Anti-Post-Net Art

A self-interview of www.0100101110110101.org

0: How would you compare the mutations of your web site - second-last
was the file directory of "life_sharing" - to the self-referential
continuity of Net Art in the progression from Heath Bunting and jodi to
Lisa Jevbratt? Are you concerned with that 'code attitude' and the other
members of the ASCII school of Net Art?

1: There may be superficial parallels, but actually we think we fall
closer to the anti-aestheticist side of this kind of activity. For
instance our early practice of breaking off and stealing little pieces
from sculptures and installations in museums is an example of trying to
create similar ruptures as Alexander Brener's spray can attack on the
Malevich painting or Oleg Kulik's crawling around on all fours with a
neck brace on. This kind of intervention may seem old-fashioned to some
people who value the pseudo-ruptures induced into digital data by Jodi,
Heath Bunting and Vuk Cosic. But we have to reject their surface hype
appeal on the basis of our dislike of the media art hype and the factual
Net Art star cult surrounding them. Actually, some data on the new
incarnation of our web site suggests that Bunting's and Cosic's
resignment from Net Art was intentional and contrived precisely to
trivialize their work. You may of course notice that we have not quit.
We are willing to reject the 'easy our' of trivialization through
has-been-Net Art star cult status.

0: And clearly this is the connection between your work and that of body
art actionists like Kulik, the false timelessness?

1: Actually it is hard to say. Net Artists have had to take a step back
in order to reflect the digital codes they appropriated, and then
another step back to analyze the first step. This is why we use the term
"Anti-Post-Net Art" instead of simply "Post-Net Art." This term
precisely dictates a second level of removal from the commodity value of
digital art - it is not some mind game, but a clear political statement:
We are not willing.

0: Would you mind if people see this as a traditional avant-garde
attitude?

1: Well, you may have noticed that our approach, which is perhaps
situationist if anything, is to take the code of a Net Artists like jodi
and copy them, but altering some of it, like the color of a page, or
some words contained in them… whatever seems marginal. And then this
appropriation becomes the underlying marginality of our own work.
Remember Duchamp's emphasis on the studio-editor. We essentially use it
but ignore it simultaneously, as if to say that these historical links
are not what it's about.

0: The most recent incarnation of http://www.0100101110110101.org,
"dates", is a simple list of Net Artists' names, each printed into one
file. When you use the names of your current lovers to title each file
and record your dates as well, are you intending to trivialize Net Art,
or is it a radical bisexual statement against the predominance of
heterosexual lifestyles in net and media art?

1: Either interpretation would hold water, but we prefer to think of it
as a certain ordering of the universe, simply we dated so-and-so on that
day and thought of that Net Artist at the same time. We don't think it's
name dropping because we take it one step further than that by using our
lovers' names as titles. Also, these Anti-Post-Net Art works are
anti-conceptual, since the focus is on the person and not on the idea.

0: In this way, you can avoid two of the major traps of Net Art, the
need to be innovative and the need to be recognized in the Net Art
community.

1: We think so, this is the primary mood of our work. The 80's were
about "attitude," the 90's were about "theory," we think the next ten
years are about the synthesis of the performative and the conceptual -
about "attitude as theory." We suspect that we won't see much changing
after that in Net Art, we've set it all up that way.