sound by micromusic.net: ubermorgen.music
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THX FOR THE INVITATION
to Artnode, cph:dox and Overgaden
and especially to Jacob Lillemose
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Greets f/ lizvlx/ubermorgen
she sorry she couldnt be here
Currently works on exhibition at Kunsthaus Graz /Austria, title "THE AGENCY", dealing with U.S. voting system, e-voting.
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konsthall in malmoe:
great exhibition coming up
"Electrohype", Opening
26th November 2004.
computer/digital art
curated by anna kindvall and lars gustav midboe from electrohype
nov. 27th 2004 - january 2005.
and 28-29 november
conference on nordic electronic art in malmoe, more info on electrohype.org
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and another pointer
tomorrow night, there will be a film-screening: THE YES MEN, including work by ubermorgen [Voteauction, Salzburg Stunt WTO, Andy Bichlbaum and Andreas Bichlbauer are Aliases of Hans Bernhard].
Cinemateket, 9/11, 19:15h
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etoy
the etoy.CORPORATION
the first boy-group on the internet
the first street gang on the internet
a cult
a formula 1 team
a global corporation
corporate identity
the etoy.LOGO, 125% streched, microstyle extended font, italic
etoy.SLOGANS - for the company, for each product and action a slogan, changing and morphing slogans and logos
brand power like coca-cola and microsoft [via the www]
internet-lsd test-pilots
experimented with drugs and tech
emigrated to the net in 1994
the etoy.TANK-SYSTEM
the digital home of the etoy.AGENTS, the virtual playground, office, publication-place, studio and airport for the new traveling generation
returned from the .net in 1996
some appereances in "reality"
tv-hijack in switzerland
helicopter-action dada-show
feature action 1996
the digital hijack
1.5 mio people hijacked in 4 months, [30 mio. ppl online 1996!], secret service
troubles, censorship, house searches, anonymous remailers, search-engine hack
[legal! cat-mouse game]
won the ars electronica 1996, catapulted from underground into mainstream new media art world, we were 22-23 years old at the time.
pervert installation etoy.TANK-SYSTEM - transformation of the digital space methapor into real space, large scaled installation. extreme festival PR and action
etoy.SHARES
etoy has no products, shares of the company is the only thing you can buy in
the form of certificates or cards - like credit cards - certificates with historical
pictures.
budapest c3 residency & gallery show, performance & exhibition with digital visitor-tracking system and enforced drug-use; excessive.
USA emigration, building of TANK-17, cargo containers with office, music-studio for world-tours [offers to travel with rolling stones]
shows at SFMOMA [performance], san francisco balsthaus gallery, etoy original formation blow up in san francisco, like a bloody sex pistols reply. split of etoy, etoy is dead - long lives etoy. a period of angst, depression and sadness...
TOYWAR
the most expensive performance in history, 4.5 billion dollars
destroyed. eToys, toy-seller over the internet sued etoy.com - the original
7 founding members by name - to hand over the domain etoy.com. large
net.community fight, in the end, eToys Inc. is bust, bankrupt
due to the fall of the .COM bubble and etoy.com claims a big victory.
Toywar carries two sides, the one side is the beautiful hardcore fight, david against goliath, underground net.art against business establishmen. the other one is the destruction of the image of etoy, the pervert etoy.CORPORATION - the fascist boygroup was built carefully by seven smart managers - handcrafted over years - into a global venture. the TOYWAR destroyed the classic bad boy corporate image. Hans Bernhard - by buying global trademarks [china, uk, kazachstan, namibia, et cetera...] - was turning around reality into another direction, leading etoy into building the etoy.HOLDING
the etoy.HOLDING, the mother corporation of all etoy.COMPANIES. a legal entity - dealing in strategic, financial and legal [trademark] matters. positioned in the center of europe [berlin] with sub-companies all over the world.
the book, the whole story about etoy - from the beginning until 2003, from eToys Inc, the internet decade, the fight between etoy.com and eToys Inc.. a fantastic thrilling read.
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break
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ubermorgen
http://ubermorgen.com
ubermorgen is the author of projects such as Voteauction, Naziline, Injunction Generator, The Agency
ubermorgen is the label of the artist duo lizvlx and Hans Bernhard
ubermorgen works with accidents and trash from net.art, we work mainly "on the edge of the law" and is specialized on "Legal Art".
ubermorgen holds no. 537 in the world-art-ranking list
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Voteauction
or [V]ote-auction
Voteauction was a "Media Hack", a mass media intrusion, a 4 month period of media madness and legal trouble of unknown dimensions before.
To put it into context, this was the year 2000, there were no other web-selling platforms [except some freaks trying to sell their votes via Ebay]
In 2000, Al Gore and G.W. Bush were running for White House. A young student with the name James Baumgartner opened a Website named voteauction.com, as part of his diploma-thesis at RPI university in upstate new york. his politically motivated idea was to point out that while vote-selling in large masses [via campaing funding] was done on a regular basis, direct vote selling was illegal, and he wanted to do that via the web, as a fake.
It got out of hand immediately -pressure from the new york election committee - and he came to ubermorgen and sold us the web-site to for an undisclosed sum.
Already it had good press [Wirednews]. we picked it up, redesigned the web-site and pushed it to the limits and over. CIA, FBI, NSA, Janet Reno, Distric Attorneys and General Attorneys from 13 States got involved and we were sued in 4 cases by General Attorneys.
We ran 20-30 Interviews per day over a period of 4 months with international press [from asia to afrika, from the u.s. to europe]. over 1800 News features - Radio, TV, Print, Online.
what was it all about?
The U.S. of America are THE leading capitalistic country. The U.S. are the world-leader in democracy. So we thought we should bring this togehter:
the slogan: "bringing capitalism and democracy togehter", a affirmative claim.. a fantastic clinch for the american brain, it was a good thing to do, we believe in the vote-selling market, it has been done for over 100 years on a large scale, now thanks to the internet it can be done p2p/ 1 on 1, cutting the middleman.
Every state in the USA and federal law prohibit the sale, buying and soliciting of selling and buying of votes as a crime...
Every day Fedex, UPS, ... cam to our office to deliver law suits, we arranged tuesday and friday deliveries because it got too much. Today we exhibit these documents in art shows and sell them through art galleries as art pieces - we call them [f]originals - foriginals.
We moved in Europe to stay flexible, from Berlin to Vienna, from Zurich to Sofia/Bulgaria. We hired several lawyers to cover our backs so we could not run into troubles in Europe. We founded a company in sofia/bulgaria to cover the risk, voteauction inc. sofia.
The US authorities spent millions of dollars investigating the case. They did not know with whome they were dealing, they couldnt know wheter we were artsitst, scam artists, business people or what the hell. The whole CNN show which we are going to see actually deals with finding out who is behind Voteauction and what is the motivation of running it, money or art.
we are happy to be the onyl artists we know, who had 30 minute feature on CNN. It actually brought us immediate fame - worldwide, through mass media, and over time it also penetrated the art world, as marti guixe put it:" this is pure contemporary pop art at it's best"
a good example is the "electrohype" exhibition at konsthall malmoe where we will show the Voteauction piece [CNN video, Seal drawings, legal documents as paper sculpture and a slide show of the web-site] as a mix of old media - video, drawings, paper... - with new work and old work
now who
are the main characters of this pop-art piece:
- Greta Van Susteren [Friend to G.W. Bush and Sharon Osbourne]
- A bunch of Lawyers
- CIA, FBI, NSA, Austrian Secret Service, German Secret Service, Janet Reno
lets roll...
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after the movie, here a
quick reference to 2 contemporary projects and 1 upcoming Project related to
[V]ote-Auction:
SELLtheVOTE.COM - U.S. election 2004, produced by Jorgen Follested in collaboration with ubermorgen. A web-site for U.S. americans to offer to sell their vote to non U.S. citizens in order to democratize the world. The world can actually vote for the U.S. President, because some smart U.S. citizens were willing to give up their sacred right to vote in favour of democray.
*THE*AGENCY*
[for manual Election Recounts], exhibition & performance, Graz
/ Austria 2004
http://ubermorgen.com/*THE*AGENCY*/
A concept exhibition about democracy, the USA and their elections, Votingcards
and Votingmachines, governemental power and Mediaterror.
February 2005 Release - Voteauction - The Movie, a DVD with a Feature Film about Voteauction, starring CNN-Layer-Graphics, CNN-Voteauction-Footage and Greta Van Susteren. 35 Minutes, PAL/NTSC.
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