Digital Actionism and Media Hacking

 

 

 

 

HANS BERNHARD

UBERMORGEN.COM

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Connessioni Leggendarie
Milan

 

04/11/2005

 

 

 

 

 

         Definitions:

  1. Media Hacking
  2. Digital Actionism
  3. The aesthetics of Digital Actionism
  4. Negative Affirmation

    Projects:

  5. etoy
  6. digital hijack
  7. Toywar
  8. UBERMORGEN.COM
  9. GWEI Ð Google Will Eat Itself
  10. [F]originals
  11. Injunction Generator
  12. Vote-Auction
  13. CNN Video

 


 

 

Initially i have to say, that in my artistic practice the difference between fact and fiction is inexistent. Since the beginning Ð especially through excessive drug abuse and due to the fact that i worked within a cult-like-collective, my memories are like a sauce... and since then the fact-fiction mix is a fix element of my artistic work.

 

But now, lets start with the dry part, the sooner we get over the boring definitions, the faster we can hear about the juicy projects...

 

 

Media Hacking

 

Media Hacking is generally described very vaguely as manipulation of media technology. A more specific definition is the massive intrusion into mass media channels with standard technology such as email or mobile communications, mobile phones, etc.. With such a simple modus operandi Ð in the end only courage, intelligence and basic know how with technology is necessary Ð we can achieve enormous reach and frequency in this age of the total networked space. Popular media hacking projects are the ãToywarÒ from etoy and ãVote-auctionÒ from UBERMORGEN.COM which i will talk about today.

 

Digital Actionism

 

The digital actionism must be understood in the tradition of the viennese actionism. It describes the intuitive transposition of the principles of actionism into the digital. The created identities Ð corporate and collective Ð become the artistic field of expression and extreme forms of aestehtics Ð for example pure communication Ð moves to the center and therefore the conventional art term is smashed, immediately re-sorted and rebuilt. The actions are documented by media coverage, emails and logfiles. The weaknesses of the existing systems are discovered within no time, elegant legal or half-legal solutions are prefereable to any illegal action. Illegality eliminates the chance to work freely and to publish openly.

 

Digital actionism means free radicals, experiments on the market of attention Ð the global mass media news-channels, for example CNN. By using contemporary low-tech tools, live generated techno-ethics within the digital peering-networks, legal expertise and psychological transformation of the technological impact into the art of the 21st century, some of the feature projects are the digital hijack by etoy and the injunction generator by UBERMORGEN.COM, which we are also going to talk about today.

 

The ãhanging inside the networkÒ, to be connected to millions and millions of invisible channels, the sensation of beeing a thin membrane within the self-inflicted mass meda storm... thats where it happens. Playground is the whole body of the ãActionistÒ and especially the Head. It vibrates, it becomes threatening, it accelerates, the communication  gets out of control and the network suddenly turns into a global menace.

 

"We are the children of the 1980s, We are the first internet-pop-generation. We grew up with radical Michael Milken [The King of Junk Bonds] and mythical Michael Jackson [The King of Junk Pop]. Hans Bernhard is loaded with 10 years of internet & tech [digital cocaine], mass media hacking, underground techno, hardcore [illegal] drugs, rock&roll lifestyle and net.art jet set [etoy]. His neuronal networks and brain structures are similar to the global synthetic network he helped build up and maintained subversive activity within. And now they are "infected" by a manic-depression [WHO ICD-10, F31.1.], both Hans Bernhard and The "Network" are infected by this structural disorder. Waves of mania and depression are running through the technical, social and economic structures. Contemporary high-tech societies deal with hardcore brains using bio-chemical "agents" to control the internal information flow, we call them psychotropic drugs. Hans Bernhard was legally sloshed by Zyprexa¨, Temesta¨, Dominal¨, Depakine¨, Neurotop¨. But how can we treat a mentally ill global network?"

 

The whole mental illness experience is visible in a video called ãPsych|OsÒ, released 2005 by UBERMORGEN.COM. One hour footage material showing Hans Bernhard inside the mental hospital in Vienna, raw and unedited. The video was exhibited in large scaled installations in Tokyo and Dortmund and it will go into global distribution 2006.

 

Video zeigen

 

The aesthetics of digital actionism

 

Our images are similar to a Temesta-Aquarium Ð they help to relax. The shock marketing of the UBERMORGEN.COM group was transformed. Chic marketing: a time-delayed style implant. Since many years, Hans Bernhard operates within a fast living mass media feedback network. Real-time living as antitheses to the american fast food trash culture consisting of re-runs from the 50s to the 90s, in the fields of the culinary, the entertainment, the biological and the infrastructural.

 

As part of a pulsating technological media network, our actions (digital actionism, media hacking, legal art, Foriginals, digital art, net.art) are referring to the autonomous nervous system and its functions. The pain, the curiousity, the speed creates states of intoxication which lead to intuitive reactions. Early training with Lsd, Xtc, etoy, UBERMORGEN, Mescalin and other Drugs and Cults have helped to stay out of permanent psychoses and gave me the tools, the experience and the overview to drive a 500 miles per hour corporate-riot vehicle through the 3-dimensional-city traffic at rush hour  without gravity.

 

Negative Affirmation

 

Negative Affirmation: This is what Bazon Brock understands not as 100% affirmation but the 150% exaggerated radicalized formulation of this demand. Through the dramatic increase of affirmation, the absurdity of many declarations becomes visible. Now a so called tilting-effect takes place. As an example we could quote the ãwork-to-ruleÒ. Each organization which stands 100% to their own rules will come to a halt of operations in no time. The affirmation strategy is beeing used by many artists to destroy claims within their logic of justification. Sadly, often it is not recognized that affirmative strategies can not be used convincingly in all fields of action. In fields where reality itself has thematized ist borderlines of existence, affirmation can not create the necessary aesthetic difference anymore and therefore can not produce a tilting-effect.

 

Now we move from the definitions to the projects and we start with

 

etoy

or, the etoy.CORPORATION

 

etoy appeared as a multinational corporation since their foundation in 1994. At this time, for artists and artist groups like etoy it was possible to appear exactly the same way as real global corporations such coca-cola or microsoft. This was due to the Internet, the web. Online, everything looked the same, grey Web-Sites with simple text and images. So we saw the opportunity and started to design  a virtual global corporation with corporate identity, a online office, a virtual homebase for the etoy.AGENTS and we emmigrated to the internet in 1994.

 

At the same time, and this is the nice thing about the internet, it is possible to exist parallel as a underground brand, we were:  "first boy-group on the internet" or "the first street gang on the internet" some how we were ãdigital punksÒ...

 

etoy was organized like a formula-1 team. Highly efficient, strongly hierarchical and hard towards the inside, but very high-tech, glamour and stylish to the outside.

 

The corporate identity was our central element, although we initially misunderstood the concept of corporate identity as pure external instruments, intuitively we built a perfect CI from the inside, from the core to the outside. The exterior view was highly stylized, in keeping with the program, the seven etoy.AGENTS make their appearance in the same look, and the same tools are always used: this principle emphasizes how the etoy.MEMBERS are interchangeable, everyone is everyone, everywhere, leaving reality behind ... The Look and accessoires: The orange crew jacket is the identifying feature No. 1. Standard overalls and a black suit are required items in the luggage of all etoy.AGENTS, just like the hand-held computer Psion, Serie 33 for ensuring minimal communication. Everything was defined, from the etoy.LOGO to the etoy.SLOGANS, from the hairdo (bald-heads) to the colors of the boots we were wearing and the contact with women and girl-friends was standardized as well as the exact way of how to associate with journalists.

 

Excerpts from the program: run / jump / shoot and shout... for the "digital generation" ! communication and production via Internet, reality emigration, digital existence. flashing into the future! The limitations of the digital world are scanned and extended through the excessive and associative use of technology. always online - sometimes lost Ð please dont forget, this first phase was during 1994-1996, so a very early internet/web moment.

 

Leaving reality behind Video zeigen

 

Why did etoy look for inner and outside similarities to global corporations? For us it was a logic consequence from the globalization of corporate europe, asia and america which we intuitively started to process and to play around in affirmative ways. The combination of drugs, internet-technology, techno-music and global corporations gave us an ultimate mix for our art-game and we were free to experiment on a global level, we started to cross borders of perception and reality and were sucked into the gigantic universe of THE NETWORK.

 

etoy Ð the cult.

Inside, in the deep inside, etoy was a cult. Towards the outside this was not visible and it was never communicated, but one could feel it. There was a certain tension and there were very strange vibes around the etoy.AGENTS.

 

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the franco-swiss philosopher was a main thinker in his time and his political ideas strongly influenced the French Revolution. One of his central statements on the building of democracy was that every citizen has the absolut right to be heard, to influence the way society and the governement should be and to then vote on it. But the most importent element of this theory of governement is, that after the moment the decision was made collectively, democratically, each citizen has to obey the rules absolutely. If he or she does not obey, the punishment will be merciless (including the death penality). So he designed a new form of absolutism in the name of democracy, at least thats how i interpret it.

 

Now, why do i mention this. Because etoy has developed an exact copy of this system 200 years after Rousseau, without knowing about him, his theory and about the french revolution. We developed a very similar  system for ourselves and pushed it to the extreme. We were organized basis-democratic, but as soon as a rule was implemented, every etoy.AGENT had to obey 100%, no discussions, no exception. Punishments were hardcore. We had ever changing models of self organisation and in combination with being Internet-Test pilots on LSD, it was a very exhausting process, 24/7 etoy, for years and years...

 

BENISSIMO-TV-HIJACK

To relax, i show you a real-live TV event. A tv-hijack during prime-time. We were invited to do a late afternoon teenager TV-Show (We did a etoy.Music Gig, some dancing) and in the next studio preparations for the biggest TV-Show of the year were ongoing. We sent in one etoy.AGENT with a very simple task: Go to Table no. 13, sit down, wait until the show starts, wait 15 Minutes, wait for a good opportunity, go on stage, say something, go off stage, be quick and dissappear. See the video of the show with the police president of the city of zurich and the mayor of zurich in the studio, they are just giving away 1 million swiss francs...

Video zeigen

 

 

The digital hijack
This is one of the feature actions, probably the best action of etoy. 1.5 mio people hijacked from search engines over a period of 4 months. [30 mio. people online 1996!], immediately we ran into troubles with the US-secret service, the CIA, were censored by the University of Vienna and my appartement in Vienna was house-searched by the austrian secret service.

 

The Digital Hijack was an act of deliberate sabotage of one of the most important tools for the common Internet user: the search engine. In the first days of the Internet age, it was one of the most relevant tools for creating hierarchy within the information you could get on the Internet and an instrument of control and regulation of your behaviour, as it still is today (i will talk about another search-engine related project today, Google Will eat itself, later on).

 

With this 1996 action, lasting four months, etoy demonstrated the "space" behind the popular interfaces of the World Wide Web. The weak points in the system and the twilight zone of the medium formed the place of action. Search-server databases became a stage for self-presentation. etoy.SOFTWARE AGENTS controlled the systematic illusion and the hijack of net-travellers: 250.000 art-hostages in March 1996. "The technology-tourist is evasively assimilated into a trap configured by the etoy.GANG. In this labyrinth, the fascination of manipulating and hacking the search systems becomes The Story." The "digital hijack" project was terminated after the 1.5 millionth hijacking, because the etoy.486-WEBSERVERS could no longer cope with the extreme amount of traffic (as many as 50.000 users every day). The software agents were officially withdrawn from the search engines at the end of July 1996 ... some of them could not be rescued ...The scene of the crime is open to the public and is still frequently visited by many inquisitive users.

 

The software agent ÇIvanaÈ traveled through the Net both to filter the search inquiries most frequently entered into the search engines common at the timeÑsuch as Infoseek, Alta Vista, Inktomi, or Webcrawler (Google was not established until 1998)Ñand to select the keywords on those sites that contained the best search results. The result of this automated spying was that programmers obtained detailed instructions for the specific manipulation of the sites searched for. ÇIvanaÈ independently generated similar Web sites: the search engines listed these duplicates instead of the information being searched for at the top. If one selected the results, one was redirected to the Çdigital hiajckÈ sites. The last stop on this forced journey was a Web site with the sentence: ÇDon't fucking move. This is a digital Hijack!È The difference to previous and most of the subsequent Net artworks lies in the Çsystem hackÈ approach: instead of a server or a server grid, the system consisting of the interplay of search engine, Web site (keywords), and user behavior was circumvented and thus at the point in time of its emergence, a new complexity was achieved in the critical treatment of the information medium ãInternetÒ.

 

Prix Ars Electronica

1996 etoy won the prestigous Prix Ars Electronica, the Oscar for Media Art. Due to this fact we were now lifted into the spotlights and we intensified our role-plays and our cult. We lived a rock-star life, we destroyed hotel-rooms and took LSD &  used mirrored sunglasses for press interviews...

 

etoy.SHARES

the etoy.CORPORATION, officially incorporated 1994, has rapidly developed into a controversial market leader in the field of experimental internet entertainment and art. the etoy.CORPORATION is currently owned by more than 2,000 etoy.SHAREHOLDERS who control and own the corporate sculpture etoy. The etoy.CORPORATION does not sell art-objects. etoy only sells itself in the form of etoy.SHARES. all 640,000 etoy.SHARE-UNITS are available on the international art market and equal 100% of the etoy.MARKET-CAP. Investments are not focused on financial profits, but rather on cultural ones. etoy plays with the overlap of commercial, social and cultural value systems. Social values (i.e. solidarity, love, security) and cultural values (i.e. art, luxury, fashion, sex) are eventually re-coded and transferred into the commercial value system. By twisting methods, meanings and realities the etoy.CORPORATION engages in form of Òsurface playÓ. Unlike other corporations etoy burns investment capital to create cultural capital. etoy.AGENTS and INVESTORS are interested in playing with capital on a cultural playground. This high risk art-operation manipulates symbols & values: expanding and dissolving terms such as ÔartÕ and Ôbusiness.Õ etoy generates impact by engaging todayÕs most dominant social issues: value, commerce and globalization.

 

Toywar

As a reaction to a law suit against the 7 founding members of etoy and to the disconnection of the web-site etoy.com initiated by the U.S. toy-seller eToys Inc., a comunity of net.activists centered around the activist group RTMark Ð today The Yes Men - built up a solidarity fonds and the Toywar-platform: the delcared intention was to destroy the toy-company eToys. The main issue was to pull down the value of the eToys-shares as fast and as far as possible. In the following weeks, activists attacked the Web-Site of eToys with different means (virtual Sit-Ins, etc.), the following loss of 70% of the eToys share-value on Nasdaq was partially claimed by these actions. The Toywar Web-site was a symbolic battleground, a online-solidarity game, in which the supporters of etoy could parade in the form of playmobil figures, avatars armed with virtual weapons. The announcement of the game read as following: Your opponents: ãeToys and its shareholders Ð as long as they still own shares. The stakes: art, free expression and life on the Internet.Ò The pro-etoy-community was visualized through 1798 avatars at the height of the campaign, taking position on the web-site. etoy and RTMark opposed the usually imageless, structural violence strategies of the economy of the net with a strategy that visualized exactly this imageless violence. After 3 months eToys withdrew the law suit against the artist group, probably because of the massive backlash eToys.com experienced.

 

The BOOK about etoy

The whole etoy.STORY was written up in a very good book published by HarperCollins in a U.K. and US edition. It is a thriller about etoy during the internet boom decade, a tense look at the social, technological and artistic environment. The book was written by Adam Wishart, a BBC documentary filmer and Regula Bochsler, a historian. They traveled around the globe and made over 100 interviews to take a broad look on the happenings around etoy.

 

 

UBERMORGEN.COM

 

UBERMORGEN.COM is an artist duo consisting of lizvlx and Hans Bernhard. UBERMORGEN.COM  works with accidents and Trash from Net.Art. We operate at the edge of the law and are specialized in ãLegal ArtÒ, ãMedia HackingÒ, ãDigital ActionismÒ and ãNegative AffirmationÒ.

 

A quote from french philosopher jean baudrillard in Le Monde: "ubermorgen means the day after tomorrow, a slight tip towards their aesthetic and activist vision and prejudice, they are hardcore and radical in their actions and they are extremely strange and highly intelligent people."

 

First i will talk about two current projects, the Google Will Eat Itself Project and the Foriginals, including the first foriginal-project, the Injunction generator. Then, to finish up the lecture we will have a close look at UBERMORGEN.COMs feature action 2000, the Vote-auction-Project and the affirmative action which resulted from Vote-auction, and to top this i will show you a piece of the 30 Min. CNN feature about the vote-auction project.

 

But first, lets start with a present project...

 

GWEI Ð Google Will Eat Itself

 

How does it work...

 

We generate money by serving Google text advertisments on a series of our own Websites. With this money we automatically buy Google shares. We buy Google via their own advertisment! So, Google eats itself - but in the end "we" own it! Thats the whole trick...

 

Now, by establishing this model we deconstruct the new global advertisment mechanisms by rendering them into a surreal click-based economic model.

 

After this whole process we hand over the common ownership of "our" Google Shares to the GTTP Ltd. [Google To The People Public Company] which distributes them back to the users (clickers) / public.

 

GWEI.org is a show-case and to unveil a total monopoly of information [Google search-engine & added services], a weakness of the new global advertisment system and the renaissance of the "new economic bubble" - "reality" is, Google is currently valued more than all Swiss Banks together (sic). Let's open their goldmine to the people. Google's position is predominant in the same moment it enters a new business field with a new service. It's the Google effect: creating consensus on a new business, even if it instantly got the predominant position.

 

GTTP Ltd. currently owns 39 Google Class A Shares [valued 300 USD] - so we earned around USD 12K since we started in march 2005, our hidden sites are slowly but steadily generating income. As it is very nicely predicted in a Village Voice article about GWEI, at this speed it will take us around 23 Million years to buy all Google Shares. And right now, Google issued even more stock, but... "The greatest enemy of such a giant is not another giant. It's the parasite. If enough parasitites would suck small amount of money..."

 

Now to another contemporary work of UBERMORGEN, this is more like a meta­-concept we are working on since 4 or 5 years.

 

The [F]originals

 

Authenticity as consensual hallucination

 

ãJust Pixels on a screen,

just ink on paperÒ

 

Based on two central projects which we will talk about later on... ("[V]ote-auction.com", 2000, and the "Injunction Generator", 2001) ... UBERMORGEN.COM coined the term [F]original. UBERMORGEN.COM calls every law suit, every injunction, every document, every legal paper or court order a foriginal Ð a combination of ãto forgeÒ and ãoriginalÒ. This neologism points out to the interwinding of fact and fiction and to a significantly expanded understanding of UBERMORGEN.COMs working material, which includes international law, democracy and global communications (Input-Feedback-Loops). On the other hand, UBERMORGEN.COM attacks the affirmative production of foriginals by showing their existence in our daily live. Foriginals claim  authenticity, but after having a closer look they prove to be nothing else than a consensual hallucination (this ãconsensual hallucinationÒ is part of the famous definition of Cyberspace by William Gibson from the year 1984 in his publication "Neuromancer").  All documents which are not ãoriginalsÒ in the narrow sense, which are for example ãmachine madeÒ or ãcount without signatureÒ, can be called Foriginals. Finally such ãforiginalÒ documents are nothing else than pixels on a screen respectively ink on paper. UBERMORGEN.COM suggests that these machine or software generated documents could look very differently. One of the examples is the BANKSTATEMENTGENERATOR, The BANKSTATEMENTGENERATOR is an online engine that generates individual bank statements. Each online user (or mueseum visitor) can enter his personal data and he/she will get a automatically generated BANKSTATEMENT. This is an evolution of the injunction generator, which we will talk about right now...

 

The Injunction Generator

 

Ubermorgen's legal art. With the usual controversial and iconoclast spirit, Ubermorgen, realized The Injunction Generator (www.ipnic.org), a software module which claims to generate on request legal injunctions and personalized documentation in .rtf/.pdf format to force a site into taking its contents offline. Carrying on with the principles of 'radical corporative marketing strategy' and the meta-concept of the [F]original Ð forged original document, the group has produced an effective and credible interface which helps creating one's own documented cease-and-desist request, which is also automatically sent to the DNS administrators, to the site's owner and to some journalists to trick them into supporting the 'public trial'. The project is published on the IP-NIC domain, an acronym which mimics the official protocols (Internet Protocol - Network Information Center), revisited as 'Internet Partnership for No Internet Content'. This sarcastic provocation (a 'public shutdown service') was conceived after experiencing a similar mishap for the [V]ote-auction project (www.vote-auction.net), which invited american citizens to put up their vote for auction. At the time (2000) an email injunction by an american court was sent to the swiss provider hosting the site, who took them immediately offline even though email documents aren't legally considered official and even though Swiss is outside of american jurisdiction.

 

The Vote-Auction Project

 

[V]ote-Auction is a classic ãMedia HackÒ and extreme ãDigital ActionismÒ by UBERMORGEN.COM, pure media madness and judical troubles over a intense period of 4 months. What was it all about: During the presidential elections 2000, Al Gore und G.W. Bush, an art student (James Baumgartner) opened a Web-Site under the name voteauction.com for selling and buying of individual votes during the presidential election.

 

The project almost immediately went out of control. The New York Election Committee and the FBI interfered and James Baumgartner sold the Web-Site to UBERMORGEN.COM for a undisclosed sum.

 

Now because UBERMORGEN.COM operated from Bulgaria and Austria, they were outside of US-jurisdiction (in europe it is not illegal to buy and sell US-votes, but it is illegal to do so in the US). Because of this fact UBERMORGEN.COM could push the project to the outmost limits. Within no time 14 District Attorneys, the FBI, the CIA, the NSA and Federal Attorney Janet Reno were investigating the case. UBERMORGEN.COM were interviewd up to 30 times per day by print and online media, tv and radio stations. Over 2500 global media clippings were counted after the project.

 

UBERMORGEN.COM was sued 4x, 3x because of illegal selling and buying of votes and once because of wrong promises (consumer fraud). This is interesting insofar, as UBERMORGEN.COM was constantly accused of not publishing this Media Hack as a FAKE, as a internet performance, as a media stunt. But for us this revelation would have rendered the whole action senseless, because the clue was to keep the audience insecure about the aim of the project. In interviews, UBERMORGEN.COM constantly claimed to be eastern european businesspeople trying to financially and mentally exploit the american voting market.

 

And that was correct, everything UBERMORGEN actually did was to combine the basic principles of the greatest democracy on earth: capitalism and democracy. Therefore the slogan of the whole action was: ãbringing capitalism and democracy closer togetherÒ

 

UBERMORGEN.COM operated with affirmative strategies. Bazon Brock coined the term ãnegative affirmationÒ, meaning the 150% agreement, the total super-affirmation. And we only pushed the bringing togehter of capitalism and democracy to the next level, the logical next step of the evolution of US-american society, only prevented by historical laws about individual selling and buying of votes. In other areas of society, privatisation and the bringing on the market already happend Ð for example the U.S. correctional industry (Prisons).

 

But how did Vote-Auction actually appear in public? The most important element was through the press, the media. Through them, the project had a global voice of unknown dimensions. UBERMORGEN.COM estimates that over 500 million people were reached.

 

CNN especially broadcasted a 30 minutes show, including 7 lawyers, 2 technicians and a politician to discuss whether the project was a real threat to the integrity of the U.S. election or wheter it was a political satire Ð and at the end of the show they did not come to a conclusion.

 

A Quote from Flash Art Magazine: "There are not many artists who can present live action and the documentation, in one piece, of an artwork in the form of a videotape containing a 27 minute broadcast from CNN"

 

But, most important there Ð through the media strategy of Voteauction, they Ð the enemy (the press but also the legal system) were not able to determine the role of Vote-auction because the press-speaker used communications strategies from the political and corporate world Ð saying nothing by talking a lot.

 

Now this insecurity concerning the motivation behind Voteauction was even more dramatic for State Attorneys investigating the case. This insecurity cost the governement of the United States millions of dollars, because the judical system was working non-stop issueing temporary injunctions and other court orders. UBERMORGEN.COM received over 700 kilograms in court material by UPS and Fedex over this 4 months period. Their task was to protect the integrity of the voting process Ð so the judical apparatus had to defend the system and fight back as hard as possible.

 

Very important as well is the quality of investigative journalism. No journalist has revealed UBERMORGEN.COMs true identities during the whole campaign, although they have not been covered up, except that different/wrong names were given out Ð but online you could easily track back the true names and addresses and much more. It is amazing how easy it is to penetrate the global mass media networks with a good story Ð if you are there at the right time.

 

UBERMORGEN.COM exploits products from such projects, for example the CNN video is shown at lectures and in galleries and museums around the globe as an art object, further objects are the ãlegal documentsÒ, the injunctions. They call it ãlegal artÒ. Such Foriginals are shown in galleries and museums as well.

 

So, to come to an end.. my final remarks...

 

Essential for this kind of projects, there is no underlying ideology or political task connected, and this is true and counts for all the projects.. from etoy to UBERMORGEN.COM.... UBERMORGEN.COM does not care who is president of the united states, it does not care wheter the voting process is corrupt or not, it does not care if corporation X uses child labour or not, etc. UBERMORGEN.COM does basic ãfreestyleÒ research, we experiment live within the networks, we invent stories and infiltrate the media, work with the feedback-loops of such stories and bounce them back into the media and the networks (spinning), we can observe these processes as participants and as non-precise researchers. There is no goal, this is basic research in the area of the art of communications, we call it ãDigital ActionismÒ or ãMedia HackingÒ.

 

Thats all from me in terms of talking, lets have a look at the CNN video now...

 

 

Vote-Auction Video