[Nettime-bold] Re: RHIZOME_RAW: 010001 ehhhh... 0100101110110101.org opensources0100101110101101.org... andpull the plug

[real@xs4all.nl]

somehow this subversive act did bring in mind the famous
opening of terry gilliam's movie brazil where the names
buttle and tuttle were switched by i believe a cockroach
falling into a machine. the consequence of this act had
finally a disasterous effect on the life of harry tuttle.
just one letter made the difference here.

interesting ofcourse are the mechanisms FC's strategy uncovers and
that have in my eyes even wider implications then the work of the
original (forgive me the word) 0100101110110101 group. because in
this case who is who and who acts like who and who is it 
that put's up questions, and what i think in this case
is also important in the field of (net)art who delivers a 
certain quality of work, and who determines what quality is.
as florian points out:
> If "dates" and "opensourcing rhizome.org"
> would not have had the 01 label, but unknown signaturw, I doubt
> anyone would have cared about them. This tells of course about the
> institutionalization, self-gratification and self-historification in
> this community which the original 01 project addressed as well.

in fact it is that they  ("dates" and "opensourcing rhizome.org") 
are now both accepted as works of art, but how do the critics and 
"fans" deal with this. will this work historically just be seen as 
response to 0100101110110101.org that had their own strategies 
(for once) turned against them, or can this project by FC be 
seen as a more fundamental thing? Something that criticizes 
the proces of institutionalization and stardom itself. I myself 
would opt for the last, this because acting like the real thing 
is in all it's radicality is what FC did. though it still is 
ofcourse a response on a response. 


ok, the good thing about this "hoax" is that it shows that everyone 
who really cares should be aware of mechanisms FC points at, 
especially in the field of art that plays with concepts as
originality. or should we hold that orginality is an obsolete
concept and that everyone who wants for example to be a part of
0100101110110101 registers another serie of digits and becomes
part of the concept and being ofcourse at least equal to the
founding group...
 
 
peter
real@...



snafu wrote:
> 
> 0100101110110101.org opensources 0100101110101101.org and pull the
> plug.
> Snafu interviews Florian Cramer
> Bologna, Digital is not analog, 27-5-2001
> 
> There was a strange smell of explosive powder in the air, last week in
> Bologna. Digital is not analog, the festival of net.art, hacktivism,
> reverse engeneering, fueled a warm atmosphere of recognition amongst
> godfathers of plagiarism such as Negativland and a new generation of
> pranksters and simulation's cowboy, such as Rtmark, Surveillance
> Camera Players, Plagiarist.org and 0100101110101101.org.
> 
> The powders were fired  last thursday by the exciting performance, in
> Piazza Maggiore, of Alexei's Shulgin 386DX, ended up with a
> decontextualized pogo. The crew got hotter and hotter over the weekend
> until saturday night when a performative march took place in front of
> the survaillance cameras around the center of Bologna. After that an
> house party terminated with fridge divings, plastic glove-toes country
> dancing and other amazing, unpredictable stuff.
> 
> But who played the role of the actual plagiarist, during the
> conference, was Florian Cramer. The teacher of Comparate Literature of
> the  Freie Universität in Berlin revealed a prank that he has been
> playing for two months under the distracted eyes of the net.art
> community. In this lapse of time, none apparently noticed that to the
> famous 0100101110101101.org's website has been recently placed side by
> side a slightly different domain: 0100101110110101.org.
> 
> This domain, registered by Florian Cramer, swaps a 0 with a 1
> mimicking very well the original domain. So well, that nobody noticed
> that the opensourced recursive splash page of Rhizome wasn't signed by
> the original 0100101110101101.org, but by the fake
> 0100101110110101.org by Florian Cramer.
> 
> In the following interview Florian Cramer explains how did it come to
> this idea.
> 
> Florian Cramer: In March 2001, there was a discussion in the Nettime
> mailing list about the historification of Net.art, whether Net.art
> has become historified and become a commodity. Instead of engaging
> in that discussion, I just registered a domain which is a sequence of
> zeros and ones very similar to the well-known zeros and ones website,
> just with a little twist in one 0 and one 1. On various Net.art
> mailing list, I posted a self-interview of my fictitious zero one
> group which I contributed to Amy Alexander's "Interview Yourself"
> project <http://www.plagiarist.org/iy/0100101110110101.html>. Nobody
> noticed the difference in the digits, as nobody noticed the
> difference in the rhetoric. There is an essay by Sarah Thompson on
> the life_sharing project of the original zero one project which
> refers to that interview and cites both URLs next to each other
> <http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/aurora/art903.html>. As mentioned in
> the interview, I created a website with a piece called "dates", a
> somewhat tongue-in-cheekish display of the Net artist's names linked
> to the names of women and men the fictitious zero one group had sex
> with <http://www.0100101110110101.org/dates.html>. Both the interview
> and the blueprint of "dates" was taken from a 1986 Neoist text which
> itself was parody of postmodern art and its self-marketing rhetoric
> <http://www.thing.de/projekte/7:9%23/berndt_smile6_eliot.html>. It
> worked
> perfectly for Net.art even fifteen years later. I just had to change a
> 
> few names and terms. My prank continued for almost two months. Nobody
> recognized the difference except mi_ga on the rohrpost mailing list
> and
> of course the Bolognese zero ones who took it with great humor. The
> prank
> was, I hope, in tune with them anyway. I think it became more
> difficult
> for them to be subversive within Net.art since they themselves became
> a
> recognized brand in Net.art. So it was time to shake this up a bit. In
> 
> an interview with Tilman Baumgärtel, the 01 project called upon people
> 
> to recuperate them, and that's what I did.
> Snafu: Since you registered the domain, you received several e-mails
> from
> people believing you were the real 01. So, a simple twist of the code,
> 
> produced a chain of human reactions...
> FC: It was very interesting for me to see that the little twist of the
> 
> zero and one had a social impact. I received invitations for
> festivals,
> I got fan mail by well-known people in the Net.art community. Everyone
> 
> believed I was the 01 they knew. People seemed to care less about what
> 
> I was doing than whom I seemed to be. I was simply using an
> established
> brand and pseudo-subversive rhetoric, and they liked it. Nobody
> checked
> the facts or got suspicious. If "dates" and "opensourcing rhizome.org"
> 
> would not have had the 01 label, but unknown signaturw, I doubt
> anyone would have cared about them. This tells of course about the
> institutionalization, self-gratification and self-historification in
> this community which the original 01 project addressed as well. There
> were other social impacts that were lots of fun as well. Some artists
> from England approached me for what Neoists used to call "grant
> sucking". They applied for a grant to spend it making summer vacation
> in Italy and asked me to write them a formal invitation. Of course I
> did, and now I wonder what will happen when they turn up in Bologna.
> It's fun and interesting to mix up social situations and experience
> how
> you can manipulate interpersonal relations by E-Mail. And it's nice to
> 
> expose this game in a city that invented the Luther Blissett project
> where many people wore the same name and created confusion with that.
> Q: Don't you think that this confusion is also related to the fact
> that people don't really pay attention to what they read? With all
> the information overload, people are no longer able to notice slight
> differences...
> FC: I have an interest in not making things that can be
> straightforwardly
> identified (even if stating this is a contradiction in itself). I have
> 
> to correct my previous statements insofar as the fake 01 website does
> not simply boil down to parody. Many people say they still like the 01
> 
> self-interview as just what it pretends to be, even though they know
> that
> it's fake. And the idea of the iterative HTML sourcecode has
> transgressed
> the prank level to a point where I am afraid that the 01 Net.artist
> identity actually plays a prank on me and turns me into something
> else! At
> the festival, I tried to inject confusion into the audience by
> speaking
> for ten minutes about bit rot as a modern type of permutation which,
> opposed to permutations in the Kabbalah and 17th century
> encyclopedism,
> doesn't increase but decrease information. To a large extent, that was
> 
> intended to be crap talk just to see if people would swallow it like
> the
> fake 01 announcements in the mailing lists, which they mostly did. On
> the
> other hand, it wasn't all crap, since I'm interested in how code
> relates
> to literature, writing, but also to information architectures as a
> matter
> of fact. The Internet and the operating systems we use is an
> architecture
> built from writing. The 01 prank of course demonstrates this as well
> 
> S: What is the difference between an unintentional error, like the
> error
> of the machine, and a chosen, a provoked error? Is it possible to talk
> 
> about aesthetic, social or machinic implications of such an error?
> FC: For me the interesting thing is the cultural impact of such an
> error. In the case of the 01 website, the error itself was a social
> one. It happened in the mind of the people reading E-Mails. I'm
> surprised
> that it worked so well. It's also telling, by the way, of how people
> rely on their software, just clicking URL in E-Mail programs like
> Outlook
> instead of using their browser bookmarks.
> 
> S: Don't you think that this kind of game risks to be very
> self-referential in a way? Is it clear and understandable within a
> specific community, but it's not played in a broader arena, like
> Rtmark
> or other people seem to do.
> FC: First of all you can't be subversive withouth being subversive
> to yourself, that's very important. You miss something crucial if you
> think subversion means to have clearly defined enemies and act against
> 
> them. The enemy always is always you, too and in the first place.
> That's
> a lesson I learned from Neoism. So I think it's very important to keep
> 
> oneself alert, to remain smart and not to fall into ritual behaviors
> of gratifying yourself and nodding to anything that comes from your
> own
> community. Sometimes you have to stir it up and play little pranks
> against
> yourself. Also I must say I'm not a Net.artist. It was a non-artist
> intervention, assuming the identity of a Net.artist. Since I am not
> interested in stabilizing this identity, it is time to pull the plug.


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