Though all remixing involves a change in meaning with respect to the original work there are certain works which wage decided attacks on the ideas conveyed by the originals. We will, thus, find works undertaking these attacks with tactics like sabotage, distortion, or aikido-like methods through which one uses his opponent's own effort against him, revealing his weak points.
There are also other tactics comparable to certain living beings’ survival mechanisms. The ability to camouflage themselves in their environment, for example, has been developed by species such as the chameleon and some classes of butterflies to keep from being seen by both their prey and predators. We can also compare them to the ploy used by a legendary wooden animal: the Trojan Horse. The computer version being well-known on the web, Trojan Horses have surpassed viruses as a threat, mainly thanks to their ability to get into our systems by hiding inside other programs. Like viruses or memes, which are reproduced through a human carrier who they use as a vehicle, certain arguments are patiently kept out of sight, only subsequently exploited to achieve maximum “infection.”
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Mark Napier
The Distorted Barbie
http://www.detritus.net/projects/barbie/
Online project
1997
Napier deals with the subject of the Barbie doll as a social icon and market phenomenon in terms of its connotations of infancy, and its social, political, and religious symbology.
In his distorted Barbies we can see variations in the style of Kate Moss, Björk, or Dolly Parton, as well as “X-Files” Barbies, “possessed” Barbies, or simply “fat and ugly” Barbies.
One of the disadvantages which were a side-effect of this project were the legal proceedings initiated by Mattel Inc., the company that manufactures the doll, which led to a series of virtual changes of address for the artist, as well as various legal pleadings, even while the project has received support and shows of solidarity throughout the art world.
The question that might be raised in response to Mattel’s lawsuit might be: who can claim to own the rights to social stereotypes?
Thomson & Craighead
Attributed text
http://www.attributed-text.net/
Online project
1997
In this work, the artists present us with a page in which all we can see is a typical legal text in the form of an alert about author’s rights. If we look a little closer, however, we realise that in fact each of the words of the text is a link to sites which do not belong to the artists. When we click on one of these words, two more items appear containing additional information: one details the copyright of the page from which the word has been “stolen”, and the other displays the text in question. The selection of these sites is not random: all are related to different perspectives on issues such as copyright, the circulation of information on the Internet, and so on.
With this ironic strategy the artists underline the absurdity of taking copyright control to extremes, especially in an environment such as the Internet, in which it is impossible for the navigator to detect the borders which separate the supposed owners of information: a page almost always hosts materials by different authors.
La Société Anonyme (José Luis Brea)
Redefinition of artistic practices s.21 (LSA47)
http://aleph-arts.org/lsa/lsa47
Work in progress
2000-2001
This work represents a manifesto comprising 34 points presented as an open reflection and work in progress dealing with the debate surrounding the new role of the artist as a producer in the century of digital communication.
Following this line of discussion, the manifesto is also presented as an artistic and theoretical production. The following are excerpts from the manifesto: “The question of the identity or condition of the author is a definitively worn-out concept. No one is the author: all producers are an anonymous society, we might even say the product of an anonymous society.”
“There is no such thing as a ‘work of art’. There is only work and some practices which we might define as artistic. These have to do with meaningful, affective, or cultural production, and they fulfil specific roles in relation to the subjects of experience. But they have nothing to do with the production of specific objects. Rather, they are solely concerned with the public impulsion of certain circulatory effects: the effects of meaning, symbolic, intense, or emotional effects, and so on.”
“Intellectual property and author’s rights will become the main hobby horse in this contemporary reconsideration of relationships within production. The figures of utopian plagiarism or the syndication of authorship – whose efficacy is best exemplified today in the field of free software – are the spearheads of a great strategy as yet not deployed which will direct its politics at the generation of devices and brokers which allow the free circulation and universal access to information, permanently altering the relationship between producers and users.”
Amy Alexander, The Yes Men, and Steev Hise
Reamweaver
http://www.reamweaver.com/
Software
2001
As advertised, this piece of software created by Amy Alexander, The Yes Men, and Steev Hise features all you need to instantly replicate any website at home, maintaining its design while allowing you to change any image or word you desire.
Various examples illustrate its potential applications: news pages such as CNN, the World Economic Forum, the World Trade Organization, and the Republican National Committee, to mention just a few examples of websites which have been distorted by this software which, we would like to point out, is also free, open, and has a GNU software license. This distortion tool allows us to redress the balance between us and powerful companies or institutions. By taking advantage of the Internet, it allows David and Goliath to be on an equal footing and of the same stature. A webpage is just the same as any other webpage, and here all the huge differences which we would face were we to take on these organizations in the real world disappear.
Amy Berk / Andy Cox
Anti-Capitalist Operating System (ACOS) V2.0
http://www.twcdc.com/
Website
2003
An economic system can be compared to an operating system: not all programmes will work if the operating system doesn't have the correct information, if parameters are not updated, or if they do not have the drivers which identify them as acceptable and functional for the system. ACOS presents us with an ironic change of operating system to defeat capitalism. In its menu we will find programmes such as the Stop Bush Video Game, May Day 200 Project, Guerrilla Tea Room, Che Money, and so on.
Amy Berk & Andy Cox comprise the art and activism collective Together We Can Defeat Capitalism (TWCDC) which carries out actions in public spaces both on- and offline.
Ubermorgen, Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico
Amazon Noire
http://www.amazon-noir.com
Internet action
2006
The collaboration of Ubermorgen, Paolo Cirio, and Alessandro Ludovico cannot be described as a group or formal art collective as such, although it does resemble a “band” in many ways. Their previous strike was an attempt to displace Google by reinvesting the money paid to them by Google for advertising in Google shares. In 2006 they planned a new action which targeted the largest online bookseller. The band dedicated themselves to purloining books with copyrights protected by Amazon.com, using a sophisticated technology encoded by supervillain and media hacker Paolo Cirio. They managed to gain access to all the pages of books for sale online, which allowed them to download whole publications and offer them free on their website as material in the public domain on the grounds of an economy of shared property. The result was a legal contest with Amazon.com which was followed by huge online debates on the limits of intellectual property.
Mark Napier
PAM Standing
http://www.potatoland.org/index.html
Internet action Video
2008
In this work Napier takes a “constructed” beauty icon – representing a Western beauty of consumerism and artificial youth – and attempts its digital reconstruction based on the traces her body has left all over the Internet. We are referring to Pamela Anderson, in her time the woman whose image became the most frequently reproduced in history thanks to the advent of the Internet.
Using these fetish images as a starting point, Napier reconstructs a 3D body of Pamela and recreates an ideal image – perhaps the one which Pamela and her surgeon are pursuing themselves. Instead of a scalpel, a mouse. Instead of skin, the screen.
Paolo Pedercini (Molleindustria)
Welcome to the desert of the real
http://vimeo.com/4750691
Video
2009
For this work Paolo Pedercini uses the software America’s Army, a videogame for the recruitment of soldiers developed by the US Defense Department, radically changing its original functions. The video’s script is no longer based on a list of the virtues and benefits of fighting and winning in the defence of the mother country; rather, it is based on a list of the symptoms of post-traumatic stress suffered by soldiers on their return home.
A propaganda tool which uses evanescent, abstract ideas of glory, domination, and control is thereby transformed into a painful demo on the pointlessness of war and the destruction of the individual.
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