Unpublished, done for "Wired", May 2003

0100101110101101.ORG

by Gabe Friedman

The way an 'OK' button, bubble could be used to deliver a unique message. I would guess most people accepted the gray bubbles with an 'OK' button popping up on their screen in much the same way they would interpret an elevator button, although an elevator button is a physical object. My question is what are your aims as an artist? How do you approach your artwork?

In reality the biggest part of buttons that you run into while using a PC is not more important than any button in an elevator. Let's say that the one we are interested in is the alarm button. Most of the interfaces are designed to let the average user be familiar with data. 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: pages, indexes, and so on. life_sharing is exactly the abolition of one of the levels of simulation that separates one user from another: the website. life_sharing allows the user to directly enter our home computer.

How do you think about your medium, which is sort of hard to envision as a real object? Where is cyberspace?

Cyberspace is a state of mind. The medium in itself doesn't make any difference. What counts is how you use it. "Media hacking" refers to the deliberate disruption, distortion, or subversion of any media message. The message is the message, who cares about the medium?

Did you decide to make artwork and then learn programming code or how did you first get into online artwork?

For almost one year 0100101110101101.ORG's activity was to deliberately reproduce other people's online artworks, exactly as they were, or mashed up. None of us had any idea on how to make a website, therefore the obvious conclusion was that stealing them was more simple and quick, and that's what we did. And it functioned. Boring things, such as websites, should be done by machines, not people.

What is your favorite piece by an online artist? Who are some of your influences?

Our favorite piece is the Injunction Generator, by Ubermorgen.com. Is there any web-site you wanna take off the web using a highly subversive method? Than go to www.ipnic.org and use it. It's easy, fun, and it works. 0100101110101101.ORG was influenced by a huge variety of sources, people like Andy Kaufman, Neue Slowenische Kunst, KLF, Kraftwerk, Sex Pistols, Negativland, Dsico, Abbie Hoffman, Hans Berhnard, ®TMark, etoy, Netochka Nezvanova.

What be the ideal way for you to display your art?

Life_sharing. The system we produced and are running since 2000. life_sharing is a real time sharing system based on Linux. For the last three years 0100101110101101.ORG's computer has been turned into a transparent webserver. Any user has free and unlimited access to all contents: texts, images, software, private mail. You can get lost in this huge data maze. life_sharing is a brand new concept of net architecture turning a website into a hardcore personal media for complete digital transparency. Better than this we can only produce a neural P2P, but we are still working on it.

Do you see online art as a way for conceptual artists to display their work to a bigger audience?

Of course, but not only. The Net is not the mere amplifier of our actions, sometimes it's the heart itself. The theft of the online gallery Hell.com, the fake Vatican website, recently defined "The World's First Internet Coup D'état", the 5 hours kidnapping of the Korea Web Art Festival, are some of the media hacks we produced that couldn't be staged outside of the Internet.