[Nettime-bold] Marina Grzinic on 0100101110110101.ORG

[propaganda@0100101110110101.org]

   The Fake As More

   by Marina Grzinic


                                                 
   Achieving what no one even three years ago could foresee as the
   necessary resolution to the dialectical impasse posed by the
   object-form critical dilemma, www.0100101110110101.org's Net Art
   both asserts and transcends objectness and formality; or, perhaps
   better stated, it represents a synthesis of the form and object
   into what might be called form-object art. Resolving at one master
   stroke the problem of content without compromising the purity of the
   nonreferential object as such, www.0100101110110101.org's work, by
   recoding other Net Art, nevertheless introduces new content and a new
   concept, in the total phenomenological sense, by actually representing
   the actions of someone other than the Net Artists plagiarized. That
   is, in their real meaning, www.0100101110110101.org is Net Art plus,
   Net Art and more, and the implications to be extracted from them will
   no doubt occupy a segment of the Net.art community for years to come.

   In their double orientation between past and present,
   www.0100101110110101.org represents an advance in another respect;
   in no other form but copy and fake can the thing be so sharply
   distinguished from its self, the "an sich," or essence, from
   the "für sich," or reality. For by reproducing existing Net Art
   www.0100101110110101.org both receives the sanction of its predecessors
   and at the same time negates the attempt to observe any new formal
   development, thus shifting the entire phenomenon to a superior,
   that is, critical, level. What is at work here is lived experience
   relived, or more accurately, the coded object recoded. In spite of the
   apparent similarity of both www.0100101110110101.org and the Net Art
   sites it plagiarizes, there are profound differences. The home page
   of rhizome.org copied and disassembled by www.0100101110110101.org
   reveals, once dissected into its source code, traces of different code
   layers created by different Rhizome web designer over a longer period,
   whereas the data under review here was completed within one day.
   Looking at www.0100101110110101.org, we see a lack of development in
   the artists' refusal to succumb to either a unilateral linear statement
   or an expression of complete circularity, but rather a synthesis of
   both in what might be called circulinear art, neither "either or" but
   "both and."  Moreover, the above is made perceptually concrete to the
   observer through a process of heightened simultaneity. For on first
   viewing www.0100101110110101.org, we are reminded of Wittgenstein's
   comment,

     "Seeing as... is not part of perception. And for that reason it is
     like seeing and again not like."[1]

   We are clearly in the presence of a dilemma. In answer to
   Wittgenstein's question, what is the criterion of the visual
   experience?, his obvious answer, "the representation of what is
   seen"[2], simply will not do. In addition to what is seen, there is the
   known: the preordinare relationship of the subject-object synthesis
   paravisually determined in the Kantian sense; as Merleau-Ponty has
   observed,

     "Le propre du Kantisme est de n'admettre que deux types d'expériences
     qui soient pourvues d'une structure a priori: celle d'un mode
     d'objets externes, celle des états du sens intime."[3]

   Self-clarification is obtained through the web pages
   themselves. Through serial repetition, the artist's search for
   a style and an ontology, an artistic expression of ontological
   ends, is consolidated in particular works that sum up the gains
   of painful and anxious exploration of viable form, at least
   temporarily. They reiterate the combinative passion of artist and
   critic that is the achievement and the ultimate responsibility of
   www.0100101110110101.org: in essence, the re-creative process. To
   say this is by no means to slight previous Net Art as such. But
   any comparison of, for example, jodi.org and its appropriation on
   www.0100101110110101.org would have to concede that the latter's
   power and potentiality, its cleaner code and its surplus of irony,
   vastly intensifies the conflict between them. However, these are but
   stylistic differences, at best provisional.  On second viewing, one
   begins to be more profoundly conscious of and receptive to a radically
   new and philosophical element in the work of www.0100101110110101.org
   that is precluded in the work of jodi and on the Rhizome home page,
   i.e., the denial of originality, both in its most blatant manifestation
   (the theft as such) and in its subtle, insouciant undertones of static
   objectivity (the telescoping of time). While the identity we share in
   jodi's art as our the digital art of our time, is deepened, broadened,
   and made, of all things, joyous, whereas www.0100101110110101.org's
   art is neither deepening nor broadening nor, if anything, joyous. On
   the contrary, it is surface, narrow, and, most especially, tragic, for
   one is forcefully reminded at every line and turn that it represents
   the ontological predicament of our time, indeed of every living being:
   inauthentic experience. It is, in a word, fakes.

   Marina Grzinic 
   Ljubljana, Slovenia 
   margrz@zrc-sazu.si



  Footnotes

    1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, translated by
       G.E.M. Anscombe, Oxford 1978, p.197
    2. Ibid., p.232/198.  3. Merleau-Ponty, La structure du comportement,
       Paris 1977, p.180.
       


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