HONORARY MENTION
0100101110101101.ORG
The difference between net.art and every other form of art seems to be “interactivity”, at least this is what we become accustomed to hearing.Well:“interactivity”, as it’s usually intended, is a delusion, pure falsehood.When people reach a site (net.art or not), by their mouse clicks, they choose one of the routes fixed by the author, they only decide what to see before and what after; this is not interactivity. It would be the same as stating that an exposition in a museum is interactive because you can choose from which room to start, which works to see before and which one after.
But recently something’s changed. In fact, 0100101110101101.ORG is trying to show that art on the web can really become “interactive”: the public must use it interactively,we must use an artwork in an unpredictable way, one that the author didn’t foresee, to rescue it from its normal routine (studio/gallery/museum or homepage/hell.com/Moma) and re-use it in a different and novel way. The first files that appear in 0100101110101101.ORG are what we will call “hybrids”: pages by other net.artists all mixed in a random way.This section of the site is centered around a random concept, so that the interface changes every time you visit it.The toolbar becomves useless, the “back”command loses its logical function: every page is set in the unpredictable sequence of chance. 0100101110101101.ORG downloads the websites of the most popular net.artists and then s/he/it/ manipulates them as “it”wants, using them in an interactive way. The night of 9th June,was the turn of “Art.Teleportacia”.“ Art.Teleportacia”is the first net.art gallery to have appeared on the web, and also the first attempt to sell works of net.art.The exhibition we are talking about was “Miniatures of the Heroic Period”, and consisted of some pages by five of the most well known net.artists in the world for sale at $ 2000 each. 0100101110101101.ORG downloaded the gallery, manipulated the contents, and uploaded it in a new “anticopyright”version, obviously without asking permission from anyone and violating the copyright of the original site.The exhibition changed its name into “Hybrids of the Heroic Period”, and the five “original” works were replaced with as many “hybrids”, files obtained by mixing pages by net.artists with some trash of the web. Art.Teleportacia is based mainly on three theoretical pillars: 1) A work of net.art can be sold as well as any other work of art. 2) Each net.art work must be covered by copyright and nobody, except the artist, can download it or even link to it without the permission of the author. 3) the “sign”of a net.art work is in the “location bar”, so the URL is the only guarantee of originality. Duplicating Art.Teleportacia 0100101110101101.ORG brought down all the presuppositions of the gallery; the contradictions which this way of thinking runs into became evident.Technically, whoever visits a site automatically downloads into the cache [kash], all the files he sees. In fact s/he already owns them, therefore it is nonsense to sell pages already on the hard disks of millions of people—it would be more useful to tell the public the fastest way to download the whole website.
We wish to see hundreds of 0100101110101101.ORG repeating sites of net.artists endlessly, so that nobody realizes which was the “original”one; we would like to see hundreds of Jodi and hell.com, all different, all original, and nobody filing lawsuits for copyright infringement. If there are no more originals to preserve, will “WebDevil”be the brush of a new generation of artists? From: Rhizome, June 99 http://www.rhizome.org/cgi/to.cgi?t=1486
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