Art work Market Original Copy Diffusion Bits Virulence FTP Ephemeral Reuse Collection Bubble Reification

The appearance of new technological devices and the phenomenon of reproducibility have transformed not only art, but our entire daily routine and our way of seeing the world. But the change brought about by all things digital, unlike other technological media, is to enable not just reproduction, but manipulation. More than invariance, perpetual change. More than a copy, the remix. This has introduced a series of questions not only on the notion of original or copy, but of authorship, of owner and of collector.

In both the works in this section and in those that underlie the entire net art project we can intuit some of the following queries:
How is the market positioned in the absence of merchandise? How can bits that are constantly changing, appearing and disappearing be collected?
Can programmers who show off their software skills by applying them to absurd ends be called artists? Or how about those who deceive us with cheap java script tricks? Or with graphics recovered from a browser’s cache? Or who spread viruses on Internet?
Has digital gotten back its aura through the uniqueness of the URL, that one-off and unrepeatable domain name for Internet sites? Is this what an art gallery might sell?
After more than 10 years of web productions, these are still valid questions.

Daniel García Andújar
Video Collection
Website. 1998

This project by Daniel García Andújar offers us a collection of online art videos. Made during the web’s formative years, when connections were anything but reliable, it suggested that we had accessed a site with the best technology available at the moment. This concept of “state of the art”, so blinding as it is fleeting, seems to be used by the advertisers to create an inferiority complex in the users. I need a better connection. My browser is out of date. My PC is several months old.
Video Collection is a doubly-virtual collection. Virtual by being on Internet, and virtual because each site linked to by the video titles inexorably sends us to a page where we are warned that the site uses very sophisticated technical resources and that our PC may not be powerful enough to handle the pages.
Andújar seems to want to play with this feeling of unfulfilled desire that the technology market leave us with, and inoculate us with a sort of vaccine. To deride us in public for our naiveté for not noticing that it was all a farce before putting our name in some forum where those who were unable to log on and see the videos were promised a helping hand. A farce like the market that offers solutions to problems we do not yet have.

0100101110101101.org
Biennale.py
Virus. Action. 2001

Conceived and arranged as an invitation to the 49th Venice Biennale, Biennale.py is a work of art that doubles as an active computer virus that endlessly reproduces its source code, the text that determines and programs its actions. The virus was made public and spread on opening day for the Pavilion of the Republic of Slovenia, where the code of Biennale.py could be read and its effects seen on a infected computer. Thousands of shirts were given out with the code written on them, so it was spread not only through the machines, but also through humans, like biological viruses.
Artists used the hysteria generated by computer viruses and attempted to have their actions set a precedent for future viruses to attain artistic status. The virus was totally harmless and used outdated viral technology, so providing Symantec with information on how to deactivate the virus, thus resulting in an alert being issued, was no more than a publicity stunt. As for the ironies and contradictions involving the art and market establishments, remember that Microsoft sponsored the Biennale and therefore the virus, and that for 1500 dollars you could have taken home an infected CD-ROM. Which leads to an even bigger contradiction if we consider the fact that collecting those CD-ROMs as unique specimens is contrary to viral logic. The more a virus reproduces and spread, the more regarded it will be.

Arcángel Constantini
Infomera
Website. Action via FTP. 2002

The web comes across as a space of virtual interchange where we are free to move around, but also as a space for disputes, like a fleeting stage for arguments, constructions, fights and consecrations. Where hundreds of battles and attacks have taken place, like that infamous first hacker war in 1991 (The Great Hacker War) before the WWW and with now obsolete technology, whose only traces are found in the writings of some war cyber-correspondent.
Within the arena of net art and near these digital feuds we find infomera.net, a name that emerged from the words information and ephemeral, and which comprised a set of performances in which, over the course of seven encounters lasting 48 hours, two online artists, in a digital faceoff, without rules and in real time, freely modified the content of the page, whose make-up and outcome were a constant unknown, each instant unique and unrepeatable.
The Infomera battles did not seek to destroy the rival (unlike the hacker battles waged between the USA and China in 2001 or Chile and Peru in 2005), but rather show off their skills in the use of software applied to the absurd. But these fighters, instead of using a combination of holds and kicks, mastered an arsenal of cheap java script tricks; instead of disguises and makeup, they used a battery of images recovered from a web browser’s cache or a clipart CD; instead of the spoils of war, they aspired to the eternal honor of being inducted into the hall of fame for champions of the wild wild web.

Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries
Declaración de artista nro 45.730.944
Website. 2002

From South Korea, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries proposes a deep musical reflection on art, Internet and culture inside the North Korean dictatorship. It does so by using one of the world’s simplest and oldest ways to communicate: words. And so it is that Artist’s Statement No. 45,730,944 is a witty succession of words that “strike” at the viewer in much the same way as previous works like Cunnilingus in North Korea or Rain on the sea, always to a jazz beat.
In the case of Declaration… the speed ratchets up our sense of conspiratorial paranoia. A near-hypnotic trance through which we end up agreeing with the stream of observations thrown at us by the piece. Observations on art, morality, censure, leisure, social commitment, the market, and which the accompanying narcotic jazz melody renders us unable to resist.

Antonio Mendoza
Image Pirate
Website 2004

Imagepirate.com points out one of the most specific features of digital media: beyond the copy, its possibility to manipulate and recombine. Unlike other copying systems, it is not the accurate duplication that is touted, but rather the active and modificatory intervention of the operator. In this project Antonio Mendoza uses modified and recombined snippets from movies as diverse as The Shining, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Scarface, Blade Runner, Taxi Driver, Shampoo and Nosferatu, as well as footage from different news networks. The soundtrack is also appropriated from recordings of Nirvana, Black Dice, Deerhof, Kraftwerk, Melt Banana and even Mr. Tamale, the band with which Mendoza plays on his days off.
The resulting product is a unique TV channel in a comatose state. An automatic channel that airs with no breaks or commercials, and which seems to be transmitting from the very subconscious of Show Business, of advertising and of communication in the consumer society with a direct line to our brains.

Iván Abreu
ASML
Website. 2003

ASML (Art Statement Markup Language) is a hybrid arrangement of art software and documentation on curatorial discourses. Based on programming languages that use tags, Abreu develops software to facilitate the analysis and understanding of these critical art texts by the computer. He selects texts from scholars like Cuauhtemoc Medina, Osvaldo Sánchez, Olivier Debroise and Priamo Lozada and adds them to his program, tagging the different fragments that comprise them. In ASML, these texts are coded in flow diagrams and generate new grammars that subvert the relationship between work and analysis, author and critic: the work as a tool to analyze the system of which it is a part. ASML is a language that provides audiovisibility to a phenomenon whose essence is verbal. This transcoding of curatorial discourses into audiovisual structures takes places as follows. Based on its understanding of the text, the software builds patterns with the components it identifies and the structural relationships it detects. These patterns are then graphed as waves and recombined to create more complex patterns, which end up serving as the base for the audiovisual aesthetics of the piece.