by individuals and
organisations. Thus when it comes to making a piece about domain name
registration I can only think of ways in which I can pitch into that
process. The sites are a lot of fun but in terms of what it tells you
about how the web is being used its the fact of registering very well
known gallery names that carries, if you like, the conceptual weight of
the piece. It seems like a reversal - because it's online not offline -
but actually it's just the most sensible mode for exploring the
possibilities offered by the dns free for all we live in.

Matthew Fuller: How do you understand this work in relation to material
by say, Luther Blisset, (the faking of the artist 'Harry Kipper') or by
0100101110101101.ORG (the invention of 'Darko Maver') and other hoaxes
produced more internally to the art world? Following from these
projects, it seems you're moving in a more gentle, as you say,
'educative' direction?

SERVICE 2000: It depends on the audience and how they come to the work.
The audience reading this, if they choose to look at the piece will read
it as an art project. A web surfer who follows a badly formed link from
artdaily.com (and there is one) will experience my serpentine gallery
site as a hoax. Depending on who you are the work will appear very
differently.

Matthew Fuller: Perhaps the way to pull gallerists along behind you is
rather by producing something that generates the debris they require to
feed on as an after effect of its own activity?

SERVICE 2000: It's funny you should say that. One thing I didn't plan
when I started this project was just how much extra email I was going to
recieve. Every email address within the 30 or so gallery domains points
to my private mailbox and I've had about 50 emails from people trying to
contact the galleries. In some cases this is people who have made an
assumption about an email address - or just added .uk to a .org address.
In other cases it's people who've followed email links off the actual
sites. I'm turing them into a series of large pencil drawings - text
translations of the actual emails. So for example one text drawing says
"THE EMAIL FROM THE DEPUTY DIRECTOR OF THE CENTRE FOR ARTS AND CULTURE
TO THE SAATCHI GALLERY ASKING ABOUT THE REPRINT RIGHTS FOR FIVE IMAGES
FROM 'SENSATION'" whilst another reads "THE EMAIL FROM THE JOURNALIST AT
THE NEW STATESMEN TO THE WOMAN AT THE SERPENTINE ASKING IF SMOKING IS
PERMITTED ON THE PATIO". Little vignettes of art and life. I think
they'll be all the nicer because people will probably be aware that I
was never supposed to receive them.

Matthew Fuller: Perhaps the restrained and ironic nature of the sites
you have put up under these names would not achieve the effects you seek
so much as might the production of intense and vivid network cultures
(which may or may not correspond at various moments with art
modalitities)

SERVICE 2000: I wonder. It would be fantastic to see galleries actually
using their sites for cultural - rather than straight ecommerce -
purposes. How much richer many of the official sites would be if they
were engaging with those possibilites. In this instance, however, I
probably feel my job is to get them looking at the web as a site that
can have significance. Rather than be insignificant. And I note that
over the last three days my sites have been getting hits from staff at
the National Gallery, Royal Festival Hall, White Cube as well as the
company that handle the south bank centres web presence. So maybe that
process has already begun…..