Experimenta - MESH 19: Global/Regional Perspectives

The twentieth century is over. The film industry is losing its importance in the media world, and its ability to embody, and renew, some of the great collective legends. This is why United We Stand looks faintly ridiculous, as does the European flag flying in the middle of the poster [2]. It is not the production of an actual film, but a promotional campaign for a film that doesn’t exist. “Working on an imaginary film is the best way to talk about an imaginary concept: Europe”, they declared [3]. The result was a massive marketing campaign which invaded public areas – with posters up around the cities of Berlin, Brussels, Barcelona, Bologna, Bangalore and New York – and media space, publicising a media object that does not exist, but that is perfectly able to generate noise. An empty space makes its presence felt by means of communication strategies, forcing us to take a long hard look at the problems with something else which doesn’t exist: Europe.

Forged originals
As Bruce Sterling [4] points out “fake projects, like protesters’ street puppets, are so common they threaten to become a genre”. Manipulating the media is not the exclusive preserve of artists, quite the contrary. While Eva and Franco Mattes are the heirs of a long tradition, from American pranksters to the Luther Blissett network, now lobbies, political parties, corporations and even the institutions are increasingly resorting to manipulating the media. Now that traditional marketing and propaganda tools are proving to be increasingly ineffective, media manipulation is turning into the real media tool of the 21st century. Media manipulation has brought us fictititous proof for justifying a war, and put out low resolution video messages on the web to keep the war going; it is present in the tapped phone conversations handed over to the newspapers, which are completely genuine, but which contain a mixture of meaning and crackle, chit chat and crime, capable of eliciting some startling responses. One recent episode in Italy shows just how widespread it is. In order to support the position of the centre-right coalition in a referendum, the Mediaset group broadcast a commercial that entirely resembled an official broadcast but provided only partial information about the referendum. This little masterpiece of modern-day political propaganda sits perfectly with the definition of “[F]original” (forged original) and was dreamt up by the Austrian duo UBERMORGEN.COM (Lizvlx/Hans Bernhard) to describe almost all their works:

This concept came to light after the masterful operation [V]ote Auction (2000), during which UBERMORGEN.COM received an avalanche of legal injunctions by email from the USA: documents of dubious authenticity as they are easy to fake, and in any case without legal standing outside the United States, but which succeeded in getting the project site shut down several times. UBERMORGEN.COM responded to this absurd situation by creating “legal art”, and the Injunction Generator (2003): a software programme that takes the data entered by the user to generate and send to the designated victim an injunction identical in form to those received by Hans Bernhard for [V]ote Auction.

In the ongoing work of UBERMORGEN.COM, the [F]original offers up a system (and a theory) for the long tradition of media fakes to which the [V]ote Auction project itself belongs, asserting the death of the concept of “originality”. UBERMORGEN.COM sets up companies and generates legal documents, bank statements and medical prescriptions with the same freedom (and the same means) with which it designs logos and seals, processes images stolen from the net (pixelpaintings) and manipulates the communications system to spread fictitious news stories. On May 2nd 2006 for example, an email titled “Police officer killed in Berlin?” was widely distributed. In the email Hans Bernhard appears to be forwarding a message received from a certain Barbara Alex, who has attached a video filmed on a cell phone in Berlin during the May 1st demonstrations: a blurred, low resolution scene, where you can just make out hooded figures savagely beating up a policeman in a Berlin street. UBERMORGEN.COM claimed this apparent “found footage” as a work of art, a sort of readymade titled [F]original Media Hack no. 1, Web 2.0. The actual story of the video, which unsettled many viewers, and was published on Google Videos and Youtube, is rather different. The operation was planned by UBERMORGEN.COM in collaboration with Alister Mazzotti of Mazzotti Action, a team of stuntmen. While Mazzotti Action made the video, Hans Bernhard plotted the media action, invented a fictional character (Barbara Alex), explored the blogsphere and wrote the email. In the end he decided to pass off the video “trouvée” as a work of art, ably sidestepping the reader who might be led to view it as a media fake due to the involvement of UBERMORGEN.COM. And in this way, using an email, a cell phone and knowledge of how the net works you can outwit the media:

Pure Media Hacking: No ethics, no content, no message. With the action “[F]original Media Hack No. 1” we follow a simple instruction on how to infiltrate mass media with low-tech devices such as email, mobile-phones, web/blog and ambiguous data. This action is a clean and simple execution and broad experiment within this conceptual setting. It is an amalgamation of fact and fiction. [6]

Are we really sure that UBERMORGEN.COM are the only people aware of this opportunity?

Faked reality
Since the attacks of September 11 in 2001, the world media and its consumers have been bombarded fairly regularly with threats, news of possible attacks, and information about the detection of groups of terrorists ready to swing into action. For the most part we have only witnessed these thanks to the media. This does not stop them from creating fear, and keeping civil society in a state of permanent terror that has made us accept all sorts of things: limitations of our freedom of expression, the war in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay and the CIA abductions in Europe. The chilling, pitiless hyper-realism of Where-next (2005) is rooted in this climate, where fear gives way to numbness. Where-next is a perverse gambling game that invites users to guess the place and date of the next terrorist attack using Google maps. Every time an attack occurs in the real world the creators of the site identify the nearest guess and give the winner a t-shirt with a photo of the attack, emblazoned with the words I PREDICTED IT. Alongside the map the site shows a banner with the World Trade Center still standing, with the macabre phrase “This space is for rent!” and “Your ad HERE” printed in front of the Twin Towers. The fact that the entire thing was viewed as utterly contemptible was maybe what led the people behind the site to come out from behind their media invention and reveal the ideological structure of the project: a bitter, sarcastic critique of capitalism, which gambles with our lives.