Technology Self-management Control Corporation Routine Intervention Public space Sabotage Interference Appropriation Drift Radiofrequency

Certain web projects can be better appreciated if we consider them not as works, but as interventions. These are interventions in a new public arena, Internet, a space to exchange, to meet, a sphere for personal and commercial transactions.

But as with every intervention in a public space, the action must blend in with the surroundings to keep from being perceived as an artistic project. It is as if just as the word art appears, the wraps come off the intervention, which then loses all sense of danger. The fiction must crouch, it must mimic reality if it is to maintain its intensity and subvert it.

In this section we find proposals that attempt to deconstruct the everyday, the social order, the individual routine and the environments and protocols for personal interaction and interchange. A questioning of the democratic and egalitarian promises of the technological media and a critique of the desire for control that hides behind their apparent transparency. Everything is revealed through the use of satire and the appropriation of corporate strategies, or by sliding into and taking part in the interstitial space of interpersonal communications or relations, making the most of noise, surprise and confusion.

Daniel García Andújar
Street Access Machine®
Website. 1997

In 1996, Daniel García Andújar started developing the project Technologies to the People for an exhibit to be held in Hamburg. The project, which has been presented online and in installations and made available on CD-ROM, uses satire and the presentation strategies offered by the new communications technologies to question the democratic and egalitarian promises of these media and to critique the desire for control that is hidden behind their apparent transparency. In this project, the artist creates a virtual and inexistent company, for which he has drawn up a detailed corporate image (with its associated logos, promotional videos and web pages). The company becomes a metaphor for the use of the new technologies, capable of making us believe possible that which does not exist. One of the products of TTTP is Street Access Machine®, a wireless device that allows credit cards to be validated on the street and which is conceived so that, for example, the homeless can receive a handout when the passerby does not have cash readily available.
The fiction created by Andújar serves to make us aware of the reality that surrounds us and of the lie of the promises of free will that are unforgivably converted into new mechanisms of control and inequality. He adopts (and perverts) corporate methods and their marketing strategies, mechanisms that remind us of the great similarity between the viral behavior of brands and logos in the ecosystem that is the global market, and that of viruses (and memes) in cyberspace.

Daniel García Andújar
Armed Citizen
Website. 1998

Armed Citizen presents a series of photographs of weapons in a gallery format that the user can view sequentially, one by one, almost like a photolog without captions. Nothing is said about their origin or owners, about whether they are criminal evidence or arms used in murders. Nor does he enlighten us on the identity of the armed citizens referred to in the title. We don’t know whether he is talking about the police or groups of civilians who have taken up arms.
What is safe to assume is that there is a vague feeling of fear and threat at play, a feeling that is reinforced by the lack of information. Each mouse click is like a new shot.
The rows of weapons remind us a police line-up in which we have to imagine their bearers without being able to see their faces. Citizens who shamelessly display their pistols and revolvers, putting themselves in a place of power where it no longer matters whether they are within or outside the law, within or outside society.

Minerva Cuevas
Mejor Vida Corp® Etiquetas de códigos de barras
Website. Action. 1998

Availing itself of all the tools that the information reproduction and distribution technologies provide, the Mejor Vida Corp (Better Life Co.) company has engaged in various actions since 1998, including giving away subway tickets and stamped envelopes, the chance to print out lottery tickets, student IDs for getting discounts, and even barcodes, personalized according to the user’s country, to lower the price of food items in supermarkets. Another service MVC offers is a letter of recommendation from gallery owners who are taking part in the initiative. In the artist’s own words, “MVC is an independent activist project that uses the corporate structure to subvert its objectives and to stage a full critique of the market economy using mass media, conducting public interventions of a political nature and offering the user the chance to generate micro-political events.”
Using the same technological tools that were developed to shore up the growth of corporations on a global scale, Mejor Vida Corp gives those who have been relegated to the role of simple consumers a license for tearing down this mechanism.

Dora García
The Tunnel People
Website. Action. Installation. 2000

The Tunnel People project was originally created for the “Metro>Polis” expo, and was developed along two lines, one involving hypertext with a multi-threaded storyline that presents the fiction of the mysterious underground dwellers that are the focus of the piece, and the other a series of performances by three actors, two men and a woman, inside one of the trains that run on the North-South line of the Brussels subway. The action and dialogue, devised by Dora García and performed by the actors, aim to arouse in the user the need to decide whether the situation created by the performance can be accepted as real, or whether he has been trapped in a show whose purpose is unknown to him. The questions this piece wants to pose include: What is the limit of publicly acceptable behavior? How can a strange situation feel normal? When exactly does a conversation get lost in the absurd? How is fear suggested and danger felt? Why do total strangers inspire empathy or repulsion in us? Is the truth really underground?

Dora García
Insertos En Tiempo Real
Website. Action. Installation. 2001/2006

Text by Dora García introducing the piece:
The name “Insertos en tiempo real” (Insertions in real time) conveys this project’s intention of interrupting, displacing, questioning and deforming real situations in real time. All the insertions are done by actors (actors in the sense that they perform by following specific instructions) and can work in different contexts, not necessarily artistic or expositional.
Two questions are at the heart of this piece: the question of the “duration” of a work of art (if a performance lasted a lifetime, how could we draw a dividing line between art and life?); and the question of behavior patterns that are adopted when perceiving works of art (Isn’t it true that we are witnessing a growing non-differentiation between the roles of the artist, the audience and the work of art? Can these conducts be completely interchanged?)
The documentation for this piece also requires a slight readjustment of the notion of documentation. First, the event extends in time in such a way that there is never a special moment that represents the totality of the action. Second, the action is so restrained that the act of documenting (photograph, film) would completely obstruct the action of the performance. What to photograph then? All or nothing. A choice must be made between a surveillance camera or nothing at all. Maybe the narration of the event is the best documentation (and could even become the final work itself, as might happen with this site).

Brian Mackern
34s56w_Temporal de Santa Rosa
Website. Installation. 2002

If we stay still, we will notice that everything is in motion and we will become witnesses to others’ voyages. Like someone seeing an arriving ship, birds migrating or an approaching storm.
Certain regularities that are found in nature make us think that there are hidden messages within it. Like the erratic paths taken by clouds. But when attempting to translate nature into human language, rather than read the message, what we should do is decode the “noise”: the message is the static.
In his piece 34s56w_Temporal de Santa Rosa (The Santa Rosa Storm), Brian Mackern recorded the static interference caused by the proximity/presence of the Santa Rosa storm on several frequencies. The recordings were made between August 20 and September 8, 2002, in Montevideo, Uruguay.
This storm, which is a common occurrence around August 30, the feast of Santa Rosa, in South America and especially in Río de la Plata, seems to highlight nature’s propensity for cycles. A cyclic phenomenon that interferes with radio frequency cycles, the cycles of sound, and leaving this static in its wake as a souvenir.