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Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2001 18:03:41 +0200
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Subject: /// 0100101110101101.ORG /// Data-Nudism


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/// from "Gallery 9 / Walker Art Centre", 01 jan 2001
/// http://www.walkerart.org/gallery9/lifesharing



Data-Nudism
An interview with 0100101110101101.ORG about life_sharing


Matthew Fuller
matt@axia.demon.co.uk

Q.: In your text describing the project, you mention that "A computer, with the 
passing of time, ends up looking like its owner? brain." Do you mean this in 
the way that any collection of objects of a certain type (i.e., books; bathroom 
cupboards full of half-used and failed rejuvenating cosmetics; boxes of toys; 
etc.) begins to provide material from which ideas and generalizations about a 
person can be extrapolated? Or, do you go further and suggest that in the 
augmentation of human by computer, the particular collection of data objects 
provides at least one of the means by which a person is "themselves"?

A.: A computer is less and less an instrument of work. With a computer one 
shares time, one? space, one? memory, and one? projects, but most of all one 
shares personal relationships. This flow of information passes through the 
computer - all our culture is going to be digitized. Getting free access to 
someone? computer is the same as getting access to his or her culture. We are 
not interested in the fact that a user can "study 0100101110101101.ORG? 
personality"; rather, in the sharing of resources, it? a matter of politics 
more than of "psychology."

With life_sharing, 0100101110101101.ORG reveals its mechanism. It sets its 
kernel free and all the functions that concern it, in the same way as a 
programmer who frees the source code of their software. It is not only a show. 
It? not like looking at Jennicam. The user can utilize what he finds in our 
computer.  Not only documents and software, but also the mechanisms that rule 
and maintain 0100101110101101.ORG: the relations with the Net; the strategies; 
the tactics and the tricks; the contacts with institutions; access to funds; the 
flow of money that comes in and goes out. All must be shared so that the user 
has a precedent to study. From this learning, concrete knowledge - that normally 
is considered "private" - can be transformed into a weapon, a tool that can be 
reused.

Q.: Following on from this, I/O/D has a slogan: "Stop the Anthropomorphization 
of Humans by Computers." By this we mean that the pattern of "personalization" 
that users effect on their computers are pre-empted and formatted by software 
designers. The kind of person allowed for by the personal computer is a rather 
limited version of what we and computers might be. What do you think the 
consequences of becoming networked are in this context?

A.: life_sharing is an evolution in comparison with the traditional 
"Anthropomorphization of Humans by Computers." One of the ideas at the roots of 
life_sharing is exactly the abolition of one of the levels of simulation that 
separate one user from another: the website. A website, except in rare cases, is 
an interface that simplifies the exchange between users, making the contents 
"easier" to use. This trivialization is called "user friendliness," and it is 
often inspired by paper: the format of pages, indexes, and so on. life_sharing 
proposes a deeper relation. It? like a "lower level language" that abolishes 
this simulation, allowing the user to directly enter one? computer, to use the 
data in their own time-space. The abolition of this particular simulation opens 
many possibilities for using the data contained inside the computer. However, it 
is naive to think that it is possible to completely avoid simulation. Any 
language, for programming or not, is symbolic.  It exists to mediate, to 
communicate. Websites are only periodically updated, generally via ftp. The bulk 
of the contents of the Internet are not accessible in real time. There is a 
strong "delay" from the time a file (a piece of news, an image, a sound) is 
"produced" to the time when it is actually accessible from the Net: the time of 
formatting and upload. life_sharing avoids this "delay," permitting access in 
real time to its contents. The user can even get to know some data (i.e., 
e-mails or logs) earlier than 0100101110101101. ORG, by connecting to 
life_sharing while we aren? at the computer.

Q.: In comparison with the project to generate a mythopoesis about the invented 
Serbian artist Darko Maver, pulling a multi-authored hoax on the art world, this 
work seems to be a very gentle and beguilingly simple intervention -- which is 
very welcome. It clearly follows more closely from your work duplicating the 
data from various internet art sites but shifts, moving data from one context of 
availability into another, but instead proffers up the data from your own 
computer. It seems that these projects offer a form of work that is not 
concerned with representation so much as directly creating new arrangements of 
patterns of life, of the availability of data, and so on. What possibilities 
does operating in this way open up?

A.: Until now, 0100101110101101.ORG has attacked what in general seemed to be in 
open contradiction with the evolution of the Net, focusing on cultural 
production and on the inaccessibility of information. The websites involved were 
not targets for attack but instruments to highlight some paradoxes of the Net. 
The duplication of hell.com, for example, provoked a radical change in their 
approach, avoiding password protection and the pay-per-view method. With 
life_sharing, 0100101110101101. ORG launches release 2.0. In other words, passes 
from a critical position to a positive one. From this moment, we will propose 
new ways for the production and distribution of culture, furnishing alternative 
models to the current ones and bringing together the cultural, political, and 
commercial aspects of life. life_sharing is not the end. It is the means.

Q.: A clear implication of the life_sharing project is the breach of the 
boundary between personal and public life and between personal and public data. 
Is there any risk in this, or have you entirely sanitized, or even fabricated 
the data you make available? What are the consequences for the way you work, 
communicate, and live generated by this openness of process?

A.: life_sharing is 0100101110101101.ORG. It is its hard disk entirely 
published, visible and reproducible by anybody: public property. 
0100101110101101. ORG will not produce material explicitly as "content,"
 except where it is technically required. We will use the computer as we have 
always done. Naturally, it is impossible to ignore that we are so "opened." Any 
internal or external connection modifies the entire structure, thus affecting 
the project itself -- for example, in the manner of acting and expressing. 
Consider the increasing tendency toward intrusion in the private sphere -- not 
only by big corporations -- and the consequent efforts of people trying to 
preserve their own privacy. 0100101110101101.ORG believes firmly that privacy is 
a barrier to demolish. life_sharing must be considered a proof ad absurdo. The 
idea of privacy itself is obsolete. A computer connected to the Net is an 
instrument that allows the free flow of information. This is its aim. Anything 
blocking this free flow shall be considered an obstacle to be overcome. 
0100101110101101.ORG solves the dualism between public and private property. It 
proposes an empirical model that fosters the free distribution of knowledge that 
grants, at the same time, its fruition.
>From now on, the product of 0100101110101101.ORG will be its own visibility. 
life_sharing is the root under which will come other services, all directed to 
show to what degree our life can be monitored. We want to show as many forms of 
data as possible on us: not only in the transparency of the hard disk, but also 
by analyzing economic transactions: the use of credit cards; physical movements; 
purchases. 0100101110101101. ORG will show the enormous amount of information 
that is possible to find on a person in the present society.

Q.: Further in this vein, some of the material is relatively intimate 
information -- forms for the avoidance of national service, for instance. How do 
these forms of personal information conflict with the anonymous collective form 
of manifestation, which you adopt as a group?

A.: In all probability, by activating life_sharing our anonymity will fade, 
since in our computer there are many documents, e-mails or contracts, which 
contain our real identities. In any case, life_sharing has the priority over 
anything else, anonymity as well. It is an operative system under which an 
infinite number of other functions can run, never compromising this one. The war 
of secrecy (cryptography, anonymity, and so on) is unfortunately a losing 
battle. The big corporations will always have at their disposal more 
sophisticated means than the average user, more calculation capacity, more 
control through satellites. It is possible to maintain anonymity only to a 
superficial level. After a certain level it is no longer possible. Any economic 
transaction, any purchase or sale, any human relationship, is based on 
documentation. The more this society grows to depend on computers, the more this 
process will be facilitated. 0100101110101101. ORG? real strength is its 
visibility. The only way to avoid control is data-overflow -- to heap up and 
multiply data to the point that it becomes extremely difficult to isolate and 
interpret. Any time you switch on your computer, any key you type, any file you 
save, something is automatically written somewhere in the maze of your computer. 
Everything is logged. In systems like Linux this is visible. You only have to 
look at the bash history or the access log. Each action is potentially 
reconstructible with absolute precision. This must be considered. 
0100101110101101. ORG uses and makes visible the aesthetic of this flow of data. 
The functionality of a computer is an aesthetic quality: the beauty of 
configurations, the efficacy of software, the security of system, the 
distribution of data, are all characteristics of a new beauty. life_sharing is 
the result of aesthetic discipline applied every day. It is the actualization of 
the idea of "total work of art" -- gesamtkunstwerk -- in other words, the dream 
of modelling reality through aesthetic canons.

Q.: Do you intend life_sharing to become an extensible system, one that can be 
taken up by other people, or is it a one-off?

A.: The diffusion of life_sharing to anyone who wants to adopt it, as an 
operative system, is surely one of its potentials. However, the total sharing of 
one? computer is not, nowadays, easily achieved. To entirely share your 
computer you need a server and extremely expensive fast network connections. 
Some operating systems and software (i.e. MacOs9, Napster, and Gnutella) are 
developing this sharing potential. At the moment, the biggest technical problem 
is the cost of telephone lines. It is predictable, however, that these costs 
will come to be more within the reach of the average user. (As happened with the 
modem connection.)

Q.: In life_sharing, you invoke the GNU Public License (GPL) a particular form 
of license for software developed by the Free Software Foundation. This license 
allows users of a piece of code to make changes to it, to adapt it for their own 
purposes, so long as they then make those changes publicly available to other 
users and do not "close" the code as it develops. The GPL is a document that has 
excited interest outside of programming circles, providing a link to other takes 
on collective or open authorship, redefinitions of copyright, intellectual 
property, and so on. It is its particular status as a document that I? like to 
ask you to comment on. GPL seems to be formed at the meeting point between two 
different dynamics which, in another context, Toni Negri names "constituent 
power" and "constitutional power." The GPL is a technical document that forms 
the basis of a particular range of working practices. As a form of constituent 
power, it is both a manifestation of the fecundity of collaboration and -- at 
the present time -- an insurgent reinvention of the form of property. Equally, 
existing as it does in the form of a license, a contract, GPL relies on the 
constituted power of social stasis and normalization. It is based on an 
immediate appeal to Law. It is this latter aspect of it which meshes so well 
with the determination to treat software as simply another variant on capitalist 
forms of property and GPL as simply a more useful means of generating such 
property. Constituent power, on the other hand, is the amorphous and ambivalent 
power of change, of the social in the process of mutation. (This at once means 
that it also encompasses emergent sections of the bourgeois, what is inventive 
and seductive in the rhetorical figure of the "entrepreneur" deployed so much 
around e-commerce, for instance.) For Negri there is no lasting accommodation 
between constituent and constitutional power. There is no synthesis onto a 
higher plane of compromise. I suspect that it is this sense that there is more 
to it, that there? more coming, more mutation, more space for profound 
invention that makes GPL and other systems like it attractive to take up as 
models for development in other contexts. Given this, I? like to ask a couple 
of things. Firstly, is your use of GPL in the description of the life_sharing 
project accurate, or (besides the project? explicit use of software released 
under GPL or open-source licenses) is it more along the lines of an allusion? If 
so, what is it that you use GPL to point toward? What do you see lying beyond 
it? (In the case of life_sharing and other projects, I suspect that although 
they use GPL as a "model," they may actually do something rather different, 
rather more. One of the ways this happens is that they do not make an appeal to 
Law as a basic condition for their function. Here I mean Law in both senses, 
that of "absolute right" in that GPL is somehow seen as being transcendentally 
correct in some circles, rather than as being something operating within a 
specific historical setting; and the more direct sense that, as it exists in the 
form of a legal document, it allows a route into this apparently "freely" 
constructed relationship for the state.

A.: The fact of adopting Linux as operating system and consequently the GPL 
license, is absolutely not an allusion, but the result of political choices, and 
for technical and legal reasons. First of all, it is necessary to make some 
distinctions. life_sharing contains stuff produced under three different 
licenses:

-- GPL: GNU General Public License. It is the general license created to protect 
free software. All the software adopted in life_sharing is covered by GPL. 
http://www.gnu.org
-- Copyright: applied only where specified, on files not produced by 
0100101110101101. ORG but protected by traditional copyright, i.e., certain 
articles or texts
-- We are working, together with a lawyer, to develop a license that we want to 
apply to all the files in which no other license is specified. This license is 
directly inspired by the GPL but will be extended to all cultural products, 
granting the possibility of:
-- using the product
-- modifying the product
-- distributing copies, modified or not, of the product (freely or with 
payment).

This license also prevents the addition of any restrictions -- avoiding the 
possibility of products covered by this license being added to or combined with 
any other products under any different form of license. Up until now, 
0100101110101101.ORG has not placed any of the things it did under copyright. 
First of all, because 0100101110101101.ORG has never produced anything.
0100101110101101. ORG only moves packages of information, diverts their flow, 
observes changes, and eventually profits from it. Visibility is the real problem 
of the Net. If someone uses your music, your words, or images, he is only doing 
you favor.

Many people have spontaneously reused 0100101110101101.ORG
www.plagiarist.org, www.geocities.com/maxherman_2000/hell.html, 
www.message.sk/warped). If someone else profits from 0100101110101101.ORG, it? 
because of their own merit. In the end, it is doing the same as what we did: 
profit is always inevitably mutual.

Q.: Yes, so this is this surplus, happening also in the economy of visibility.  
Developing this, it seems there are two basic forms of approach to the knot of 
problems pointed to by the terms appropriation/plagiarism/anticopyright, etc. 
One is illustrated by Hegel when he says, in Elements of the Philosophy of 
Right, "To appropriate something means basically only to manifest the supremacy 
of my will in relation to the thing." The other approach is the generation of 
contexts in which the creation of dynamics of circulation and use that have 
greater or lesser degrees of openness -- not the imposition of will -- prevail. 
(A different formulation of this might be found in the statements of 
anti/copyright commonly used in the underground and radical media in Italy and 
elsewhere, where copyright is open to further nonprofit users, or for 
participants in social movements, but closed to proprietary reproduction. Thus, 
on the "inside" an open context is created, but the proprietary weapon of 
copyright is still maintained for use against for-profit use. The fiction of the 
will is used in this sense as a legalistic shield in order, in essence, to 
dissolve it.) Do these two forms correspond in some way to the two modes of 
operation that you have spoken about?

A.: The fact that 0100101110101101.ORG is explicitly no-copyright is surely 
strictly linked to commercialization, but not in the sense in which it is often 
used. It is common to mistake "no-copyright" for "no-profit." 
100101110101101.ORG is compatible with monetary retribution, under different 
forms. life_sharing, being a project financed by an institution, is one of 
these. "Free" software, Negativland? music, Wu-Ming? books, are all examples 
of cultural products that have been able to reconcile the no-copyright model 
with commercialization. No-copyright is no longer solely an underground 
practice, but a wider cultural "production standard." This means, in the first 
place, being conscious that your own knowledge is not innate, but that it is a 
synthesis of different cultural products. Recognizing this means making our own 
knowledge shareable and thus usable not only by ourselves but by anyone, even 
commercially, imposing simply that nobody can subsequently restrict this 
possibility to others. The problem of copyright is increasingly more important. 
It deals not only with software, art, or music, but is invading every field of 
human life. Let? consider, for example, the field of genetics. In 1987, in 
apparent violation of the laws that govern the concession of patents on natural 
discoveries, a revolutionary decree was made in which it was declared that the 
components of human beings (genes, chromosomes, cells, and tissues) could be 
patented and considered the intellectual property of anybody who first isolates 
a length of DNA, describes its properties or functions, proposes an application, 
and pays some money for a patent. This implies that, for example, when a person 
wants to have a genetic code test, they may have to pay a percentage to the 
company that holds the copyright of one or more of their genes. "Manifest the 
supremacy of my will in relation to the thing." This signifies that all the 
times that it is necessary, every time we found ourselves in front of a distance 
that doesn? belong to us, that we share a book, a film, an idea, we can say: 
"It is mine! I did it!"


First published by Gallery 9 / Walker Art Centre for life_sharing by 
0100101110101101.ORG http://www.walkerart.org/gallery9/lifesharing/


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