Anybody can become a member of �TMark by simply deciding
to support one of their many creative sabotage actions against
multinational corporations, politicians and the new myths of the
digital age. "Corporations are complete and utter machines working to
increase the wealth of the shareholders, often in detriment to culture
and life. �TMark is a machine to improve the culture and life of its
shareholders, often in detriment to wealth," Ray Thomas, spokesman for
the group, declares. Its best-known actions include mirrors, parodies
of official pages of politicians and corporations.
For the Public, TTTP is a non-profit foundation which
organises different types of activities, with the aim of making
technology accessible to the less affluent areas of society. In actual
fact, it is an artistic project in the making, with the objective of
provoking reflection about the use of the new media and about the new
mechanisms of exclusion generated by a computer-literate society.
"People say that new technology will give us freedom, and it is seen to
be a fairer, more democratic area, but I can’t help asking myself who
really has access to it?", And�jar exclaims.
Antoni Muntadas, the father of Spanish digital art, has
lived and worked in New York for many years. This project, produced in
1994 for the Randolph St. Gallery in Chicago, is one of the pioneers in
the use of Internet as an instrument for social criticism and as a
territory where an unofficial history can be reconstructed, through the
contributions of all net-users. File Room has been constructed as an
on-line community archive about cases of cultural censorship around the
world, which allows users to access the database, add new information
and take part in a discussion forum.
In Internet, everything is for auction: in Absolute
Sale, lots from the former Eastern European bloc are sold. After
selecting a geographical region, the user goes through the standard
procedures in order to take part in an on-line auction. However, as he
continues, the user realises that the merchandise for which he is
bidding is an artist from the chosen region. The project, by a Yugoslav
collective, is designed to make us think about social and personal
identity and about the situation of the artists who lived their golden
age in the socialist bloc, compared with the later collapse of the
bloc, the ethnic wars and the desperate economic crisis.
This project tranforms the computer interface into an
anarchistic operative system, in which Batman and Robin turn into
socialist revolutionaries and the Bellagio Casino in Las Vegas is
transformed into the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art. Click after click,
the user discovers a parallel world, where nothing is what it seems.
The site shows Andy Cox’s works and documents the actions of the
collective Together We Can Defeat Capitalism, which he founded. Its aim
is to point out the incongruences of the current capitalist system and
the negativity of consumerist ideology, opening up a new area for
discussion and critical analysis.
This startling, politicised work created by the
Australian artist with the collaboration of Michael Grimm and the
collective Los Fantasmas, The Ghosts, intimidates the user with an
uninterrupted flow of visual and aural stimuli. Dedicated to the
Mexican Zapatista movement, the project divides the screen into five
micro-stages, where a linear narrative takes place, mixing sentences
and images from various contemporary cultures with distrurbing military
photos, treatises on war strategies and messages in ICQ that come from
well-known multinational corporations. The complete runthrough takes
about 25 minutes and the user does not need to interact with it.
Conceived as an artistic vision of daily life, this
project is dedicated to employee number 12,995 and to his frustrations
and angst. Throughout his life, Meyer has analysed, with irony, the
human being’s role and the concept of identity in the world dominated
by corporations and the New Economy. The user is invited to follow the
daily routine of a faceless employee and to interact in a series of
situations that are typical in the world of work. Only after having
overcome a series of trials can the user follow the employee home, get
to know his domestic arrangements and experience his alienation and
loneliness...but take care, because there is a surprise waiting in the
bathroom...
Since 1997, RTI has based its artistic demonstrations on
creative recycling and the use of free programmes (shareware). It has
recently opened a trash media lab in Sheffield, where all the equipment
comes from tips. Its website is meant to be a catalyst for artistic
activity: its aim is to generate creative processes, not to be
considered a work of art in itself. "The media pay a lot of attention
to projects carried out with the newest and most expensive
technologies, but more than works of art, they look like creative
exhibitions of the latest technological advances of the corporations.
The aim of our installations is to demonstrate the potential for
technology at no cost," says James Wallbank, founder of the group.
This theater group was founded in New York in 1996 and
carries out performances based on re-readings of famous texts by
writers such as George Orwell, Edgar Allan Poe and Samuel Beckett. All
the activities take place in the street and the group takes advantage
of the numerous surveillance cameras that abound in Western cities to
retransmit their actions via Internet. This means that, on the one
hand, they protest about the violation of privacy and on the other,
they make the public more familiar with the latest surveillance
technology, so that there is a greater awareness of the social
implications of the generalised use of these types of control and
public debate about its use in democratic society is encouraged.
Maintaining his antimilitarist ideology, and in
collaboration with Joe Dellinger, Deck has created a project which
encourages us to the analyse the relationship between the armament
industry and the media. Based on the press coverage of the latest
Balkan conflicts, Deck accuses the Government and the American
communications groups of manipulating the truth. In order to
demonstrate this, he has made a montage of various actual battle
scenes, where the segment retransmitted on televison is accompanied by
the images immediately after, which the public did not see. The images
that were never retransmitted give us much to think about.
Co-founder of the Electronic Disturbance Theater, among
other projects, Dom�nguez organises virtual sit-ins. These are acts of
protest that use Internet as their field of operations, with the
objective of temporarily blocking certain websites. Most of the attacks
have been carried out in favour of the Zapatista movement and against
the Mexican government and related authorities, such as the Bank of
Mexico, but they have also waged protests against institutions such as
the Pentagon. The actions are carried out through a small application
called FloodNet, which can be downloaded from the EDT site. When it is
used simultaneously by a large number of people, it blocks the
targetted website.
The IAA develops useful technology for social and human
requirements. One of its most outstanding creations is Pamphleteer,
a.k.a. Little Brother, a robot of primitive design, programmed to offer
information to people who do not have access to Internet. "Its apparent
innocence makes it the perfect vehicle for new types of activism", its
creators explain. They played a leading part in a protest against
Haider’s government during the last Ars Electronica festival in Linz,
Austria. On that occasion, they used the GraffitiWriter, a robot
controlled via Internet which allows anyone to write subversive
messages on the streets.
A soundtrack with jazz music pulls the user into the
rhythmic, absorbing narrative of an ironical televised karaoke, where
Young-Hae Chang’s silent shouts (according to netiquette, using capital
letters is the equivalent of shouting) fill the screen with demands.
"There is no interaction in my work, neither are there any graphics, no
photos, no banners, there are no colours and no fireworks. I hate
interactivity. When I enter an interactive work, I feel like a
guineapig. Art is not a reward, it is a shock", declares the Korean
artist with the longest, most consolidated career in the field of art
on the net.