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/// from "Gallery 9 / Walker Art Centre", 01 jan 2001
/// http://www.walkerart.org/gallery9/lifesharing

+ + +

A Hole in the Brain of the Machine

by Marina Grzinic

0100101110101101.org's life_sharing is a Walker-commissioned Internet
artwork–or perhaps, if you prefer, a web-based project–that presents a
bizarre shift, a reversal. Rather than moving from dull, drab life into
the ecstasy of Internet art, life_sharing takes a radical detour from
the thousands of exciting formalistic possibilities of web designing
(the innovative interfaces that are always trying to amuse us) and
returns to dull, drab existence itself–the disgusting impotence of
everyday bureaucracy, the exchange of mail, and the negotiation for new
projects.

There are subdirectories and maps, dozens of different documents that
include e-mail letters, drafts from ongoing projects by
0100101110101101.org to archives of texts by other authors with
0100101110101101.org's comments, pages of e-mails, half-completed
documents, and personal annotations mixed with samples of critical
texts–a whole bank of virtual papers. Such a gesture allows us to enter
a private life. If you have time to take a ride, browse through papers,
documents, paths, and texts–who knows how long it might take and where
we might land. 0100101110101101.org is creating a hole in the brain of
the machine as a kind of alien situation, a de-realization of the system
of the computer and of the content of so-called everyday life. It is as
if we suddenly have access to the constantly microscopically zoomed
information content of an individual, in all the dirtiness and business
of someone's life. It is as if he or she gives us the possibility to see
everything under his or her skin, the intestines of the body, so to
speak, and of the computer as well. There is something disgusting and
repulsive in this action, but powerful at the same time.

In contrast to obscurantist New Age allusions, namely that the Internet
and the World Wide Web make the natural exchange of art and perfect
communication possible, life_sharing shows clearly that life is an
artifact cobbled from other artifacts, rather than from profound
experience. In contrast to the mass media-produced idea that life
connected with new media achieves a natural totality, processes of
0100101110101101.org's life_sharing visualization underscore this
artificial, mediatized, constructed, and unnatural human life, and
her/his/its thoughts and emotions. The use of (re)cycling methods
suggests a radical re-questioning of originality and repetition, reality
and media simulation.

0100101110101101.org's technique consists of superimposing two
incompatible realms, which they nevertheless allow to invade each other:
the symbolic realm of representation–making an internet art project
with certain structure; and life in itself–the proximity of life, the
uncomfortable point of entering, constantly, into somebody's life and
taking part in all his/her privacy that is now visible, open, and
proposed as a project. Everyday life functions for 0100101110101101.org
almost as a decomposing moment of life.

0100101110101101.org's approach is strategical to such an extent that,
to paraphrase Christine Buci-Glucksmann's book The Madness of Seeing (La
Folie du Voir), the Internet has arrived at the position where "eyes can
see how eyes see." life_sharing enables the user to see the
bureaucratic, archival, and administrative content(s) of everyday life
as well as the users watching this content, being a part of these whole
endeavor.

In contrast to the clean, pure space of virtual reality, material
reality and life itself were objects of horror and disgust because they
were difficult to integrate into the cyber matrix. As Julia Kristeva has
pointed out, the material becomes what culture–the sacred–must purge,
separate, and banish so that it may establish itself as clean and
disinfected in the universal logic of catharsis. If the material is a
part of cyberspace, then it becomes not an object, but an abject–the
material is reduced to an obscene intervention. life_sharing is this
abject; the user gets the feeling that a mistake has been made, that
this is a senseless situation. Something is missing here: the glossy
design and the kitsch surroundings. Instead, we are confronted simply
with a listed number of maps and subdirectories.

The same senseless intervention exists in mistakes that are practiced as
a concept and a strategy on the www and Internet. The insertion of
mistakes into perfect, simulated environments can be viewed, therefore,
as a point of developing new aesthetical and conceptual strategies,
since the mistake as an object of horror and disgust cannot be
integrated into the matrix. A mistake is like a wound in the image; it
is an error in the body, or, as formulated by Richard Beardsworth, a
failure representing precisely our submission to time. To make a mistake
is therefore a process of finding a place in time. This is a situation
of producing a gap, a hiatus, where we can insert not only a proper
body, but also its interpretation. Such a mistake is already apparent in
the name of the group: 0100101110101101.org. This name forces the user
into a process of endless copying. The fact that 0100101110101101.org
has such a strange name induces the user/sender to copy and paste it
again and again–it is too difficult to remember precisely. So, from the
name on we see a constant path of research practiced by
0100101110101101.org of ways of representation on the www and
articulation of the www as a (senseless) archive bound to questions of
authorship and copying, pasting, removing, and erasing.

To better understand the life_sharing project, let's browse into the
0100101110101101.org organization history. In the net.art community,
0100101110101101.orgbecame famous with their "theft" of the private and
closed net.art gallery site Hell.com, which was downloaded during one
weekend and served from their own site for endless use by any visitor.
0100101110101101.org made "versions" or "remixes" of other well-known
net.art sites, such as Art.Teleportacia. Influenced by the methods of
the Situationists and, above all, the Neoists (recent activities in
Italy had originated under this Neoist pseudonym), they transferred
their approach to the Internet.

Their secretiveness concerning the name 0100101110101101.orgis an
artistic practice pressing the user to repeat the matrix of the computer
memory (01)–the structure of the computer brain, so to speak–and the
openness of the internet machine, which is all about copying, reusing,
re-making history, life.

0100101110101101.org's project Darko Maver–the fake artist prank–was
also such a construction: Darko was constructed by photos, or more
correctly, by photographic documents of actual atrocities, several of
which had taken place in Maver's "home patch" of the former Yugoslavia.
The story of Darko Maver's life and death is the following: he was born
in 1998 at the webzine site called "Degenerated Art," where
0100101110101101.org started to dispatch information about a mysterious
performer-artist who traveled across the former Yugoslavia living in
motel rooms and old empty houses, a victim of staged atrocities and
ethnic cleansing stories. Maver was born in 1962 near Belgrade, left the
Academy of Fine Arts, moved to Ljubljana, and later to Italy. He was
arrested and released in Serbia and Kosovo, on several occasions, on the
charge of disseminating anti-patriotic propaganda and put in prison in
the early 1999. In May 1999, Darko Maver's death in prison, under
enigmatic circumstances, was announced.

The Darko Maver and life_sharing projects share the tension to reconnect
art with life through an obvious mixture of fake life and real data and
places. Darko Maver has to be taken very seriously, as he has to be
perceived as a topos and a tropos, a figure, construction, artifact,
movement, and displacement. Maver's meticulously constructed life and
simulated death(s) are today seen as a commonplace and powerful
discursive construction. What we envision here is that the Internet has
found itself occupying the place of the impossible - the real object of
desire. But there is nothing sublime in it; it is simply that the
Internet is occupying the structural place, the forbidden place of
enjoyment. Accessibility, nonoriginality, reproducibility–these are the
characteristics that we have to attach to it, thanks to
0100101110101101.org.

The aim of 0100101110101101.org's life_sharing is to effect the "ruin of
representation" (Jo Anna Isaak) precisely on the grounds of what has
been excluded from the nonrepresented object (e.g., life itself). This
creates a significance derived from absence, and in this way,
investigates the means by which a subject, and the body, are produced.
Such counter-narratives are resistant to the point that they can no
longer be included within a philosophically binary opposition, but
inhabit philosophical oppositions, resisting and disorganizing, without
ever constituting a third term (Jacques Derrida). The achievement is
this: the decentralization of the subject to the point where instead of
outside or inside, there exists a powerful dynamic relation to both
outside and inside, dependence and independence, art and nature and,
ultimately, to what is real and what is not.

Is 0100101110101101.org (de)archiving life? No, it is rather a
simulation of its political and emotional coordinates. However, it is
not only this; the way life is presented in the life_sharing project
clearly shows that life via the Internet is only an algorithm. life
_sharing is powerful on the libidinal rather than on the conceptual
level, on the way we "desire" our own oppression, rather than the way we
entertain beliefs. The project aims not so much to show life as
something else, but rather to instantiate the idea of dealing with, or
living with and through, contradictions. This means that it is not a
question of losing life, but actually getting it back through a process
of rethinking the place where it was/is produced.

0100101110101101.org uses extreme oppositions to show that life is
absolutely mediated, constructed, and fabricated, and that there is a
speculative identity of the computer paradigm and of life itself. It
shows that instead of being a substantial force, life is composed of
clich