• 1997
• Website with trademarked sentences linked with URLs
• www.irational.org/tttp/TM/trademark.html
• Presented in the exhibition as wall installation

Daniel García Andújar – the Spanish media artist better known by his company name Technologies To The People — almost ten years ago created with Language (property) a work addressing the increasing privatization and commodification of language. A plain HTML page presents a list of sentences that have become registered trademarks and thus the property of their corporate owners. Examples include »Where do you want to go today?™« (Microsoft), »A better return on information ™« (SAP), »Moving at the speed of business™« (UPS), »What you never thought possible™« (Motorola). By giving his project the title Remember, language is not free™, Andújar anticipated the disputes surrounding ›intellectual property‹ in the following years (and increasingly evident in the second half of the 1990s with the ruthless scramble for domain names in the World Wide Web). While on the website the individual sentences are linked to the copyright notices of the relevant companies, a large-format, almost ›immersive‹, wall Presented has been chosen for the exhibition.(Inke Arns)

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Frieze Issue 37 November-December 1997

DASA, Dortmund, Germany

DASA, or the Deutsche Arbeitsschutzausstellung (The German Health and Safety at Work Exhibition) to give it its full title, is a museum in which you can put on a pair of hygienically padded headphones and take a guided tour of the history of work. Behind this is the serious point that working people – whether typing at computers or tapping blast furnaces – are exposed to danger. Ear muffs, goggles and back exercises were all invented to protect the body during the production process. If the mind responsible for that body is to understand how vulnerable it is and how it works, clear images are needed. ‘Short Cuts – Anschlüsse an den Körper. Ein Cross-Over durch Kunst, Wissenschaft und Körperbilder’ (Short Cuts: connections to the body. A criss-cross tour of art, science and images of the body) is the wordy title of an exhibition that provides just that. The 17 artists involved use photography, video, installation and interactive computers. Curators Iris Dressler (art historian) and Hans D. Christ (artist) state that in organising the show they were interested in ‘surfaces’ and not in ‘physical feelings’.

Dressler and Christ are aware that the image of the body at the end of the millennium has been a staple of art magazines, major exhibitions and symposia for many years. The key features of this show are the unusual venue and the claim to be showing work by young and largely unknown artists. Timm Ulrichs, who was born in 1940, is the oldest. The End (1997), his photograph of a closed eyelid with the words of its title tattooed on to it, hangs at the beginning of the exhibition. Nearby, Spanish artist Daniel Garcia Andujar’s Body Research Machine (1997) uses a pompous set of apparatus that purports to provide, in the form of scanned data, information about the visitors who walk through it. You realise that all this high-tech hoo-ha is a fake when smoke rises after the scan button has been pressed, but the work is based on the fantasy that you can magic people out of some sort of data-essence – which reduces gene and clone technology to a level that even Mary Shelley had gone beyond.

Surprisingly few artists addressed the two aspects that have been illuminated most strongly by art based on the body and its image in the last few years: gene technology and the field of tension between sex and gender. The American artist Janine Antoni uses the latter most obviously – but in a way that is already slightly old-fashioned. Her three-part photographic work Mom and Dad (1994) shows an elderly couple (her parents) losing their sexual identity through make-up and styling.

The photographs exhibited are mostly examples of the flood of artfully produced body pictures that has been pouring out for some years, but which have become bogged down in technicalities through putting technique above content. This applies as much to Bea de Visser’s Getting Back Through You (1996), eight portraits of people superimposed on the artist’s face, as it does to Frank Goeldner’s series ‘O.T.’ (Untitled, 1992), in which a trick is used to make the subjects’ skin seem transparent. But Gabriele Leidloff’s installation Ugly Casting (1997) does convince. She shows eleven photographs of death-masks. The sequence of still images produces a cliched scene of a kiss, which is then set in motion in a video. Zoe Leonard uses similarly macabre material in her presentation of anatomical models and plays with the contradiction between subjectively felt shame and a scientific approach that allows the body to function as an object of research.

Ritual 1-2 & 3 (1997) by Dutch artist Peter Bogers takes a more spectacular approach. In contrast with many works in the show, which approach the theme of the body with calm reticence, a ticking wall-clock establishes the tempo in Bogers’ space. On one wall you see real-time pictures from various other exhibition areas, or of yourself, caught up in Bogers’ video works. On the floor are 12 TV monitors set in a circle. The scenes playing are edited in such a way that each screen shows a violent scene from a feature film and then freezes. This produces an endless sequence of punches and bullet wounds. You stand in the middle and follow them round, or you can sit down in front of a smaller video screen and watch loops of action scenes dissolving into each other. Headphones play a soundtrack like a DJ’s set, with shots and blows as the beat. You are aware that Bogers’ sources help shape our image of the body, but it is the only work in the exhibition to make it clear, through the vehemence of its manipulation, that this is wrong.

After that you can rest on E.R. Sonntag’s rubber seat, entitled Omo (1996-97), enjoying the vibrations running through your body, until Bogers’ images start to slowly drain out of your brain – unfortunately they will never disappear completely.

Martin Pesch, translated by Michael Robinson

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Frieze Issue 37 November-December 1997

DASA, Dortmund, Germany

DASA, or the Deutsche Arbeitsschutzausstellung (The German Health and Safety at Work Exhibition) to give it its full title, is a museum in which you can put on a pair of hygienically padded headphones and take a guided tour of the history of work. Behind this is the serious point that working people – whether typing at computers or tapping blast furnaces – are exposed to danger. Ear muffs, goggles and back exercises were all invented to protect the body during the production process. If the mind responsible for that body is to understand how vulnerable it is and how it works, clear images are needed. ‘Short Cuts – Anschlüsse an den Körper. Ein Cross-Over durch Kunst, Wissenschaft und Körperbilder’ (Short Cuts: connections to the body. A criss-cross tour of art, science and images of the body) is the wordy title of an exhibition that provides just that. The 17 artists involved use photography, video, installation and interactive computers. Curators Iris Dressler (art historian) and Hans D. Christ (artist) state that in organising the show they were interested in ‘surfaces’ and not in ‘physical feelings’.

Dressler and Christ are aware that the image of the body at the end of the millennium has been a staple of art magazines, major exhibitions and symposia for many years. The key features of this show are the unusual venue and the claim to be showing work by young and largely unknown artists. Timm Ulrichs, who was born in 1940, is the oldest. The End (1997), his photograph of a closed eyelid with the words of its title tattooed on to it, hangs at the beginning of the exhibition. Nearby, Spanish artist Daniel Garcia Andujar’s Body Research Machine (1997) uses a pompous set of apparatus that purports to provide, in the form of scanned data, information about the visitors who walk through it. You realise that all this high-tech hoo-ha is a fake when smoke rises after the scan button has been pressed, but the work is based on the fantasy that you can magic people out of some sort of data-essence – which reduces gene and clone technology to a level that even Mary Shelley had gone beyond.

Surprisingly few artists addressed the two aspects that have been illuminated most strongly by art based on the body and its image in the last few years: gene technology and the field of tension between sex and gender. The American artist Janine Antoni uses the latter most obviously – but in a way that is already slightly old-fashioned. Her three-part photographic work Mom and Dad (1994) shows an elderly couple (her parents) losing their sexual identity through make-up and styling.

The photographs exhibited are mostly examples of the flood of artfully produced body pictures that has been pouring out for some years, but which have become bogged down in technicalities through putting technique above content. This applies as much to Bea de Visser’s Getting Back Through You (1996), eight portraits of people superimposed on the artist’s face, as it does to Frank Goeldner’s series ‘O.T.’ (Untitled, 1992), in which a trick is used to make the subjects’ skin seem transparent. But Gabriele Leidloff’s installation Ugly Casting (1997) does convince. She shows eleven photographs of death-masks. The sequence of still images produces a cliched scene of a kiss, which is then set in motion in a video. Zoe Leonard uses similarly macabre material in her presentation of anatomical models and plays with the contradiction between subjectively felt shame and a scientific approach that allows the body to function as an object of research.

Ritual 1-2 & 3 (1997) by Dutch artist Peter Bogers takes a more spectacular approach. In contrast with many works in the show, which approach the theme of the body with calm reticence, a ticking wall-clock establishes the tempo in Bogers’ space. On one wall you see real-time pictures from various other exhibition areas, or of yourself, caught up in Bogers’ video works. On the floor are 12 TV monitors set in a circle. The scenes playing are edited in such a way that each screen shows a violent scene from a feature film and then freezes. This produces an endless sequence of punches and bullet wounds. You stand in the middle and follow them round, or you can sit down in front of a smaller video screen and watch loops of action scenes dissolving into each other. Headphones play a soundtrack like a DJ’s set, with shots and blows as the beat. You are aware that Bogers’ sources help shape our image of the body, but it is the only work in the exhibition to make it clear, through the vehemence of its manipulation, that this is wrong.

After that you can rest on E.R. Sonntag’s rubber seat, entitled Omo (1996-97), enjoying the vibrations running through your body, until Bogers’ images start to slowly drain out of your brain – unfortunately they will never disappear completely.

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HAMBURG
Jens Rönnau
un-frieden. sabotage von wirklichkeiten

Kunstverein und Kunsthaus in Hamburg, 30.11.1996 – 19.1.1997

540 Künstler aus 31 Ländern der Welt waren 1996 dem Aufruf gefolgt, Konzepte zum Thema “un-frieden. sabotage von wirklichkeiten” einzureichen. Per weltweitem Internet hatten die Ausstellungskuratorinnen Ute Vorkoeper und Inke Arns für eine Beteiligung an diesem Projekt geworben, das im Rahmen der Hamburger Woche der Bildenden Kunst 1996 präsentiert wurde. Nur 34 Projekte davon wählte die Jury für jene Schau in den Räumen von Kunstverein und Kunsthaus Hamburg. Allerdings waren fast alle anderen eingereichten Konzepte den Ausstellungsbesuchern ebenfalls zugänglich: 26 in einem speziellen Konzeptraum, die übrigen in einem Archiv – “ein Ort für Entdeckungen und Vernetzungen”, so die Ausstellungsmacherinnen.

Es war Konzept der Ausstellung, für das Ute Vorkoeper verantwortlich zeichnet, “unterschiedliche, möglichst auch unbekannte künstlerisch-politische Positionen der 90er Jahre zusammenzutragen” unter dem Motto der “un-friedlichen” Wirklichkeiten, die unseren Alltag bestimmen: kritische Hinterfragung, Auseinandersetzung, auch Lösungsvorschläge für Denkansätze. Dabei besteht der erkenntnistheoretische Grundsatz, daß Krieg und Frieden sich nicht als Antipoden gegenüberstehen, weil es “die eine Wahrheit” nicht gibt und weil man eingestimmt hat “in den Abgesang auf jedwede Utopie”. “Wir stehen diesseits der Utopien und jenseits der Apokalypsen” (U.Vorkoeper).

In sechs Themen-”Zonen” war die Ausstellung unterteilt: Kontrolle (Unsicherheit), Nachrichtendienste (Desinformation), Alltag (Befremdendes), Grenzpolitiken (Gratwanderungen), Staatsmaschinen (Ordnungen) und Science Fiction & Ökonomie (Zukunftsverwaltung). Die Grenzen dieser Zonen blieben allerdings fließend und können bestenfalls als Hilfsversuche einer Klassifizierung jener Ausstellungsvielfalt gelten, die übrigens nicht nur auf einen Ort beschränkt war. Auch an anderen Orten der Hansestadt gab es Projekte und Performances, etwa durch Mobilar-Austausch von öffentlichen Cafés durch die österreichische Gruppe “tonnage inc”.

Zum Programm zählten wider Willen auch hundert Hamburger Unternehmen, bei denen es elektronische Sicherheitskontrollen gibt. Mittels per Post versandter Magnetstreifen wurden dort die Alarmsysteme ausgelöst – ein Mail-Art-Projekt des Engländers Heath Bunting, der auf seine Weise kreativen Unfrieden stiften wollte, indem er Ordnungen auf den Kopf stellte. Sicherheitssysteme werden durch Verunsicherung ad absurdum geführt.

Hierzu zählt auch die Infragestellung des nationalen Territorialstaates durch die slowenische Künstlergruppe Irwin/NSK, die unter dem Motto “Neue Slowenische Kunst” kollektive Avantgarde-Kunst propagiert und Pässe ausgibt für den “NSK Staat in der Zeit”, der sich in und mit der Zeit bewegt, und nicht in geographischen Grenzen. Sein Motor ist ein symbolisch-physikalischer Kollektivkörper, der keinem Territorium, sondern Geist und Ideen den Status eines Staates verleiht. Mit den bei Irwin zu bestellenden Pässen sollen Menschen ohne gültige Reisepapiere während des Jugoslawien-Krieges schon internationale Grenzen passiert haben.

Die Grenzen des einstigen “Eisernen Vorhangs” überschritten während des Kalten Kriegs in den 60er Jahren ferngesteuerte Minifahrzeuge des US-Geheimdienstes. In einer Schau zeigt der Berliner Peder Iblher banale, fiktive Fotos aus den Weiten der damaligen UdSSR, die von jenen Spionierfahrzeugen stammen sollen und die trotz Millionenaufwand kaum nennenswerte Erkenntnisse vom “Feindstaat” gebracht haben sollen.

Eine Demokratisierung der Technik fordert der Spanier Daniel G. Andujar mit seinem Projekt “Technologies To The People”. Er will mittellosen Personen den Zugang zu neuen Technologien ermöglichen, um der drohenden Schere zwischen informierten und nichtinformierten Mitgliedern der Gesellschaft entgegenzuwirken. Dazu dienen Werbekampagnen wie für “Personal Folkcomputer” oder die “Internet Street Access Machine”, die auch mit Kreditkarten für jeden nutzbar sein soll.

Persönlicher geht es im Selbstversuch Birgit Brenners zu, die sich um eine Rückführung der statistischen Durchschnittsmenge ihrer in einem Jahr geweinten Tränen bemüht. Seine persönliche Ordnung in der Welt der Begriffe will Marcus Bastel (Amsterdam) finden. Er überhäuft einen Konferenztisch mit willkürlichen Begriffen, kontrastiert Worte per Monitor mit aufgezeichneten Selbstgesprächen.

Auf die glatte Schönheit unserer Autowelt hat es der Japaner Daisuke Nakayama mit seinem “Car of desire” abgesehen: Ein schnittiges Fahrzeug als edelpolierte Holzskulptur steht frei im Raum. Man sollte sich dem indes lieber nicht allzusehr nähern, denn es ist von rasierklingenscharfem Schneidestahl überzogen.

Wohlige Schönheit bis zum Überdruß hingegen zeigt der Niederländer Gary Carsley, der mit seinem “Amt für öffentliche Arbeit” mittels unzähliger Rosenarrangements unseren triest-schrecklichen Alltag ironisch “verschönt”. Dabei kommt die Rose auch als ein Moment der Erotik zum Einsatz, begleitet von Texten oder mehrdeutigen Sprüchen wie “HOME SWEET HOME OH?”.

Schön erscheint auch “Wandering Position” – ein quadratisches, endlos ineinander verschlungenes Linienmuster auf dem Boden der Ausstellungshalle. 24 Stunden lang zeichnete Yukinori Yanagi (Japan) den Weg einer Ameise in einem durch Eisenbarrieren eingegrenzten Feld mit roter Kreide nach – eine letztlich schöne und zugleich bedrückende sowie nachdenklich stimmende Installation.

Als bedrückend mag man denn auch eher den Gesamtkontext der Ausstellung empfinden, selbst wenn die künstlerischen Konzeptionen oft kuriose Auswege aufzeigen, wie Andreas Peschkas “Stempelset für Attentäter”, der jedem Attentäter gestattet, per Stempel einen Fingerabdruck des Künstlers am Tatort zu hinterlassen. Entsprechende Bestellzettel für den Stempel sind nebst Anschrift beim Künstler einzureichen. Gewalt, Geheimdienste, Ressourcen, Medien und Macht werden in den gezeigten Konzepten und Installationen vielfältig thematisiert und hinterfragt. Man konnte die Ausstellung mit einem lachenden und einem weinenden Auge zugleich verlassen.

Katalog, 128 Seiten, s/w-Abb., deutsch/englisch, 30 DM

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Presented as large-format wallpaper installation » The Research Department of Technologies To The People devotes itself to statistically recording and presenting core areas of contemporary life. In regard to levels of technology ownership in the USA, the department tells us that 77.3 % of the population possesses a microwave, but only (only?) 55 % a supermarket price scanner. Another statistic reveals that Washington and California are the federal states in which UFOs are most frequently spotted (New York trails far behind at the other end of the scale). We are also given percentages for the distribution of religions over the continents, beverage consumption in selected countries, the frequency with which types of passwords are cracked, the primary online activities of women, and the distribution of employment in the USA (with data supplied by the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U. S. Department of Labor). In the exhibition the statistics are presented as large-format printouts covering the walls of the room dedicated to irational’s Collecting data all over the net project. The collection of all kinds of data (via surveys, for instance, or loyalty cards) combined with the personalization facilitated by increasing linkage with databases has now become a powerful tool for consumer control. With its own requests for sensitive or wholly irrelevant information, irational began from an early date to confront the increasingly apparent mania for collecting data. (Inke Arns)

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Presented as online website Daniel G. Andújar’s company Technologies To The People (TTTP) invites interested parties to submit an application to the grants programme of the fictitious Technologies To The People Foundation. A click on the hyperlink takes potential applications to the Preliminary Basic Application, a serious-looking questionnaire which reveals the subtle mechanisms used to collect marketing-relevant data. A notice advises that a fee is payable — by credit card only — prior to submitting an application, and requests for sensitive information are underscored by ironic notices flickering across the screen: »We would appreciate! Strictly confidential!« The form asks for the applicant’s social insurance number and credit card details as well as financially useful data (age group, gender, marital status, occupation), and rounds off the profile by asking for details of religion and race. (Darija Simunovic)

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A long list of awards conceivably and inconceivably bestowed on the Technologies To The People website which, as its makers would have us believe, is »one of the most popular art sites on the internet «. Framed in silver like a collection of especially valuable postage stamps, the some 30 distinctions presented in the original thumbnail format include »Browser Watch — Net Fame!«, »An Internet cool site of the day«, »Magellan Star Site«, »Prescribed by Dr. Webster’s Web Site of the Day«, »Art Dirt« — »Your Webscout Way Cool Site«, and »Orchid Award for Page Excellence«. (Inke Arns)

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A long list of awards conceivably and inconceivably bestowed on the Technologies To The People website which, as its makers would have us believe, is »one of the most popular art sites on the internet «. Framed in silver like a collection of especially valuable postage stamps, the some 30 distinctions presented in the original thumbnail format include »Browser Watch — Net Fame!«, »An Internet cool site of the day«, »Magellan Star Site«, »Prescribed by Dr. Webster’s Web Site of the Day«, »Art Dirt« — »Your Webscout Way Cool Site«, and »Orchid Award for Page Excellence«. (Inke Arns)

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“THE BODY RESEARCH MACHINE© nutzt neuartige Technologien, die auf hochentwickelten biometrischen Technologien basieren, um komplexe Daten über den menschlichen Körper zu erfassen. Die Maschine sendet Ultraschall-Wellen durch den Körper, die in Phasen-Daten aufgespaltet werden. Sie sucht dabei jede Sektion des Körpers nach interessanten Informationen ab und überträgt sämtliche Eingangssignale in eine spezielle Computerdatenbank.

Das Datenbanksystem, das von TECHNOLOGIES TO THE PEOPLE© eigens entwickelt wurde, beruht auf dem Aufbau verschiedener Atommodelle und kann individuelle Aminosäurestrukturen Atom für Atom nachbauen. Diese und andere Daten werden in unserer Zentraldatenbank gespeichert. Die gewonnenen Daten können schließlich mit den DNA-Ketten einer GenBank verglichen werden.

TECHNOLOGIES TO THE PEOPLE© unterstützt das “Model Ethical Protocol for Collecting DNA Samples”. Wir werden keine Patentierung der DNA-Ketten oder den Verkauf des genetischen Materials zulassen. Wir garantieren dagegen die individuelle Kontrolle über persönliche Informationen. Wenn das “Human Genome Project” seine Mission, die Transkription des Codes, der die Erschaffung und Entwicklung menschlichen Lebens kontrolliert, erfüllt hat, wird dieser Code für alle auf dem Markt verfügbar sein. So hoffen wir. Sind die DNS-Ketten des Menschen erst einmal vollständig entschlüsselt und interpretiert, dann werden wir in der Lage sein, das Ergebnis für unsere eigenen Zwecke zu nutzen. Wir werden uns selbst neu erschaffen und den Lauf der Evolution ändern.”

Daniel García Andújar

Daniel García Andújar: The Body Research Machine, 1997,
Multimedia-Projekt (screenshot)

Daniel García Andújar: The Body Research Machine, 1997,
Multimedia-Projekt (screenshot)

Daniel García Andújar: The Body Research Machine, 1997,
Installationsansicht (Photo: Sascha Dressler)

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