Lilly controls my Forigi nals
In the projects series called Psych|OS, the Austrian artist duo
UBE R MOR GE N .C O M (liz vl x/Ha ns Ber nhard ) is working on the subtle
membrane that connects the digital and the biological: a mix that
UBERMORGEN.COM, an identity that lives and works on the Net,
experienced on their own bodies. One of the best-known exponents of the
net.art scene, UBERMORGEN.COM are the theorists of digital actionism, a
radical practice of artistic action which experiments on the market of
attention and takes place in mass media. The most astonishing result of
this kind of practice so far has been Vote-Auction (2000), a web site that,
during the American presidential elections 2000, helped people sell their
vote in an auction. The legal prosecution against UBERMORGEN.COM, and
the media hysteria it produced, are an integral part of the whole project.
interviewed up to 30 times per day. CNN produced a 30 minutes show on
the project in their legal format Burden of Proof. In this feature,
UBERMORGEN.COM never comment on whether the project was a real
threat to the integrity of the U.S. election or wheter it was a political satire.
In the mass media storm, the digital actionist works with her whole
body, as well as part and victim of the network around her. “We are
children of the 1980s, We are the first internet-pop-generation. 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.”. Hans Bernhard`s neuronal networks are
connected to the global network, and his mental illness – the bipolar
affective disorder that in March 2002 sent him to a mental hospital – is the
network's illness. The video called Psych|OS (2005) sums up that
experience, in which those two levels – digital and real, bio & tech,
nervous system and operative system – merge.
This nervous system, infected by the hi-tech, needs a treatment, and
the hi-tech society prescribes its remedies, “bio-chemical 'agents' which
control the internal information flow”. Olanzapine, an antipsychotic drug
produced by the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly as Zyprexa®, is one of
these agents. In the digital prints Zyprexa “Lilly 1112” and Zyprexa “Lilly
4117” (2006), UBERMORGEN.COM paints the drug molecular structure, but
during this translation process the molecule discovers to be made by bits.
“Just pixels on a screen, just ink on paper”, like Foriginals (forged
originals), the conceptual device UBERMORGEN.COM uses to change legal
documents into legal art. The statement “Lilly controls my Foriginals” – a
declaration of poetics that seems to be a declaration of love, used as title
for the recent personal show UBERMORGEN.COM had in Brescia, Italy -
comes from here. “Lilly controls my Foriginals” means “Lilly controls my
artistic work”, where Lilly just seems to be a woman’s name, is in fact the
name of a pharmaceutical company. Lilly “controls”, inspires as well as
oversees, supervises the contact between my brain and my hard drive.
The Psych|OS Generator (2006) is the literal application of this kind of
control: a piece of software that asks the user about the symptoms of her
disease and provides her with a remedy, in the form of a "forged original“
medical prescription. On the one hand, UBERMORGEN.COM seems to
underline the irresistible analogy between the implications that have led
to illness and the prescriptions provided to again recover one’s health –
once again, technology is at the same time the disease and the remedy for
a body living in the networks. On the other hand, we have to take into
account the elements of dadaist randomness, of irony, of irrationality
expressed through a mathematical algorithm implied in the very form of
the “generator”. The situation appears to be something like a forced heir
of the hat out of which Tristan Tzara picked his poems, a tradition that
UBERMORGEN.COM, who have performed in the Cabaret Voltaire in
Zürich, know very well. The digital environment we live in makes us fall ill
and prescribes us its remedies; but in the same time technology, as a
medium of expression, is a real remedy. This concept can be extended to
the blog recently launched by UBERMORGEN.COM, the hansbernhardblog
(2006): a masterpiece of “digital intimism”, in which Hans Bernhard
subverts the form of blog, confronting the baroque sentimentalism of the
confession with the cold minimalism of the remedy: that is, talking about
himself through the simple itemizing of the substances he gets every day
to keep under control his widespread mind.
UBERMORGEN.COM’s focus on “the pixel as the molecule” and
technology as a hidden demon relates also to the technology industries
newest gadgets -- RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) chips are one of
the leading technologies of the future: an identification system that can
collect diverse information about the products it is attached to as well as
the person that has made purchase of the product. We can read in
Wikipedia: "an RFID tag is a small object that can be attached to or
incorporated into a product, animal, or person. RFID tags contain silicon
chips and antennas to enable them to receive and respond to radio-
frequency queries from an RFID transceiver“. It is, in short, a kind of
digital DNA, usually used as an evolved substitute of the bar code, but able
to be used for a long list of applications. It can be implanted under the
skin, and from a formal point of view, it reveals an organic structure,
surprisingly similar to a cellular structure.
The ART FID (2005) series features some digital prints on canvas
which portray, magnified on a monochrome background, the structure of
some round RFID chips. We feel like to be in front of some kind of
monocellular being (a virus?), or a molecule seen through a microscope.
First step: from chip to molecule. But its photographic picture, enlarged as
to reach the scale of a pop icon (are the RFID chips the Campbell's Soup
Can of the XXI century?), unveils another nature, neither silicon nor
molecular, but digital. Second step: from molecule to pixel.
But there's something more. The ART FID series have been shown for
the first time during ART 36 Basel, announced by a press release – a
media hack in pure UBERMORGEN.COM's style – talking about an
experimental initiative by the same Art Basel: the introduction of the RFID
technologies into the art system, providing visitors immediate access to
information about all artistic works being presented, as well as access fot
gallerists into the financial situation and the purchasing power of potential
buyers. Third step: from pixel to individual and social body.
In other words, with the ART FID (2005) series UBERMORGEN.COM
tells us – using the visual impact of a suprematist painting - about this mix
between biotechnologies and digital technologies, and between hardware,
software and wetware: a neverending overlapping of contiguous levels
that is shaping our identity, and that, by now, already shaped
El Juez y la Conectividad – el nuevo principio de la José Eduardo de Resende Chaves Júnior1 Aunque haya virado cliché enaltecer el potencial colectivo de la red, en el Poder Judicial eso todavía es un gran tabú, pues la decisión judicial, mismo cuando proferida de forma colegiada, es fruto todavía de un proceso de convicción profundamente monocrático. Sin perquirir sobre las compleja
8945d_043-044 6/18/03 11:21 AM Page 43 mac85 Mac 85:1st shift: 1268_tm:8945d: SENDING A SIGNAL THROUGH A GAS For decades scientists have tried to understand how cells work together in tis-sues, as well as in whole organisms. By the 1980s, the identity of many signal-ing molecules, the cellular responses they evoked, and many aspects of intracellu-lar signaling pathways were understood. All t