Hans Bernhard, UBERMORGEN.COM
Digital Actionism - Media Hacking (1994Ð2006)
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... Usually these actions are carried out
within the legal realm - or at least in the twilight zone of international law.
Sometimes laws have to be challenged in order to update/optimize the legal
system. We have to judge for ourselves whether its unethical to do so or its
totally reasonable to put freedome of speech above an applieable law. With such
a cybernetic modus operandi Ð in the end only courage, intelligence and basic
technological know how is necessary Ð we can achieve enormous reach and
frequency in this age of the totally networked space. Popular media hacking
projects are the ãToywarÒ by etoy and ãVote-auctionÒ by UBERMORGEN.COM.
Important to note: All our projects are non-ideological, non-political. they
are pure basic research experiments.
digital actionism 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. The actions are documented by
media coverage, emails and logfiles. The ãhanging inside the networkÒ, to be
connected to millions and millions of invisible channels, the sensation of
beeing a thin membrane within a mass meda storm... thats where it happens.
Playground is the 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.
etoy
etoy appeared as a multinational corporation since the foundation
in 1994. At the time it was possible to appear online exactly like ãrealÒ global
corporations such Coca-Cola or Microsoft. We started to design a virtual global
corporation with corporate identity and an online office and publication
platform: the virtual homebase for the etoy.AGENTS. In 1994 we emmigrated to
the internet, to the etoy.TANK-System. Net.Art as Avant Garde movement: Phase
1: 1994-1999, Phase 2: 2000-200X. etoy was organized like a formula-1 team.
Highly efficient, strongly hierarchical, very high-tech, glamour and stylish to
the outside. strongly influenced by viennese actionism. Parallel to the
corporate apperaence, we existed as an underground brand, we were: "the first boy-group on the
internet" or "the first street gang on the internet", ãa digital
drug cultÒ, we were ãdigital punk". Corporate Slogans: "The Future is
Now!" and "The Surface is the Content". The etoy.MEMBERS are
interchangeable, everyone is everyone, everywhere, leaving reality behind ...
etoy, the designer is the architect is the popstar is the coder is the system
is etoy. Deep inside, etoy was a hardcore cult. etoy was travelling the
twilight zones of the "universe", always coming back to report from
their missions (etoy-testpilots/internet-astronauts). The combination of drugs
(LSD/MDMA), internet-technology, techno-music and the rise of truly global
corporations gave us an ultimate mix for our art-game and we experimented on a
global level, we started to cross borders of perception and reality and were
sucked into the gigantic universe of THE NETWORK.
First etoy.Web-Site - www.ubermorgen.com/lectures/A_2007/images/etoy_firstwebsite_1.jpg
First Microsoft Web-Site - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Microsoft_starmap.png
On a nice saturday night, to be exact on december 7th 1996 in
switzerland, the prime time saturday night lottery show BENISSIMO (live) was
hijacked by etoy.AGENTS. the famous show master BERNHARD TURNHEER was attacked
on stage by etoy.e03. He told him that he could not stand this television
reality and that he has to find a way out of the TV into the Internet... after
massive confusion, the Showmaster showed him a way out... This hijack was
covered for over 10 days in the main newspapers of Switzerland.
The Video - www.ubermorgen.com/lectures/videos/etoy_bennissimo.mov
1.5 mio people hijacked from search engines over a period of 4
months. [30 mio. people online 1996! We reached 5% of the internet
population!!], immediately we ran into troubles with the US-secret service, the
CIA, 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. With this
1996 action, we demonstrated the "space" behind the popular
interfaces of the World Wide Web. Influcenced by the porn-industry and their
agenda-setting - on the edge marketing-strategies.
The digital hijack Ð www.hijack.org
From Publishers Weekly: "In this penetrating examination of a
seminal cyberspace turf war, Wishart and Bochsler tell a story about art
imitating life and the artist being sued for trademark infringement.
Documentary filmmaker Wishart and Swiss National TV reporter Bochsler recount
the tale of etoy, a company of German-based avant-garde artists that held wild
parties and issued stock to shareholders. It registered the name etoy.com to
serve as an online gallery and virtual workspace. In September 1999, etoy was
sued by the hugely popular online retailer Etoys.com, which at the time was
valued at $8 billion, for trademark infringement. The authors thoroughly detail
each volley in the "Toy War," including lawsuits, denial of service attacks
and grassroots activism. More significantly, the battle serves as a case study
for exploring the conflicting forces that have shaped the Internet's
development. Backed by venture capitalists and led by CEO Toby Lenk, Etoys.com
was out to make a profit by selling products. Etoy, on the other hand, was
supported by a few wealthy patrons and run by media-savvy artists with shaved
heads who went by code names and wanted to shake things up. The latter were
much more successful. With extensive and entertaining firsthand accounts,
Wishart and Bochsler reveal how the dot-com boom warped the perceptions of
artist and corporate executive alike. Although Lenk was a seasoned executive,
he was caught off guard by the collapse of Etoys.com, and despite etoy's subversive
origins, it developed internal power struggles that rivaled those of a Fortune
500 company."
U.K. Edition, Fourth Estate London, 359 Pages
UBERMORGEN.COM is an artist duo created in Vienna, Austria, by
Lizvlx and Hans Bernhard. Behind UBERMORGEN.COM we can find one of the most
unmatchable identities Ð controversial and iconoclast Ð of the contemporary
European techno-fine-art avant-garde. UBERMORGEN.COMÕs work is unique not
because of what they do but because how, when, where and why they do it. The
permanent amalgamation of fact and fiction points toward an extremely expanded
concept of oneÕs working materials, that for UBERMORGEN.COM also include
(international) rights, democracy and global communication (input-feedback
loops). ÒUbermorgenÓ is the German word both for Òthe day after tomorrowÓ or
Òsuper-tomorrowÓ.
UBERMORGEN.COM - www.ubermorgen.com
[F]originals
forged original document; either forged or authentic document or
forged & authentic: A Foriginal is always original and unique. Foriginals
are pixels on screens or substance on material [i.e. ink on paper].
[F]originals are non pragmatic - they are absurd. They do not tell you whether
they are real or forged - there is no original but also no fully forged / faked
document. Foriginals can be human or machine generated; Foriginals are digital
or analog; [F]original is a sub category of "Legal Art";
[F]originals - www.foriginal.com
In March 2002, ubermorgens Hans Bernhard experienced a manic
outbreak in South Africa. He was airlifted to Austria - General Hospital
Vienna. Two and a half years later, UBERMORGEN found video footage, photos and
texts of his stay at the Mental hospital. They decide to release the material
unedited. "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], underground
techno, hardcore drugs and net.art jet set [etoy]. His neuronal networks and
brain structures are similar to the global synthetic network he maintained
subversive activity within. And now both Hans Bernhard and The
"Network" are infected by this structural disorder.
The Psych|OS-Generator - www.ipnic.org/psychos/
Psych|OS Video - www.hansbernhard.com/X/pages/video/
Psych|OS Foto-Series - www.hansbernhard.com/X/pages/photo/pages/psychos_hans.html
Psych|OS Paintings - www.hansbernhard.com/X/pages/painting/pages/psychos.html
Hansbernhardblog - www.ubermorgen.com/hansbernhardblog
Psychotropic Blog Karaoke - www.ubermorgen.com/Psychotropic_Drug_Karaoke
Voteauction was a Website which offered US citizens to sell their
presidential vote to the highest bidder during the Presidential Elections 2000,
Al Gore vs. G.W. Bush. Bringing capitalism and democrazy closer together!
Several US States (Missouri, Wisconsin, Chicago, Arizona, Nevada, California,
Massachusetts, New York) issued temporary restraining orders. Federal Attorney
Janet Reno, the FBI and the NSA were investigating the case to ensure the
integrity of the voting process on november 7th, 2000. Over 2500 global and
national News features in online media, print, television and radio have been
reported (including a 27 min. CNN exclusive "Burden of Proof").
UBERMORGEN.COM exhibits the [V]ote-auction CNN tape, Voteauction-Seals and
[F]original legal Documents in Museums and Galleries around the globe.
NAZI~LINE was a collaboration between UBERMORGEN.COM and Christoph
Schlingensief. THE PROGRAMM: right wing extremists [i.e. neo-Nazis] should
experience economical and social warmth and support in order to be integrated
into our society. The Campaign: Active Neo-Nazis were casted in Berlin. Then
they were sent to Zurich (CH) to be actors in "Hamlet"
(Schauspielhaus Theatre). The project dealt with transfer, integration,
agression and communication.. Additionally NAZI~LINE invests into psychological
and medical treatment of neo-Nazis. International Corporations as well as
neo-Nazis and hate criminals are kindly asked to register for treatement.
NAZI~LINE - www.ubermorgen.com/NAZI~LINE/
Injunction Generator: With their usual controversial and
iconoclast spirit, Ubermorgen, an artist group created by Hans Bernhard
(founder of etoy) and lizvlx, 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. www.ipnic.org
BANKSTATEMENTGENERATOR: The "BSG" is an online
engine that generates individual bank statements. If you need a positive or
negative bank statement, generate it yourself! In doing so, the user is free to
determine the amount and type of deposits and credits as well as the degree of
design abstraction of the resulting document, an [F]original that manifests
itself as an array of pixels on the monitor screen. www.ipnic.org/BANKSTATEMENTGENERATOR
Psych|OS-Generator: The "PG" generates
diagnoses and creates medical prescriptions. The user can either answer a
questionnaire or select a medical condition from the standardized WHO and
U.S.A. list of mental illnesses (ICD-10 & DSM IV). The machine then
generates a diagnosis and a "prints" a prescription with the list of
psychotropic drugs to cure the disease. www.ipnic.org/psychos
We generate money by serving Google text advertisments on a series
of hidden 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! Now, by establishing this autocannibalistic 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 public. GTTP Ltd.
currently owns 248 Google Class A Shares [valued at 469.94 USD USD each per Feb
28, 2007]. As predicted in a Village Voice article about GWEI, at this speed it
will take around 23 Million years to buy all Google Shares... but "The
greatest enemy of such a giant is not another giant. It's the parasite. If
enough parasitites suck small amounts of money...". reality" is,
Google is currently valued more than all Swiss Banks together (sic).
GWEI Ð Google Will Eat Itself - www.gwei.org
(in collaboration with Alessandro Ludovico and Paolo Cirio)
THE PLOT: The Bad Guys (The Amazon
Noir Crew: Cirio, Ludovico, Lizvlx, Bernhard) stole copyrighted books from
Amazon by using sophisticated robot-perversion-technology coded by supervillain
Paolo Cirio. A subliminal media fight and a covert legal dispute escalated into
an online showdown with the heist of over 3000 books at the center of the
story. Lizvlx from UBERMORGEN.COM had daily shoot outs with the global
massmedia, Cirio continuously pushed the boundaries of copyright (books are
just pixels on a screen or just ink on paper), Ludovico and Bernhard resisted
kickback-bribes from powerful Amazon.com until they finally gave in and sold
the technology for an undisclosed sum to Amazon. Betrayal, blasphemy and
pessimism finally split the gang of bad guys. The good guys (Amazon.com) won
the showdown and drove off into the blistering sun with the beautiful femme
fatale, the seductive and erotic massmedia.
THE TECHNOLOGY: The Amazon Noir Robots (Sucker01-12) used the
frontdoor to access the huge digital library of Amazon.com. They tricked around
with Amazon.coms "Search Inside the Book" function until it gave away
the complete volumes of copyright protected books. This was carried out by
sending 5.000 - 10.000 requests per book. After this process the data was
logically reassembled into pdf-format by the SIB-Book-Generator.
THE
TRUTH: All our work is done in the open. Our matter is accurate. Amazon Noir
was scripted as an internet-movie. The whole digital action (media hack) was
carried out in the global massmedia, within the art world and on a highly
sophisticated technical level in the clandestine matrix of our global networks.
Amazon USA, Amazon U.K., Amazon Germany and Amazon France were vulnerable
targets. During the attack they
transformed part of the ãSearch Inside the BookÒ technology to defend the
rights of the copyright holders - without actually solving the problem. Over
3000 Books were downloaded and distributed through p2p (Peer-to-peer networks:
Gnutella/G2, BitTorrent, FastTrack, ed2k) between April - October 2006. In July 2006 Amazon
France and Amazon USA threatend to litigate. The matter was resolved out of
court October 30th, 2006. Amazon (USA/France) bought the Amazon Noir software
for an undisclosed sum - both parties signed a non-disclosure agreement.
Thieves of the invisible - www.amazon-noir.com/thieves.html
Dialogue - www.amazon-noir.com/dialogue.html
Diagram - www.amazon-noir.com/diagram.html
Amazon Noir Ð www.amazon-noir.com
(in collaboration with Alessandro Ludovico and Paolo Cirio)
It mixes up the real "virtual" (the game) with the
virtually "real" (money). In China there are over 2000 Online-Gaming
Workshops that hire people (over 500.000) to play online games such as World of
Warcraft (WoW) day and night. The gaming workers produce in-game currency,
equipments, and whole characters that are sold to American and European Gamers
via Ebay. These people are called ãChinese Gold Farmers". The future is
now!
Keywords: Metallic - Alternative Energy Sources - Trade
Agreements - Ghostbuster, Roaming - Steel, sugar and services - Consumer-made
content and value - 1500 Gold $ 131.99 - close Internet cafŽs in Beijing to
prevent the spread of SARS - Modified sees/crop, hydrogen Ð The Myspace angle Ð
Media Hacking Ð prepaid Pass9 - a group of WOW players in China committed mass
suicide, virtual die-ins Ð Taxes, copyright and Freedom of Speach, in game
civil rights - Unions fighting Louis Vuitton living oceanfront - Boomtimes in
Kuala Lumpur Ð Kaogma Festival - Megaphone diplomacy - New cartoon uproar
Economy / Inflation: In Warcraft, itÕs the currency itself
thatÕs being overproduced, not just any product. That means it'll take more
units of that currency to exchange for any product. Inflation. The price of
everything goes up. Everything you worked so hard to save up suddenly becomes
worth so much less. The Warcraft economy appears to be on the lip of this
plunge and administrators are taking steps to curb inflation. When they find a
career farmer, they ban the character. Now the farming company has to re-buy
the game and set up a new account. This makes the process of creating these
goods overseas more expensive, and functions similar to a tariff (which is a
protective tax). There is a balance, which in the real world, the Treasury, and
the Federal Reserve, and International Organizations try to maintain. And by
maintain, I mean getting as much cheap shit for themselves as possible without
throwing the system completely out of whack. (In the finance industry, human
rights is a footnote, if anything.) What lies ahead for the Warcraft economy?
LetÕs keep watching it in the future.
Chinese Gold - www.ubermorgen.com/2007/projects/Chinese_Gold/
Belgrad Session 1 - 8 - www.hansbernhard.com/X/pages/photo/pages/chinese_gold_screenshots.html
Blue Series, Untitled 1 - 7 - www.hansbernhard.com/X/pages/photo/pages/chinese_gold_workshop.html
M.
Bittanti, D. Quaranta (editors), GameScenes. Art in the Age of
Bank of WoW - http://www.bankofwow.com
Guarantee: All Gold in our BANK are Made Totally Manually!