From "Eyestorm", 3 Jul 2001
Portrait of the Artist as a Hard Disk
by Tilman BaumgärtelOne aspect of the internet that has really taken off is file-sharing, the ability to connect to another user's computer and download files from their machine. This is the basis behind networks like the infamous Napster. But now some Italian artists have simply opened up their entire computer to the internet, allowing anyone to rummage through their personal files. Net art writer Tilman Baumgärtel considers the reasons for such an extreme act.
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'Now you are in my computer.' Appearing singly and in pairs on standard gray warning messages, these words greet anyone who enters the cryptic and hard-to-remember address www.0100101110101101.org into their internet browser. One thereby gains direct access to a computer belonging to the Italian art group of the same name. No, you don't access their homepage or their website - you enter their personal computer, directly and in real time.There you can snoop around just as you wish, checking the digital belongings of this artist duo from Bologna. You can browse their email, read their exchanges with curators, critics and friends, and see what projects and texts they are working on right now, what software they are using and how it is configured. You have complete access to all their data, and given that these people rely almost entirely on their computer when making their work, that's quite a lot of material. The only thing you can't do is change the data on the hard disk. You can, however, download all the data onto your own computer and manipulate it there, forward it to others, or re-publish it online. The artists of 0100101110101101.org don't believe in intellectual property and copyright. Rather, they stick to the old hackers' motto: information wants to be free.
The piece is entitled Life-Sharing: an anagram of 'file-sharing', the exchange of data between private computers via the net that happens on peer-to-peer networks such as Napster. It's a highly appropriate name, since you can gain complete insight into the files of 0100101110101101.org, making the work a digital self-portrait of the artists, whose life is to a great extent 'lived' on their computer. Life-sharing is a portrait of the artists as a hard disk.
Making art from one's private life is not new. Artists such as Chris Burden, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Andy Warhol have turned their lives into spectacles, and, on the net, the complete revelation of one's personal life has been a staple of cyber culture - just think of the notorious Jennicam. Other examples include Dutch programmer Alex van Es, who has wired up all the appliances in his house. Now, at his website www.icepick.com, web-surfers can check how many times Van Es has flushed the toilet in his house, when the door bell rang for the last time, and how often he has opened the door of his refrigerator.
The subject of 'cyber-intimacy' - characterized by the strange contrast between the impersonality of the personal computer on the desk of your office or living room, and its ability to connect one with a worldwide audience of strangers - has attracted the attention of artists who work with the internet. For example, Austrian net artist Eva Wohlgemuth has put three-dimensional scans of her body on her website, which the viewer can rotate and zoom into and out of, and has published personal diaries on her travels in Siberia and other parts of the world.
But Life-Sharing doesn't only address questions of online privacy and control, even though the artists have pointed out in an interview that one idea behind the work is to circumvent the social control that computers and computer networks facilitate: '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.'
Apart from making their computer's contents constantly accessible to everybody on the net, the artists want to make the programs on their desktop available for free, using something similar to the Gnu Public License (GPL), a software license that was written for free software such as Linux (the free rival to Windows). While most software licenses don't allow for the exchange of programs, the aim of the GPL (which was developed by the American programmer Richard Stallman) is exactly the opposite: software that runs under this license can be copied, distributed and modified by anybody: 'Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for this service if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs; and that you know you can do these things', reads the introduction to the GPL.
While international media companies such as Bertelsmann or TimeWarner try to turn our access to information into a pay-per-view experience, the internet has enabled free and uncontrollable distribution of digital text, images and music. Life-sharing stakes a claim for keeping information in the public domain rather than turning it into a commodity. Open-source programs such as Linux have shown how successful it is to make data public rather than hiding it.
For 0100101110101101.org, culture is an open process that is greatly enhanced by open information distribution. In previous works they have 'opened' the highly secretive web gallery www.hell.com to the public by re-publishing its hidden content on their website, and made copies of popular pieces of net art that were for sale commercially. In their new work, they have taken this open-source approach to a new level. 'Until now,' they say, 'the GPL has been applied only to programs, with great success both economical and "cultural". 0100101110101101.org wish to apply the open source model (so using a license directly inspired by the GPL) also to works of art. It is a concrete proposal: to truly share intellectual properties, beginning with our own, every day.'
Life-Sharing
WWW.0100101110101101.ORGIcepick
http://www.icepick.comEva Wohlgemuth
http://www.thing.at/bodyscanGNU Public License
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html