snafu on Wed, 30 May 2001 23:03:27 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> 0100101110110101.org opensources 0100101110101101.org... and pull the plug |
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. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net