[Please find below the second of my three etoy articles. This one
deals mostly with etoy's history. The first article is titled "How
the etoy Campaign Was Won" (http://rhizome.org/object.rhiz?1642),
and the third, "Blueprint for Toywar II"
(http://rhizome.org/object.rhiz?1752). This essay, "Breakthrough to
the World Code," was written in April 2000 for the Rem Koolhaas
catalogue "mutations" which will be out soon.]
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Breakthrough to the World Code: etoy's Concept of Net Architecture
by Reinhold Grether
(Translated by Brian Currid)
dedicated to Peter Cook's prepackaged frozen lunch
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Net Architecture
People, goods, and data are: 1) distributed world wide 2) mobile 3)
localized. People are localized around the focal points of their lives,
goods are localized in warehouses and data on hard drives. We call the
world-wide circulation of people "tourism," the global transfer of goods
"shipping," and the movement of data "routing." Without packaging, there
can be no transportation. People are packaged in outfits and vehicles,
goods in shipping containers, and data in TCP/IP packages. Each packet
travels under the code name of an address, which anticipates an arrival
in a particular location. These addresses are called travel documents,
freight papers or headers. It begins with a delocalization, and until
arrival everything takes place in the anonymity of non-places. There can
be no transit without a net(work). At the end of the twentieth century,
the infrastructures of tourism, shipping, and routing are growing to
form net(work) architectures which span the world.
Article 77 from Le Corbusier's "The Athens Charter" (1943) summed up the
functionalism of traffic: local living, local working, local relaxation,
and between each of these a delocal movement. A whole epoch oriented
itself towards this four-way division of the surfaces – only the
networks did not. With the vile maliciousness of viruses, they
penetrated all protective shields of the local, and loaded even the last
hut with their lines, wires, cables, pipes, canals and shafts. Renzo
Piano and Richard Roger's 1977 "Centre Pompidou" revealed unmistakably
what the grids, skeletons and modules of modernity had always
symbolized, namely that local architectures organize superstructures for
networks and function as terminals in global networks. Thus, there is
not only a net(work) architecture I, that of transit, but also a
net(work) architecture II, that of the immobile.
Since data networks have begun to depict and expand physical reality, a
third form of net(work) architecture has emerged, that of data worlds. A
first strand virtualizes the entire architectural process, from the
first sketch to final inspection. One and the same technology visualizes
the architectural real and its halo of the fleeting, of the unbuilt and
unbuildable. A gradual transition to the construction of virtual
environments for the Net (1), games and films. The second strand
develops the cooperative potential of the Net. Many different hands are
processing at the computers around the globe and around the clock, and
their traces remain available, proposals and detailed architectural
plans. A third strand models navigators and topics. Data mining begins
with catalogues of web addresses, leads through the indexing of web
pages by search engines to personalized information assistants, and is
currently producing a software family, by which global communities will
be able to allow data to circulate between hard drives (Napster and the
consequences). Data representation is quickly abandoning the scheme of
pages. In the beginning, pages could be extended by scrolling, broken
through by way of links. The point linkages are followed by continuous
hypertext and hyper media spaces, which stage immense data landscapes.
All of this is integrated by net(work) architecture III, that of the
data worlds, which links up the world-wide cyberpopulation on countless
platforms.
It is almost a cosmic process, and nothing less than a global cultural
revolution, how a colossal data network is put together from physical
environments, forms an independent data sphere, and in the end forces
the physical base to undergo an unimaginable reorganization, best
comparable to the consequences of Neolithic city planning, the systems
of inscriptions of the great civilizations, the professionalization of
the psyche in the ecumenic age, modern science and industrial
revolution. In principle, every physical point on the globe is being
turned into information, and will be accessible, controllable, and
transformable from anywhere in the world. Net(work) architecture IV
generates a global matrix of virtual-physical penetrations. A mixed
reality made up of data jockeys and remainder physics.
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Tank Systems
On October 26, 1994, the Internet agent TERM-SHOOTER launched seven
travel ready Central Europeans into the Net, and called them "etoy".
etoy followed two performative strategies:
1) they imported reality concepts like "person" and "space" into the
Net, and forced them to be reformulated
2) they exported net concepts back into reality, and observed what
effects they can have.
The control center during the years 1995-1997 was the navigation plan of
the etoy INTERNET-TANKSYSTEM http://fanclub.etoy.c3.hu/tanksystem, which
functioned both as a spatial metaphor and as an Internet metaphor, and
could thus disturb both virtual and real environments. It is made up of
labyrinthine repetitions of the same base module which flanges a
pipeline to a container. The structure of the base module is purely
conceptual, so that pipeline, container and flange can be concretized,
materialized, virtualized and combined in countless ways. Flanging is
the hero of all tank systems. It serves as the universal connector,
which translates the flows into worlds of representation. etoy often
likes to ambush its containers with overdone media context and surreal
tools and services.
Tank systems are building elements in all the net(work) architectures
etoy has developed, and the INTERNET- TANKSYSTEM is the core aggregate
which powers all other developments. The OFFICE-TANK anticipates the
cooperation platform etoy.TOWER, the later participation formats can be
traced back to FANCLUB (mail contact), ANONYMOUS-MAILER (remailer),
CONFERENCE (chat with etoy.BOTS), AIRPORT (link community) and FREEZER
(digital freezing of virtual identities), the PIPELINE-room
installations and etoy.TANKS transfer pipelines and containers into real
space, and TOYWAR obtains a good deal of its UNDERGROUND and DISCO
aesthetics from there.
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Hijacks
Surfing is beautiful. There are all kinds of EXO out there. Even the
tick etoy is already up. Sitting under a stuffed cockatoo, well
camouflaged on a sky-blue barbed wire. I want to look at the colorful
feathers from close up. Klick: the link is a tick –its a flange–its a
trap! Instead of juggling EXO-evasions, an ENDO-bite deep enough to
reach through the calluses: "Don't fucking move! This is a digital
hijack." Diplomatic navigation through a massive battery of tanks
achieves the freeing of the hostages. The political topology of the Net
is nowhere more beautifully illustrated than in etoy's "digital hijack"
http://www.hijack.org/, which, as a web page promotion for the tank
system, makes fun of itself. Thesis 1: etoy works both inside and
outside. Thesis 2: etoy points out practices immanent to the system.
Thesis 3: Flange creates impact.
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Technologies of Globalization
From the beginning, etoy has worked with an emphatic Concept of the
net(work). This concept of the net(work) Retroactively interrogates its
most advanced formation, the Internet, about the manifestations of the
net(work) in human history, and proactively develops its unredeemed
potential in the medium of new technologies. Contrary to popular
opinion, people have always lived simultaneously in both local and
distant networks. The transcontinental trade routes brought goods, news
and contacts into the smallest circle of life, while the soul, which
everywhere could be professionalized, opened up the entire cosmos. etoy
had to confront the fact that the data packages which circulate in the
Internet can just as scarcely be comprehended in categories of the
object, as the social information-processing transmitted over the Net
can be thought of in categories of the subject. For the problem of the
subject, etoy developed two solutions. On the one hand, the virtual
agent identity of the net emigrants as etoy.CREW, on the other the
holding company for net culture capital production as etoy.CORPORATION.
etoy replaced the category of the object entirely with packages, the
most monumental expressions were the cooperation platform etoy.TOWER and
the freight containers etoy.TANKS. The essential coordination frame for
etoy's technologies of globalization is marked by the etoy.TIMEZONE.
It's no exaggeration to say that in the years 1997 and 1998, etoy
elevated the potentials of globalization to an art form. On April 4,
1997 they move into the etoy.TOWER, a veritable intranet, which
documents all information, communication, and production processes
meticulously, version-controlled, and in a multi-media fashion. Such a
work instrument cannot be overestimated, since it allows a collaboration
on the most developed prototypes independent of time and place. If a
version is rejected, a more promising version continues to be worked on.
Numerous projects can be pursued at the same time, and all super-users
can see the development as a whole. Gradated project, time, and person-
relevant reading and writing rights can be granted, so that swarms of
parallel virtual groups can make use of the resources of the platform in
ways tailored to the task at hand. The intranet of the etoy.TOWER
completes on the level of work organization the same opening of
participation formats as the etoy.SHAREHOLDER concept
http://www.etoy.com/SHARE does on the financial level. Since going
public on January 25, 1998, under the patronage of the Austrian federal
chancellor at the time, Viktor Klima, in the ball room of the Viennese
Institut Fran
