Hijacking, piracy, copyright infringement, intellectual property violations … The industry rejoices as art projects incriminate themselves. It reinforces the atmosphere that the 'takeover' can proceed managed by legalistic regulations and in-house artists whose allegiance to corporate law is user friendly. 0100101110101101.org, however see it differently …
Log into www.0100101110101101.org and read the daily (read and unread) mail, browse the folders and subdirectories, unravel the history of an idealized, yet paradoxically wholly pragmatic, intervention into the open system as really 'public.' Not a dump for unused file (like Napier's 'Digital Landfill'), nor a manifesto in any futile sense, 01.org merely apply the principle of communication on the net as a system in which data transfer is extended beyond limiting protocols or firewalls and into the relinquishing of the hazy privacy assumed by most web users. In abandoning the aura of mystery, in reintegrating the directory structures in place of endless graphically bloated effects, 'Life_Sharing' situates the typical web interface as an posture that forecloses more than it reveals, a kind of denial of access. So instead 01.org abandons the flashy intros in favor of the direct entry.
As such, 01.org seems oddly banal interface in a web environment easily trivialized by events like 'Browserday,' as it continuously voids the imperatives of a web community inebriated by instantaneity. So rather than 'flickering signifiers,' the site restores a content rich in the kind of principled subversion not celebrated as style. Their work, 'hijacking' hell.com, Olia Liliana's 'teleportacia', among many others, is aimed not at piracy, but at extension, tribute, and play with a purpose.
Either we accept that 'information yearns to be free' or we fall into deception, cowardice. 01.org ascribe to long-standing ideals about freedom to communicate unobstructed by the regulation of discourse. Surely an old principle. Indeed even Thomas Jefferson, on the heels of the French Revolution, both cautioned and admired the link between publishing and the democratic process: 'The only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to.'
The migration of information into cyberspace caught governmental and commercial regulatory systems unprepared for a system in which hierarchical distribution channels were well in place. Indeed the artists on the 'electronic frontier' quickly found a foothold that leveled the field while the regulators scrambled to govern information flows while the BBS culture proliferated and expanded into P2P networks. Industry, and particularly the media industry, blew its cover and was exposed for astonishing reactionary profiteering at the expense of artists and the public -- the phrase they now use is 'Napsterization.'
01.org subscribe to open-source not in pursuit of self-interest, but rather of declaring the net a transformed cultural sphere in which social reciprocity is an imperative gained by rethinking exchange in the face of the incorporation of information, by acceding to the substitution of material copyright with the Gnu General Public License - GPL, by reminding a web community that they are too easily proxies or beta-testers for corporate public relations of art institutions hungry for good press. The 'takeover' obviously can go in more than one direction!
Hijacking, Piraterie, Copyright-Verletzungen … Die Industrie jubelt über Kunstprojekte, die sich selbst belasten. So verstärkt sich der Eindruck, als könnte das 'Takeover' von gesetzlichen Regelungen und In-House-Künstlern gemanagt werden, die ganz im Sinne von Userfreundlichkeit den Unternehmensregeln die Treue halten. 0100101110101101.org sieht die Entwicklung allerdings ganz anders ...
