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A Hole in the Brain of the Machine by Marina Grzinic The Walker Art Center commissioned 0100101110101101.ORG's work - an internet.art work, or perhaps, if you prefer, a web based project, with a title life_sharing. In contrast to obscurantist New Age allusions, namely that as part of this project we will share life and possibly exchange art together, we have to take the life_sharing project by 0100101110101101.ORG very seriously. The life_sharing project presents a radical rupture with the capitalist machine, which is nowadays functioning as a convulsed postmodern pastiche, searching for possible ways of perfect communication and exchange. We have to read this project not in relation to the floating signifier, with the meaning that arise here and there, but solely in relation to the traumatic Real, the most impenetrable zone, and the one that can never be fully assimilated to the symbolic order of language and communication, nor to the imaginary. The traumatic Real is the hidden/traumatic underside of our existence or sense of reality, whose disturbing effects are felt in strange and unexpected places. The traumatic Real is defined through extreme situations, in disturbing behavior that is both horrific and enjoyable, or in the uncanny effects of close-ups or details. What is the Real in the project life_sharing? Reality in itself, presented in such a direct and crude way! What is the Real in the project life_sharing? Life in itself, which is always subtracted from the immaterial situation of the vast space, which we call cyberspace. 0100101110101101.ORG is creating a hole in the brain of the machine as a kind of alien situation, a de-realization of the system of the computer and of the content of so called everyday life. There is something so disgusting and repulsive in this action and so powerful at the same time. It is as if suddenly we have access to the constantly microscopically zoomed information content of an individual, in all the dirtiness and business of someone's life. It is as if he or she gives us the possibility to see everything under his or her skin, the intestines of the body, so to speak, and the intestines of the computer as well. And the strategic mind of this whole endeavor by 0100101110101101.ORG is based upon the discordance between reality, observed from a safe distance, and the absolute proximity of the Real (life). 0100101110101101.ORG's life_sharing moves from establishing a constant, interminable shot of reality to a disturbing proximity that renders visible the disgusting substance of enjoyment, and confronts us with a view that is too close for comfort. 0100101110101101.ORG's technique consists of superimposing two incompatible realms which they nevertheless allow to invade each other: the symbolic realm of representation, making an internet art project with certain structure and etc. and life in itself - the proximity of life, the non comfortable point of entering, constantly, into somebody's life, taking part in all his or her secrecy, that is now visible, open, and proposed as a project (this real life is almost as a decomposing moment of life!). Superimposing two exclusive realms that nevertheless allow to invade each other: the symbolic realm of representation (internet.art) and the Real ( the introspection of everyday bureaucracy, the non-intimacy, the peculiarity of life in itself) shows life as absolutely artificial, constructed. 0100101110101101.ORG's approach is strategical to such an extent, that, to paraphrase Christine Buci-Glucksmann's book, The Madness of Seeing (La Folie du Voir) the Internet can now be considered in the position where 'eyes can see how eyes see.' In contrast to the clean, pure space of virtual reality, the material reality and life in itself - suddenly as showed by 0100101110101101.ORG - becomes an object of horror and disgust because it cannot be integrated into the matrix. In other words, the material becomes abject. As Julia Kristeva has pointed out, it becomes what culture, the sacred, must purge, separate and banish so that it may establish itself as such in the universal logic of catharsis. Materiality is entirely extracted from cyberspace, and reduced from object to abject - a senseless, obscene intervention. The entrance of mistakes in perfect, simulated environments can be viewed, therefore, as a point of developing new esthetical and conceptual strategies, since the mistake as object of horror and disgust cannot be integrated into the matrix. What matters in cyberspace is the possibility to interact concretely, hence materially, by means of different devices. It is at this precise point of contact, at the interface between the virtual and real, that the user is called upon to insert his or her fingerprints, and ultimately, also his or her material body in the form of a mistake. The interface can be considered an obscene stain constantly reminding the user of his or her inability to become fully subject in cyberspace. We might also say the same with regard to the mistakes: mistakes in the image are like a fingerprint on the film, a scratch or scar on the skin - the evidence of the existence of the image. To make a mistake is to find a place in time. A mistake is like a wound in the image; it is like an error in the body, or, as formulated by Richard Beardsworth, failure(s) represent(s) precisely our submission to time. This is a situation of producing a gap, a hiatus, where we can insert not only a proper body, but also its interpretation. Such a mistake is a process of endless copying. The fact that 0100101110101101.ORG
has such a strange name induces the user/the sender to copy and paste it
again and again -- it is too difficult to remember precisely. In the net.art
community, 0100101110101101.ORG became famous in the past with their 'theft'
of the private and closed net.art gallery site Hell.com which was
downloaded during one weekend and transported on their own site for endless
using by any visitor. Their secretiveness concerning the name 0100101110101101.ORG is an artistic practice pressing the user to repeat again and again the matrix of the computer memory (01), the structure of the computer brain, so to speak, and the openness of the internet machine, which is all about copying, reusing, re-making history, life. The 0100101110101101.ORG's project Darko Maver-- the fake artist prank -- was also such a construction: Darko was constructed by photos, or more correctly, by photographic documents of actual atrocities, several of which had taken place in Maver's 'home' patch of the former Yugoslavia. Darko Maver is a topos and a tropos, a figure, construction, artifact, movement, displacement. Maver's hundreds of simulated deaths are today seen as a commonplace and powerful discursive construction. And what we envision here is that the Internet has found itself occupying the place of the impossible - real object of desire. But there is nothing sublime in it, it is simply that the internet is occupying the structural place, the forbidden place of enjoyment. Accessibility, non originality, reproducibility -- these are the characteristics that we have to attach to it, thanks to 0100101110101101.ORG. 0100101110101101.ORG's life_sharing presents a bizarre shift, a reversal (not from dull, drab life into the ecstasy of Internet art) but a radical detour from thousands of exciting formalistic possibilities of web designing -- innovations in entering interfaces, which are always trying to amuse us -- to dull, drab existence in itself, to the impotent situation of life, the disgusting impotence of everyday bureaucracy, exchanging of mails, bargaining for new projects. What we get in the end is a psychotic de-hallucination. Net.art, which is in most cases, virile and powerful, inventive and heroical, is now without the touch of life, since it is life in itself! It is not a question of keeping the position, but of constantly re-articulating it, through a process of positioning, differentiation and, moreover, of interpretation. 0100101110101101.ORG's position is a deeply oppressive, working intellectual activist position, whose result is a constant politicization and a turbulence, and not the privilege of the splitting and floating subject, who is everywhere and can be everybody. Jacques Lacan clearly indicated that a resistance to capitalism can only be theorized in terms of some resistant instance, that is, strictly speaking, neither exterior nor interior, but rather, is situated at the point of exteriority in the very intimacy of interiority, which Lacan named extimacy (ext[eriority-int]imacy). Conceived in terms of extimacy rather than in terms of pure alterity, resistance therefore consists in the derivation from within capitalism of an indigestible kernel, of an otherness which has the potential to disrupt the circuit of the drive for growth. 0100101110101101.ORG's life_sharing presents such indigestible kernel, an otherness which has the potential to disrupt the circuit of the drive for growth. Circular narrative renders visible the circularity of the gap that separates reality from Real: what constitutes reality is the minimum of idealization which the subject needs in order to sustain the horror of the Real. This minimum of idealization is often pushed to the limits of believability. Are you sure that 0100101110101101.ORG's life_sharing is not staged, that this is not again a copy of life? Is real life or isn't? As Jean Narboni put it, discordant are not only perceptions and emotions, but also the faces, which are real territories. To transform a life does not mean only to use it as a territory along which one can stroll. A life can also be doubled or borrowed, much more easily than shared. The aim of 0100101110101101.ORG's life_sharing is to effect the 'ruin of representation' (Jo Anna Isaak) precisely on the grounds of what has been excluded - from the non-represented object (e.g. life in itself). This creates a significance derived from absence, and in this way, investigates the means by which a subject, and the body, is produced. Such counter-narratives are resistant to the point that they could no longer be included within a philosophical binary opposition, but which, inhabit philosophical oppositions, resisting and disorganizing, without ever constituting a third therm (Jacques Derrida). The achievement is thus the decentralization of the subject to the point where instead of outside or inside, there exists a powerful dynamic relation to both outside and inside, dependence and independence, art and nature and, ultimately, to what is real and what is not. The identity of 0100101110101101.ORG is represented, not through the psychology of an individual, but through the formation of a new visual and cultural space, via the recycling of stereotypes. What we are witnessing in life_sharing is the act of taking possession of documents, photographs, images, which are constantly produced as types, stereotypes and prototypes. Consequently, in life_sharing there is (contrary to the anticipation of the realistic doctrine) no psychology, except when it is a constituent part of a 'quotation' or 'stereotype'. This can be regarded as the return of the repressed. The methods described result in a project which exposes a never-ending display, insertion and rearrangement. Likewise, life is an artifact cobbled from other artifacts, rather than from a profound experience. In contrast to the mass media-produced idea that life connected with new media achieves a natural totality, processes of 0100101110101101.ORG's life_sharing visualization underline this artificial, mediatized, constructed and unnatural human life, and her/his/its thoughts and emotions. The use of recycling methods suggests a radical re-questioning of originality and repetition, reality and media simulation. These are images/documents/facts about (historical) places, where our own memories become at once psychotic and erotic. Is 0100101110101101.ORG (de)archiving life? No, it is rather a simulation of its political and emotional coordinates. Life_sharing is used against amnesia, shifting tenses in a way that deepens our understanding of memory and history beyond the medium. However, it is not only this; the way life is presented in the life_sharing project clearly shows that life via Internet is only an algorithm. 0100101110101101.ORG's life _sharing is powerful on the libidinal rather than on the conceptual level, on the way we 'desire' our own oppression, rather than the way we entertain beliefs. The project aims not so much to show life as something else, but rather, to instantiate the idea of dealing with, or living with and through, contradictions. This means that it is not a question of loosing life, but actually getting it back through a process of rethinking the place where it was/is produced. 0100101110101101.ORG uses extreme oppositions to show that life is absolutely mediated, constructed, fabricated and that there is a speculative identity of the computer paradigm and of life in itself. It shows that instead of being a substantial force, life is composed of cliché. This is an attempt to create empathy where apathy reigns, and to create anxiety without ecstasy. The strategy is not to make fakes, but to develop tactics of political and aesthetic articulation of a proper reality and the politics of resistance, as, perhaps, Homi K. Bhabha would say, around a specific kind of subject that is constructed at the point of disintegration. 0100101110101101.ORG is almost fixated on life, reaching the zero elements of what is perceived to be the central concept of the internet, which still functions as sublime object. This is a deadly serious vision, as Slavoj Zizek would say, that shows clearly the important quality of technology and clichés. 'Everything, everywhere, everybody' is the slogan of the 90s that results in a confusion of bodies, concepts and strategies - a type of out -of -joint situation for the subject. We find ourselves within all media, in all bodies, in all possible spaces at once. We are faced with leaving a historically defined position, which imitates the natural world of our senses. With new media and technology, we have the possibility of an artificial interface, which is dominated by non-identity, or difference (Peter Weibel). Instead of producing a new identity, something much more radical is produced: the total loss of identity. The subject is forced to assume that s/he is not what s/he thought her/himself to be, but somebody-something else. The 0100101110101101.ORG's life _sharing project compulsorily revisits and encircles, again and again, those shattered and perverted dreams and lost causes, not because of the process of marking some totality of ethics and morals, but (and finally this is the appropriate place to use it) to share the politics of perception, the politics of seeing, and the politics of life, as a constant mediation between 'ultra-ethics' and strangely de-realized de-psychologized situations.
Marina Grzinic, Ljubljana, Slovenia
References - Beardsworth, Richard, "Derrida & the Political",
Routledge, London and New York 1996.
First published by Gallery 9 / Walker Art Centre for life_sharing by 0100101110101101.ORG |
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