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The K Thing
Story of an infamous online performance

 

«In politics, deliberate violation of limits is understood as a hostile act of aggression. In culture though, overtepping the limits is understood as a sign of freedom»
Rene Block, Art knows no limits

 

The night of December the 2nd 2001, at 2 AM - Seoul local time - Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.ORG hijacked all the visitors of the first Korea Web Art Festival, held in Seoul, South Korea.

The Mattes had been invited to the event through the commission of a new work. Instead of creating a webpage, their contribution was an online performance.

They connected to the website of the exhibition and renamed the works belonging to the twelve invited artists. After the permutation, each link no longer corresponded to the work created by its author, but to another one.

The day of the official opening whoever entered the exhibition through the website www.Koreawebart.org instead of seeing the chosen artwork, would get imperceptibly redirected to a different one. Clicking the link to the work of Lisa Jevbratt, for example, they'd see the one of Motomichi Nakamura, while looking for the Critical Art Ensemble would lead to Sean Kerr's work, and so on.

None of the works had been erased or in any way modified tough, but exchanged with one another. Before hacking the website, the Mattes stored a back up copy of the whole exhibition, hidden inside an invisible folder in the official website, to be able to restore the show once the performance would be over.

Nobody, neither the curator nor the invited artists, was aware of the nature of the performance since, according to Franco Mattes «There was no other way to carry on such a performance. Many of our actions request surprise, that's why they are organized secretly».

Immediately after the action was discovered Mattes' FTP account got disabled, preventing them from connecting to the website and restoring its original appearence.

The modified version of the exhibition has been visible only for few hours, before the curator and the organizers of the event, realized that something went wrong. It will take them few hours to figure out that it had not been an outsider hacker but Mattes' own contribution to the exhibition.

The action had catastrophic consequences. Following the discovery of the performance, the Korean Ministry of Culture and Tourism took the drastical decision to dismiss the curator. In addition to this, there will be no other Korea Web Art Festival in the future.

Some of the invited artists didn't accepted the Mattes' action as being a lecit intervention, and refused to give their help to reconstruct the exhibition.

Full catastrophy on all sides: the Ministry of Culture and Tourism furious, the curator fired, the artists unhappy.

Ask to comment upon the facts Franco Mattes replied «It's an intricate matter, but what I want to be absolutely clear is that nobody did expect such consequences for the curator: he has been unfairly dismissed, while he has done a great job. Even under such pressure he hadn't withdraw the relation with us, and confirmed our tript to Seoul, where we finally met».

Interviewd by German magazine Telepolis curator Marc Voge coments: «I love everything 0100101110101101.ORG does on the Net».

The performance and its consequences provoked a stormy debate. Stories and statement being told and circulating are literally hundreds. Everybody had his say on the affair. Invited artist Sawad Brooks compared the action with the erased work of De Kooning by Robert Rauschenberg, while Steve Kurtz of the Critical Art Ensemble writes: «It seems that 0100101110101101.ORG wanted to place themselves above all in the center of the whole exhibition, producing a storm in an electronic water glass. Good publicity, no consequences».

This performance pointed out, partly accidentally, radical differences, not only on intellectual property issues, but rather on a social level, contradictions that are rarely tackled in an art context. It's been a sheer crash on culture.

Franco Mattes final comment is rather surprising: «This has been our last online performance, our last "pure Net Art" piece. We've said what we wanted, and brought it to its final consequences. I wouldn't know where to go further in this direction».