Siguiendo el buen ejemplo de la sociedades capitalistas desarrolladas, la actividad terciaria, la prestación de servicios, se ha convertido en uno de los sectores clave de la economía de este país (España). Diría más, los servicios de ocio y turismo se han convertido en una necesidad, hasta el punto de convertirse en la principal fuente de divisas y en el motor económico que alimenta toda una nueva idiosincrasia. Es un papel en perfecta armonía con la fuerza dinámica de la economía global que asumimos de forma colectiva con cierto conformismo ¿Quién no se ha sentido alguna vez en este país, o ha ejercido directamente, de guía turístico o camarero? Nos viene en el DNI (Documento Nacional de Identidad). Nuestra disposición para el servicio es puesta a prueba con cierta periodicidad ya que en reiteradas ocasiones nos vemos obligados a ejercer de guías ocasionales para familiares, conocidos y amigos que vienen de visita y necesitan del perfecto anfitrión que los oriente por el complejo y fascinante mundo de la tapa, el flamenco, la paella, la cala, la ruina, el museo, la catedral, etc., según afinidades y naturaleza del visitante, guía y lugar en concreto. Nos convertimos en mediadores ocasionales filtrando de forma subjetiva la información que conforma parte de nuestra realidad más inmediata, y lo hacemos de forma automática, casi profesional, sin darnos cuenta, destilamos la realidad a nuestro antojo, de acuerdo a nuestras preferencias. Y cuento todo esto porque en una de estas jugadas, me vi ‘obligado’ a acompañar a una amiga investigadora hasta la capital del Reino, donde debería orientarla, fundamentalmente, en una investigación que estaba llevando a cabo en torno a la cultura del archivo y que pronto verá la luz con forma de ensayo en la lengua franca de la sociedad de la información, el inglés. Guiar, manipular, interpretar, filtrar, condicionar, orientar, mediar, priorizar, jerarquizar… todo lo que trato de combatir sin éxito alguno, demasiado poder, hasta para un amigo.

Nos dirigimos a el Real Sitio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial (el Monasterio de El Escorial) que como saben es un gran complejo (palacio, el propio monasterio, museo y biblioteca) que se encuentra en San Lorenzo de El Escorial, municipio situado a 45 km. al noroeste de Madrid, en la Comunidad de Madrid (España). El nombre de El Escorial se debe a unos antiguos depósitos de escoria procedentes de una ferrería de la zona de donde tomó su topónimo la aldea ubicada en las proximidades del lugar donde se construyó este monumental complejo. Fue mandado construir por el rey Felipe II para conmemorar la victoria de San Quintín el 10 de agosto de 1557 sobre las tropas de Enrique II, rey de Francia y para servir de lugar de enterramiento de los restos de sus padres, el emperador Carlos I e Isabel de Portugal, así como de los suyos y los de sus sucesores. La planta del edificio, con sus torres, recuerda la forma de una parrilla, por lo que tradicionalmente se ha afirmado que esto se hizo así en honor a San Lorenzo, martirizado en Roma asándole en una parrilla y cuya festividad se celebra el 10 de agosto, el día que tuvo lugar batalla de San Quintín, de ahí el nombre del conjunto y de la localidad creada a su alrededor. Prestigio y poder sobre la escoria, como conmemoración de la victoria y en honor a un martirizado. Lorenzo, a su vez, fue uno de los siete diáconos de Roma, y encargado de administrar los bienes de la Iglesia. Por esta labor, es considerado uno de los primeros archivistas y tesoreros de la Iglesia, y es el patrón de los bibliotecarios. Todo un juego de metáforas y una inspiración para cualquier artista que se precie, ahí queda.

Lo que interesaba especialmente a mi amiga Sara Greene fue la impresionante inversión y el especial cuidado en la biblioteca. Felipe II cedió para la misma los ricos códices que poseía y para su enriquecimiento encargó la adquisición de las bibliotecas y obras más ejemplares allá donde se encontraran. Fue proyectada por el arquitecto Juan de Herrera que, además de la misma, se ocupó de diseñar las estanterías que contiene. Los impresionantes frescos de la bóveda del techo emulan las pinturas de Ghirlandaio en la Biblioteca Vaticana. Está dotada de una colección de más de 40.000 volúmenes de extraordinario valor, y se ubica en una gran nave de 54 metros de larga, 9 de ancha y 10 metros de altura con suelo de mármol y estanterías de ricas maderas nobles primorosamente talladas. Sin duda, Felipe II, entonces el monarca más poderoso de la Tierra, quiso emular la Biblioteca de Alejandría reuniendo aquí la sabiduría de un mundo en cambio constante y difícil de abarcar, en una permanente ampliación de su extensión y complejidad. Felipe II no reparó en gastos, además de adquirir, numerosas bibliotecas privadas y los libros que le ofrecían los mercaderes, hacía encargos directos para buscar libros en ciudades como Amberes, Colonia, o Nuremberg. Los embajadores en París, Roma y Venecia recibieron instrucciones para que compraran libros preciosos y los manuscritos que ansiaba. De este modo comenzaron a llegar a El Escorial remesas de libros y documentos, a los que se unieron los que algunos cortesanos legaban al rey en su testamento y los que otros copistas producían. Felipe II concibió su gigantesco cofre de piedra para que contuviera una réplica de todo un mundo inabarcable, el mayor edificio de Europa, un gigantesco contenedor de muros de granito ensamblados sin ornamento, una metáfora inagotable del Poder en mayúsculas.

A esta colosal obra se le uniría otra que sin duda tendrá un mayor impacto en las tesis de Sara, la del Archivo General de Simancas, que fue establecido como Archivo Real por Felipe II y al que nos dirigimos tras la visita a El Escorial. En 1567 Felipe II encargó a Jerónimo Zurita y Castro coleccionar los documentos de estado de Aragón e Italia y juntarlos con los de Castilla en el Castillo de Simancas, creando uno de los mayores archivos de su tiempo, sin duda, uno de los mayores esfuerzos técnicos y logísticos de la época. Dotado de uno de los primeros reglamentos de archivos del mundo llegaría a ser uno de los principales archivos históricos conocidos (tras el Archivo Secreto Vaticano), por su enorme calidad y cantidad de documentación que conserva (entre 50 y 60 millones de documentos) es indispensable para comprender partes fundamentales de la Historia entre los siglos XV y XIX. Ambos complejos formarían parte de una complicada estructura ideada para gobernar el sistema político más grande que había existido nunca. Y para mover semejante maquinaria inventaría un moderno sistema burocrático que permitiera abarcar todo el sistema. Algo que suena absolutamente contemporáneo.

La cuestión es si Felipe II sabía en aquellos momentos aquello de que la información es poder, es más, que el control de la información le ayudaría a perpetuar el poder, para si mismo y los suyos en el futuro. Algunos detalles de su biografía y muchos detractores del monarca imperial hacen dudar de su capacidad. Como anécdota pudimos comprobar, durante la visita a la biblioteca del Escorial, alguna de sus numerosas extravagancias que han provocado estas dudas, por ejemplo que los libros de los estantes están dispuestos de forma que el lomo queda hacia dentro y las cantoneras hacia fuera, algo sumamente extraño. Según me contó Sara, que ahora hacía de mi guía, Felipe II hizo dorar las cantoneras para que los estantes hicieran juego con el pan de oro de la bóveda, pero más allá del detalle, esto también supone una ocultación de la información en los lomos, una manipulación evidente. Igualmente hizo tapar los estantes vacíos con lienzos pintados que representaban los libros que estaba esperando o que no poseía, hasta que este espacio fuera ocupado por los ejemplares reales una vez recibidos. Y esto ya me parece más bien una cierta patología obsesiva. Educado como un humanista, nunca llegó a serlo. Aunque no hay duda de que Felipe II el Prudente fue un hombre inteligente, de cierta cultura y formación, bibliófilo sin duda, aficionado a la música, el arte, el coleccionismo y muy especialmente a la arquitectura. Con capacidad para la planificación y con visión política, su personalidad definirá la historia europea de la segunda mitad del siglo XVI. Felipe II se comunicaba casi diariamente con sus embajadores, virreyes y oficiales repartidos por el imperio mediante un sistema de mensajeros que tardaba menos de tres días en llegar a cualquier parte de la península o unos ocho días en llegar a los Países Bajos, y esto no parece la obra de ningún loco por muy obseso que pareciera.

Inició cambios en la práctica y en la forma de gobierno, rompiendo de esta manera con la tradición medieval y otorgando un carácter innovador a la Corona, al tiempo que se fijaban las bases de la administración pública moderna. Algo, pues, si que parece que sabía. Sin embargo y como suele pasar a quienes ostentan tanto poder, en su extremada prudencia y celo burocrático, el poderoso monarca no había caído en la cuenta de que en aquel preciso momento, mientras él se refugiaba en el micro-mundo de su torre de control, se estaba gestando ya una incipiente fuerza que crecerá hasta llegar a transformar y soslayar los cimientos de todo su Imperio.
En una sociedad mayoritariamente analfabeta, donde el conocimiento estaba limitado a la información proveniente de unos pocos pergaminos manuscritos que custodiaban celosamente en los monasterios y centros de poder, la aparición de la imprenta tuvo una repercusión de extraordinaria importancia. En términos más actuales, la imprenta supuso la aparición de una verdadera puerta trasera en el Sistema que permitiría comenzar a hackearlo hasta llegar a transformarlo íntegramente. Un virus tan sencillo como el del Saber, el acceso a la información, que comenzó a ser patrimonio de mucha más gente, aunque todavía una minoría. Todo un virus que sigue propagándose, mutando sin cesar e infectando el Sistema. El despliegue de prestigio y poder, aquella maquinaria pesada, acabaría disipándose muy lentamente hasta convertir todo el sofisticado mecanismo en un mero símbolo formal, una alegoría, el monumento (Patrimonio de la Humanidad) que hoy conocemos. Un pesado sarcófago de granito que los turistas visitan asombrados de su envergadura y que los guías ocasionales interpretamos a nuestro libre albedrío.

En el mismo sentido que ahora es especialmente preocupante la ausencia de políticos capaces de comprender nuestra nueva realidad tecnológica desde la que deberían desarrollar su acción política, Felipe II tenía más empeño en atesorar y controlar, que en intentar comprender los cambios que estaba sufriendo la realidad de su Imperio. Como Harold Pinter afirmó en su discurso al recibir el Nóbel de Literatura: “el lenguaje político no está interesado en la verdad, sino en el poder y su mantenimiento”, una observación que tiene vigencia histórica con carácter retrospectivo. El sueño de todo político ha sido cerciorarse de que la información fuera un instrumento de su propio poder, y no de los ciudadanos para controlar al poder. Por consiguiente este es, en definitiva, el punto neurálgico que debemos atacar en cualquier sistema jerárquico.

Las evoluciones tecnológicas que se han sucedido a lo largo de la historia han tenido una influencia directa sobre los sistemas de gobierno. Y hablando, como estamos de bibliotecas, librerías, archivos y de libros, tenemos que admitir que la forma primaria de acopiar información, de almacenar contenidos, y de distribuirlos que permitió la aparición de la imprenta jugó un papel fundamental en la difusión de las ideas con gran influencia en la política coetánea. Con la imprenta de caracteres móviles se agilizó notablemente la reproducción de múltiples ejemplares de una misma obra y se facilitó la rápida difusión de información y opiniones en poblaciones pequeñas alejadas de los centros de decisión. Los acontecimientos políticos de aquella época, como el saqueo de Maguncia en 1462, provocaron la dispersión de los alumnos de Gutenberg por centro Europa, difundiendo la nueva técnica de impresión y con ella la distribución de contenidos. En poco tiempo no quedaría localidad centro europea importante que no contase con su propia tipografía desde donde se imprimían mayoritariamente clásicos, pero también recientes aportaciones al pensamiento y a las ideas políticas de la época. La misma tecnología que permitiría modernizar el sistema de administración y gobierno, permitía a cierta parte de la sociedad dotarse de mecanismos para el acceso a la información. Durante el Renacimiento fue el medio decisivo para que las ideas del humanismo se expandieran con cierta celeridad. Aunque tendrán que pasar todavía varios siglos para que podamos hablar de la puesta en marcha de verdaderos procesos de socialización de la información.

Progresivamente, al disminuir enormemente el precio de los libros y de otras publicaciones, se intensificó la transmisión de información y su comunicación, y lo que es más importante, a partir de aquel momento el saber comenzó a ser patrimonio de mucha más gente, multiplicándose las relaciones entre lectores y personas ilustradas de otros países. En el siglo XIX se introdujeron los sistemas de impresión todavía hoy vigentes, que permitieron realizar tiradas a muy bajo coste. Surgieron entonces los periódicos, revistas y otras publicaciones que tuvieron el efecto no solamente de divulgar la cultura, sino de contribuir a la formación civil y social de la gente y al propio progreso de la técnica, la ciencia y las ideas. Pero rápidamente aquellos medios de comunicación de masas (la prensa y más tarde la televisión y la radio) se convertirían en una poderosa maquinaria de control social por parte de una élite minoritaria, desconectando así a los ciudadanos de la participación activa de los debates y la toma de decisiones (siempre nos quedará el voto). “Los periódicos, ya se sabe, no cuentan las cosas como son, ni como creen que son, sino como ellos quieren que sean”. Afortunadamente el periodismo, como otros oficios, está sufriendo una seria transformación en su práctica tradicional que tiende a desactivar el poder de las empresas mediáticas en el control de la información. Es lo que llamamos el fin de la era de la prensa, que no del periodismo como algunos cuestionan. Según Juan Varela, “los ciudadanos se han apropiado de la información a través de los medios sociales. La crisis de la credibilidad de la prensa tradicional, el cuestionamiento de la objetividad y la aparición de herramientas digitales accesibles a todos convierten el periodismo en una conversación de la que los ciudadanos más activos no quieren estar ausentes”. No nos extrañan datos como los que recientemente hemos conocido, que los medios son el sector más corrupto para los españoles (44%) por detrás de los partidos políticos (63%) y las empresas privadas (54%). Los medios, se supone, que debían ser vigilantes de la democracia, pero desde esta perspectiva es claramente imposible.

Conceptos como el de sociedad de la información forman parte ya del lenguaje cotidiano. La influencia de las tecnologías de información y comunicación (TIC) y las consecuencias de la globalización han tenido un indudable efecto transformador en la medida en que están desmantelando viejos modos de pensar y funcionar. El desarrollo de las llamadas nuevas tecnologías nos capacita para formular las cosas de manera diferente, aportando nuevos medios al proceso y a los sistemas de producción de los diversos bienes y servicios culturales, así como a las formas de distribución y transmisión de información. Estamos ante la imposición y desarrollo de un nuevo sistema económico, social y tecnológico que se caracteriza por la importancia de la información como elemento básico para la creación de conocimiento y para la satisfacción de las necesidades de una sociedad resultado de la rápida difusión y democratización de las TIC. En esta última década destaca especialmente el papel de Internet como infraestructura que ha preparado el camino a la sociedad de la información, ya que ha aportado un medio de comunicación e intercambio de datos asequible a amplios sectores de la sociedad. Internet, y en especial algunos de sus servicios como la WWW, se convierten en una herramienta altamente eficaz de difusión de información que permite el acceso a millones de páginas de contenidos textuales y multimedia. Devuelve al ciudadano la capacidad de participación en redes distribuidas de difícil control político y combina en cierta forma (y mediante diferentes tecnologías) los aspectos deliberativos y participativos aparentemente incompatibles con modelos previos. Conceptos como el de fomentar la conversación, la hipertextualidad, la multipresencia, el intercambio de opiniones y enlaces, la comunicación participativa, el archivo compartido, la sindicación de contenidos, etc., son claves en el desarrollo de las estrategias de comunicación cultural, política o social. Estamos ante una nueva era que se caracteriza por la colaboración entre colectivos que trabajan en comunidades con gran capacidad de organización y comunicación, explorando, reflexionando y aportando energía a movimientos y procesos tales como el acceso a software de código libre, el acceso libre a la información, la transformación de los medios de comunicación, la disolución de la autoría y los conflictos con la propiedad, el software social, etc. Las TIC tienen un uso del tiempo y del espacio muy diferente a los medios tradicionales lo que inevitablemente está modificando la percepción que tenemos sobre algunas cuestiones fundamentales. Se habla mucho de inmediatez, pero también se puede hablar de continua reelaboración y sobre todo de permanencia de la información. Podemos generar y consumir contenidos muy rápidamente, pero también modificarlos y recuperarlos con la misma celeridad, se trata de un archivo en continua elaboración y revisión, con unos niveles de accesibilidad hasta ahora desconocidos. Las grandes contenedores del saber, los gestores de la información deben de transformar sus estructuras. El mismo concepto de biblioteca pública, fiel a los principios que han justificado su existencia desde su creación en el siglo XIX, debe de adaptar su funcionalidad a la nueva realidad. En esta nueva realidad, la biblioteca pública, que siempre ha utilizado la información como materia prima de su actividad, debe de transformarse en una institución con un enorme potencial, enfatizando ese potencial en el acceso a la información, a la formación permanente y a los registros culturales en un nuevo entorno de contenidos digitales y de redes de comunicaciones rápidas y económicamente asequibles. Debería de privilegiarse, si quiere sobrevivir, como una puerta de acceso a la sociedad de la información y como factor de equilibrio para evitar que los avances tecnológicos agraven la tendencia latente a la exclusión social de determinados colectivos. Eso sí, tendrá que adaptarse e ir dejando atrás la idea de biblioteca como lugar, como realidad física limitada por los muros que cierran su recinto, y convertirse en entidad lógica y centro de servicios. La biblioteca digital es utópica en el sentido plenamente etimológico del término, ya que no es posible situarla en unas coordenadas espaciales precisas. Ya no nos interesa tanto quienes son los garantes de la información, quienes la atesoran, mas bien quienes nos pueden ayudar a transformar dicha información en conocimiento efectivo para el completo desarrollo de nuestras vidas.

El caso es que todos estos procesos recientes puestos en marcha han acabado por dinamitar los muros del Convento, en este caso monasterio, como garante del preciado tesoro del conocimiento. La biblioteca del Emperador ha quedado totalmente expuesta a la chusma, el granito se torna transparente arrojando luz a su interior. Se han caído también los murallones del Castillo de Simancas que albergan el Archivo General y muestra ahora lo que estaba oculto. La caída de todas estas defensas ha provocado que se desborden los caudales de los fosos que los rodean y, hasta entonces, protegían de asaltos malintencionados. Sus aguas desbordadas provocan confusión en las poblaciones circundantes, sus habitantes se dividen entre quienes se atreven a dirigirse hacia el interior del archivo y quienes se ven superados por la confusión de tal novedad. La realidad es que el archivo ha quedado a merced del pueblo, sin su anillo defensivo amurallado, nada ni nadie puede impedir que la información contenida quede en pública exhibición. Y al parecer no es un proceso aislado, se ha corrido la voz y lo mismo está ocurriendo en otros lugares del planeta. La confusión de los primeros momentos es total. Muchos no saben que hacer con todo aquel caudal, en cambio otros parecen desenvolverse con cierta agilidad en este nuevo contexto, atesorando todo cuanto cae en sus manos (Diógenes digital), convirtiéndose ellos mismos en garantes de la información que atesoran con codicia.

Resulta francamente difícil avanzar al ritmo que exige el desarrollo tecnológico en una sociedad cuyo ambiente general es todavía poco favorable a la introducción de las TIC. Las empresas, la Administración Pública, el mundo institucional, el sistema educativo y algunos sectores de la sociedad se muestran muy reacios a adaptarse a la nueva realidad, también es verdad que en parte carecen de recursos necesarios y la preparación adecuada. Quienes nos dedicamos al mundo del arte, tampoco podemos escapar de este proceso de recontextualización. La oposición de algunos artistas contra el sistema hegemónico institucional de los 60-70 apenas resolvieron algunos aspectos puntuales que ahora parecen agravarse con este nuevo tirón de alfombra bajo los piés. El Museo, ese mausoleo contenedor de reliquias artísticas, y ahora el nuevo Centro de Arte tienen serias dificultades, al menos por el momento, para adaptarse a esta nueva realidad. Muchas instituciones culturales siguen ignorando el cambio, aferrándose a viejos modelos basados en el control jerárquico de la información y el tutelaje de la ciudadanía. No se dan cuenta de que están inmersos en un proceso de cambio profundo de las relaciones entre las entidades culturales y sus públicos objetivos. No parecen entender que una de las principales transformaciones de la era de la Sociedad Informacional es la evolución de los hábitos en el público y las audiencias, hasta el punto que podemos hablar también de la nueva era de la participación y la interpretación. El público del mundo del arte, los visitantes a museos y centros culturales, los participantes en diferentes eventos culturales, ya no quieren limitarse a recibir información sobre los distintos acontecimientos, sino que, además, quieren interactuar en los nuevos medios de comunicación pasando a formar parte del mismo proceso de transmisión de la información, quieren ser parte activa en el proceso de transformación de esa información en conocimiento. Son muy pocas las instituciones culturales que están atendiendo esta realidad cada vez más aplastante. Los responsables de comunicación de estos museos y centros culturales se sienten muy cómodos con un modelo de comunicación lineal y unidireccional que no ofrecen canales de comunicación y participación colaborativa permitiendo acceso a los sistemas de selección y criterio social de la información. Las instituciones culturales dedican un gran esfuerzo a la organización de las tradicionales ruedas de prensa cuyo principal objetivo es la obtención de reseñas y cobertura mediática en las secciones de cultura y sociedad de los principales medios de comunicación tradicionales (prensa escrita, radio y TV) y en sus correspondientes suplementos culturales. Reseñas emitidas de forma unilateral que no serán contrastadas ni pasarán a ser gestionadas por la institución productora con el fin de ofrecer más información y opinión cualificada sobre la exposición a sus potenciales visitantes y usuarios. En el mismo sentido podemos imaginar la relación con el público, la desproporción entre la publicidad del medio emisor y la poca capacidad del mismo para recoger las reacciones del mismo. Discursos unilaterales, cerrados, definidos, sin posibilidad de contestación, sin posibilidad de participación y gestión colectiva. Si observamos con detenimiento el ritual, si acercamos la lupa a la liturgia de la cultura nos llegaremos a preguntar, qué hacen todas esas personas con sandalias y calcetines agolpándose en grupos a las puertas de nuestros museos. No tienen pinta de estar concluyendo un complejo proceso por el cual la producción cultural que realizamos los artistas se convierta en socialmente representativa, cargándose de significado y fuerza simbólica. Viendo el trasiego de autobuses repletos de estudiantes o turistas qué entran y salen del museo, deduzco que todos estos visitantes no parecen participar tampoco de ningún proceso de participación colectiva, más allá del mero hecho de ir juntos a un mismo sitio, más bien tienen pinta de acudir a una especie de “gabinete de curiosidades” o a un extraño ritual de fe con escasa capacidad recreativa. Ya nos lo aclaraba una carta de la Icomos (Internacional Council of Monuments and Sites), “el turismo cultural es aquella forma de turismo que tiene por objeto, entre otros fines, el conocimiento de monumentos y sitios histórico-artísticos”, o sea que tampoco tienen la obligación, según el documento de los museos, de confraternizar con los artistas, otros agentes culturales, o cualquier miembro del contexto socio-cultural, aunque sí han de adquirir cierto nivel de conocimiento sobre el “sitio”. El problema es que el “sitio” está desapareciendo, físicamente, o se está transformando en “otra cosa”.

La institución museística está sin duda ante un reto no exento de paradojas e incluso contradicciones, la paradoja de constituir físicamente un centro para promover iniciativas culturales que cada vez tienen un marco de representación más difuso. Donde cada vez más los sistemas de representación y difusión pasan a través de redes inmateriales y que a su vez necesitan irremediablemente de un contenedor físico, un espacio real desde el que emitir y producir. Cada vez será más difícil el concepto de lo permanente y más probable el de zonas híbridas y temporales donde la gente puede reunirse, hablar, trabajar, incluso celebrar juntos, disolverse como grupo social, trasladarse, y/o formar un nuevo grupo. Hemos de asumir estas contradicciones. La contradicción de un proceso cultural necesariamente lento frente a un ritmo de desarrollo tecnológico y social frenético.

Al igual que la Biblioteca, los espacios dedicados a las artes visuales tendrán que convertirse en un espacio en el que generar conocimiento; manejar información, producir, exhibir y difundir, más que almacenar objetos u ordenar en vitrinas. Un centro-laboratorio de los medios, un centro de recursos dotado y familiarizado con los usos contemporáneos en materia de TIC. Un espacio abierto, un canal de comunicación entre estructuras sociales tácticas e independientes, el mundo más académico y la teoría, la práctica artística contemporánea y la experimentación, el que es de “allí” y el de “allá”. Debe de ser en ese sentido más un medio que un fin en si mismo. Las políticas culturales de los últimos años parece que han sido diseñadas para hablar de arte pero al margen de los artistas. Al parecer los artistas no somos agentes culturales válidos más allá de nuestro mero papel decorativo carente de mayor funcionalidad en el Sistema Cultural. Seguramente nuestra secular incapacidad manifiesta para dotarnos de recursos con los que poder influir en la opinión pública y condicionar la oferta y demanda de bienes y servicios culturales nos ha puesto en esta incómoda posición ¿O será que todo ha cambiado?, ¿qué ya no hablamos de la cultura como un bien y servicio público? Mientras perdemos el tiempo paseando nuestro ego por los salones más exquisitos, mendigando espacios de visibilidad en la precariedad, los profesionales del Marketing Cultural conspiran a nuestras espaldas, utilizando su jerga perversa: responsabilidad social corporativa, mercantilización de los procesos colectivos, industrias culturales…

Los agentes culturales de un territorio son las personas, grupos o instituciones que intervienen en la creación, la producción, la exhibición o la conservación, entablando relaciones que afectan a la configuración del Sistema Cultural Local y que disponen de recursos para poder influir en la opinión pública y condicionar la oferta y/o la demanda de bienes y servicios culturales. La información es poder, sobre esto parece haber un amplio consenso, pero no podemos dejarlo en manos de un cualquiera de turno. Debemos llamar la atención sobre la importancia que adquiere el consumo informativo como proceso de producción de sentido en la conformación de las identidades culturales, destacando la actividad de los públicos en su interacción con los canales y los mensajes de la cultura de masas, como parte de un proceso amplio y complejo, en torno a las industrias culturales y de comunicación. La lógica funcional de las industrias culturales ha quedado obsoleta.

La adaptación de la sociedad a estos nuevos usos y costumbres, desafíos y transformaciones, supone un reto sin precedentes, también para los artistas. Se trata de hacer frente a este reto con el objeto de facilitar el desarrollo de una nueva concepción de práctica artística con una infraestructura de investigación desarrollada, para una fuerza de trabajo inmaterial, y con actitud innovadora y emprendedora. Estamos, sin duda, ante una reformulación de los procesos de producción, transmisión y apropiación de los bienes simbólicos que nos hace replantearnos los modelos de construcción de subjetividad y organización social. Debemos de utilizar las herramientas que tenemos a nuestro alcance y que deben de permitir al ciudadano la capacidad de participación en redes distribuidas de difícil control político y combinar en cierta forma (y mediante diferentes tecnologías) los aspectos deliberativos y participativos aparentemente incompatibles con modelos previos. La ciudadanía (casi reducida su capacidad a la de meros consumidores) está desatando fuerzas que “aplanaran” las empresas y los gobiernos y está creando una nueva sociedad civil. Particularmente creo que estamos continuamente redefiniendo parcelas de poder y esto producirá ‘malos entendidos’ y confrontaciones inevitables. La reclamación de un espacio público es una constante histórica que está también en permanente redefinición, se trata de no bajar la guardia a la hora de afrontar nuevos retos y de encontrar nuevas vías que permitan a la sociedad expresarse con absoluta libertad. Ahora mismo trabajamos en un espacio muy reducido, sometido a continuas presiones, que es necesario ampliar. La tensión entonces será irremediable. Asumamos nuestra responsabilidad. El colectivo de artistas visuales no puede atrincherarse como mero sirviente de las estructuras culturales establecidas salvaguardando posiciones indefendibles. Quienes nos dedicamos a la práctica artística debemos de ayudar a introducir las transformaciones necesarias que permitan modificar las estructuras fundamentales de la Institución-Arte, destruyendo sus cimientos si fuera necesario, convirtiendo en ruinas su castillo. Arrimando el hombro en un proceso colectivo imparable.

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by Álvaro de los Ángeles, 2006

Arcades first appeared in Paris in the first third of the nineteenth century and became increasingly commonplace, as Walter Benjamin points out, with the growth of the textile trade, which marked the beginning of a hitherto unknown relationship between the inhabitant as a customer/buyer (user) and the city. Glass, iron, overhead light and artificial lighting -”The arcades were the setting for the first gas lighting,”‘ wrote Benjamin- covered entire blocks of buildings. This new architectural concept was in keeping with the period of change and the industrial revolution it formed part of. However, it also represented the ubiquity of a city inside a larger city, a clear attempt to create a “new” world inside a known one, while evoking the ideals of progress and well-being, albeit founded on a virtual idea, unreal or unattainable, that the physical and tangible world no longer seemed capable of generating or achieving.
In much the same way as painting, panoramic views faithfully reflect nature, but, in extending further than painting, they convert it into a lifelike experience thanks to the lighting, generating transitions of light that imitate day and night using effects normally associated with illusionism. In employing features that belong to the scenic arts, panoramic views represent at the same time the prelude to “”photography, silent film and sound film”2. These modes of recording a world in constant flux (modes engaged in an almost constant transition and interrelated with each other), became gradually more feasible when technological advances made it possible to convert into scientific practice the theory that enabled the albeit problematic use of the magic lantern. As a result of one of these transitions, Daguerre, after losing his most developed panoramic views in a fire in 1839, unveiled his daguerreotype, an improved appropriation of the methods of Nicéphore Niépce (above all in relation to the medium and the fixing of the image), something that gave him a disproportionate amount of fame as a pioneer and a consummate illusionist. In other words, if the panoramic views can be viewed as the extension of painting within the ambit of the scenic arts, the appearance of photography momentarily and fragmentarily fixes part of that mystery played out in the settings. If lighting bestows credibility and verisimilitude upon large panoramic settings, then light is the essential material that enables the photographic act to take place, allowing both the photograph to be taken and the resulting image to emerge on a sensitised glass plate.
By following the relevant thread, we can interpret the shop windows of the arcades as screens onto which products are projected, visible behind the transparency of the glass and inaccessible due to the pure thickness of its surface. They drive a desire that is only satisfied by the action of buying and selling. In the objects displayed in them we not only see the goods that we wish to purchase, we also project ourselves into a mental space where we ‘are wearing the clothes, eating the food, using the utensils or living with the furniture put in front of us. This projection operates, at the very least, in two directions. In seeing ourselves within this imaginary world, we plan the future from the present, we create a line of action, we want to see that this journey we are embarking on is feasible. On the other hand, we project an illusory reflection of ourselves, an idyllic image in which the future we imagine does not exist, and in which we would be incapable of handling it with complete freedom should we find ourselves in it. The truth is, we cannot control something that is shown to be intangible and which is also, to all intents and purposes, impossible to predict.

It is for this reason that the now ubiquitous compendium of artistic/social connotations that is cinema, whose high-quality prologue is written by the intense history of photography and other advances sensitive to the recording of the world, can be seen as the starting point of models revolving around the concept of desire: its impossible definitive conception (in that it is nothing other than a virtual projection on a screen); and its insatiable appeal (even in the knowledge of its non-conceivable character, we still want to see more and more derivatives of it). This figurative desire has traced a fascinating path that runs from modes of collective contemplation to others where the need for individual viewings and non-transferable personal experiences has been marked out with increasing clarity. Nevertheless, an initial phase in this differentiation was already present in the origins of the cinematic experience. Whereas the Lumière brothers, with their cinematograph (1895), enabled people to come together to watch cinema, linking it forever to the world of spectacle, Thomas Edison’s (1891-1894) kinetoscope laid the basis for the individualised enjoyment of the moving image, in the unreserved belief that there was no future in the social and collective act of viewing -either in cafes, in the early days, or in specially created rooms later on-. Was Edison, as the entire century that followed sought to demonstrate, really so wrong?
It would perhaps be inaccurate to analyse both these options, synthesised herein, in line with such clearly delineated concepts as right or wrong, success or failure, as much as history enjoys such polarised divisions. With the supersonic intervention of digital technology, we now find ourselves at the onset of another technological revolution comparable to the one instigated by the appearance of photography and cinema, which were mainly differentiated (or nuanced rather) by the immediacy of the results, the speed of the perpetual changes, the technical (yet ideological) impossibility of an about-turn or even a simulated slowing-down of events. As a consequence, this constant, regular, unstoppable speed can only be analysed from the perspective of the individual, through an interchangeable interface that is employed solely by a single person: unipersonality, individualism, solitude in the face of the retro-lit screen.
Collective networks created by the Internet generate a not-insignificant paradox: designed to provide wide-ranging solutions, they can only be responded to by individuals who know their logins, passwords, and access routes. Virtuality, perhaps as a reaffirmation of itself or because of the fear of being swallowed up by its own inconsistency, is obliged to surround itself with specific elements, passwords, serial numbers and compatible updates desperately anxious to replace what was there previously. All in all a vast range of options concealed behind the apparently cold and static normality of a screen (a window, but also a mirror) that is representative of each individual. However, underlying the concepts of absolute freedom are obstacles, restrictions, surveillance and control of practically every movement designed to expand the field of activity. Any action of this type generates, as a co-active counterbalance, a reaction that attempts to cancel or subdue it. Behind the translucent plastic casing and crystalline plasma screens of its machines, this transparent society retains part of the darkness so characteristic of the most time-honoured and claustrophobic subjugation of freedoms.
Daniel G. Andújar and Technologies To The People (TTTP) have taken particular interest in the development and use of virtual communication and information networks, such as translation, at the level of the society in which they originate and which they represent. Their e-projects3 set out to respond to specific real needs of a certain sector of the population, through instruments based on virtuality, free access and an almost literal transcription of the Foucaultian “tool box”, where philosophy is replaced by a type of technology that is more social than scientific, more participative than contemplative. As they are virtual spaces of freedom, they become places that generate real dialectic conflicts between users- a micro-society that settles its differences as a mimesis of society in general. Elements such as accessibility, individuality, security, etc. lead to the possibility of constructing the surrounding world around it, with the added advantage of a wide range of options and the free selection of them. Obviously, this construction is based on existing cultural models tailored to the real demands of each user, including the organisation of their milieu in accordance with their needs, tastes or preferences. In this respect, Hack Landscape signifies one more stage in the development of personalised tools and perhaps constitutes one of the installations that best demonstrates, from a symbolic point of view, this social model supported around the construction of the milieu itself.
It is a house/study that features several retro-projections of varying sizes positioned in such a way that they can be seen, totally or partially, from all four sides, and on whose walls are disposed windows or openings. The viewing public can see the mechanism used from the very beginning of the process. The production design is perfectly visible, as are the retro-projected screens and the interior space of the house, which is fitted out not in order to make it credible but to show it is functional and usable. It is for that reason that it has been conceived as a place of work as well as leisure, where technology is an omnipresent element, an unavoidable code (and an acquired civil right) for understanding the current mechanisms of the globalised world. From the inside of the room the screens are marginalised and delimited by the windows, each one of which -as elements that exist more than ever as connecters between two extreme spaces- offers a complex and different visual situation. It is from that vision that the screens supplant urban or natural spaces originating from fiction or taken directly, in real time, from a surveillance cameras. The unifying theme is the landscape or, to be exact, the representation of the landscape and our subjective, cultural and constructed vision of the original natural medium.
The conflict between antagonists is clear from the very beginning. In addition to the aforementioned opposing effect between the visible structure of the projection mechanism and the illusion maintained from the room interior, the alternation between fiction and the reality of the projected audiovisual material can be added, as well as the continuous play between inside/outside, interior/exterior, light/shadow, etc., and, on the other hand, the eternal dichotomy between truth and untruth. Or between what is offered to us as true and that which we discover to be false. These two formal concepts, possessing a cultural and subjective construction, are usually associated with virtues or defects: goodness tends to be linked to truth, whereas falsity and untruths are linked to evil or disobedience (another erroneous and interestingly named concept). In this context, technology is used, and is propagated ad infinitum in the process, as an ideal tool for breaking up discourses designed to cause predetermined confusion, to offer an external image that conceals the real actions of its internal ideology. As a result. Hack Landscape reveals, in a single horizontal and dehierarchised plane, both the construction of the reality of the interior and the physical machinery that makes its technical and conceptual development possible.
The argumentational origin of these oppositions has the potential to return us to the myth of the Platonic cave, where the shadows of real objects cast on the cavern employ here the polyvalent technology of audiovisual projections. For its part, the projected material, which acts as a synthesis of the recording that has been made individually or anonymously throughout the network, recreates from a multitude of angles an entire catalogue of mythological updates, from the reflection of Narcissus on the screen; to a sedentary and virtual Odyssey-”the motionless voyage”, in the words of Eugeni Bonet’- that is not far removed from cinematographic video-artistic and documentary references; and onto Sisyphus’ inability to keep his mind on all the things that are happening (or the stone on top of the mountain).
From a semantic point of view, Hack Landscape refers in this context to the colloquial voice that relates “hackers” to “computer pirates” (the title can thus be translated as “to pirate” or “to appropriate landscapes”). However, as a verb, “hack” also means “cut something up roughly, chop it into pieces”. This definition lends it a hardened, premeditatedly cruel character. a meaning that emanates from the dominant power that, as in other installations created with the support of TTTP, sets out in this work to perform a 180º turn and thereby put the result of the coercion face to face with the element generating it. “watching the watchful” as it were”.
By way of rounding off this very brief analysis, I would like to turn my attention to the concept of creating the environment itself, to the way in which society has changed its behavioural and relationship-related habits in moving from collective uses to individualised modes. The possibility of multiple means of accessing information, leisure, Culture, and virtual experimentation, has lead to the Illumination of one world inside another. The image of landscapes in relation to the city is enough to understand the virtual world inside the physical one, where even sensations seem to become increasingly similar to the original ones they mimic or supplant. Hack Landscape is in no way a catastrophic vision of society today. Rather, it attempts to demonstrate, somewhat remotely, almost objectively, new tools for personalising the professional and domestic environment, all the time fusing the historical separation between our working lives and personal lives, or between the space where we work and where we rest. Everything appears to move into a type of dynamic simulation in which the outlines become blurred and the references become confused, in much the same way as received, stolen or legally used images “rethink” the values of reality or fiction, of authorship or anonymity. The creation of the space that surrounds this house/study takes another step forward in the process of representing the exterior space (regardless of the quality of this landscape) and questions it. Is our field of vision reduced to a panoramic view, to an oblong format? Or is this way of seeing a cultural construction, a synthesis, the literal translation of the picture, frame, window or the screen in the end?
Without question, more so in this than in any other case, the end is the beginning, the question is the answer, the definition forms part of the heading.

All that remains is to look carefully, put the pieces together again and form a stance of one’s own from which to question, yet again, our entire surroundings.

Benjamin, Walter, Ellibro de los pasajes, Madrid. Akal, 2005. p. 38.
Ibid. p. 40.
e-valencia.org (online since November 2001, despite two attempts to censor it); e-barcelona.org (since 2004); a-sevilla.erg (since April2006); e-areo.org (created for Area 2003 but not online at the moment); e-seul and e-wac.org (created as part of the exhibition and debate project On Difference #1 organised by the Kunstverein in Stuttgart, online since May 2005).
4 . Bonet, Eugeni: La invitación a1 viaje / imagen-movimienro-tiempo. In, Movimiento aparente. La invitación al viaje inmóvil en las tecnofogías ubicuas del tiempo, la imagen y fa pantalla (catalogue). Espai d’Art Contemporani de Castelló-EACC, Generalitat Valenciana, 2000.

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[Essay] Jacob Lillemose fortæller i dette essay om Daniel Garcia Andújars installation X-Devian. The New Technologies To The People System og om baggrunden for dette værk
Af Jacob Lillemose
Foto: Århus Kunstbygning

Udstillingen X-Devian. The New Technologies To The People System blev vist i Århus Kunstbygning fra 12. maj til 10. juni 2007
www.aarhuskunstbygning.dk

X-Devian. The New Technologies To The People System

Da kunst- og teknologifestivalen Ars Electronica i 1999 tildelte førsteprisen The Golden Nica i kategorien ”.net” til programmøren Linus Torvalds for hans udvikling af styresystemet Linux, pegede den overordnet på en forbindelse mellem software og kunst, og mere specifikt på et slægtskab mellem fri software og den del af samtidskunsten, der er optaget af softwares stadigt større indflydelse på sociale, økonomiske og politiske forhold. Ligesom Linux modarbejder denne samtidskunst den proprietære softwareindustris ensretning, undertrykkelse og rationalisering af softwarekulturen og udforsker i stedet alternative muligheder for at sætte softwarekulturen fri gennem anderledes åbne, udtryksfulde og spekulative processer.

På et mere indirekte plan pointerede Ars Electronicas valg af Linux også et andet slægtskab mellem fri software og denne samtidskunst, nemlig begges forestilling om at software ikke bare er et spørgsmål om at programmering, men om at producere kultur, om at forstå og bruge teknologi som et engagement i en samfundsmæssig kontekst. Ifølge grundlæggeren af Free Software Foundation (FSF) Richard Stallman handler fri software således både om ”praktiske, materielle fordele” og om ”hvilket samfund vi ønsker at leve i, hvad der skaber et godt samfund”. [1] Stallman selv forestiller sig et særligt kollektivt og kreativt samfund funderet i friheden til at ”bruge, studere, kopiere, modificere og redistribuere software”. For ham repræsenterer fri softwares fundamentale ophævelse af den intellektuelle ejendomsret en mulighed for strukturelt og konceptuelt at ’omprogrammere’ samfundet til det bedre, og det er en opfattelse han deler med megen af samtidskunsten.

Ars Electronicas sammenkædning af fri software og samtidskunst viste sig at have nærmest profetisk karakter. Hvad der dengang endnu begrænsede sig til et fåtal af separate projekter har siden udviklet sig til en vidtfavnende og dagsordensættende diskurs, så fri software og beslægtede strømninger i dag udgør en integreret og væsentlig del af kunstneriske praksisser og teoridannelser. Fri softwares koder oversættes til æstetiske principper for udvikling og fornyelse af samfundsmæssige forhold, fra materielle fortolkninger af open source og digitale udfordringer af den intellektuelle ophavsret til en generel interesse i uafhængige netværker og selvorganiserede fællesskaber baseret på kollektiv produktion og deling.

”Distribution” og distribution af Linux
Installationen X-Devian. The New Technologies To The People System (2005- ) af den spanske kunstner Daniel Garcia Andújar og hans virksomhed Technologies To The People [2] er et bogstaveligt og samtidig fiktionaliserende eksempel på denne udveksling – på hvordan fri software som emnefelt, model og etik kan inspirere samtidskunsten i nye retninger og på hvordan samtidskunstens visuelle, rumlige og konceptuelle sprog kan italesætte fri software på et abstrakt plan og diskutere dets betydninger i forhold til generelle samfundsmæssige problematikker. For selvom Stallman understreger det samfundsmæssige perspektiv, så er fri software i den brede offentlige bevidsthed stadig et konkret, og for størstedelen også fremmed, spørgsmål om programmering. Kun et fåtal forstår fri software som en levende, inklusiv og nyskabende kultur, hvor det er muligt at ændre afgørende samfundsmæssige relationer. Og netop udfordring og udvidelse af denne almene bevidsthed om fri software – og for så vidt også af fri software-miljøets selvforståelse – er omdrejningspunktet i X-Devian . Gennem lige dele oplysning, kritik og iscenesættelse skaber værket en alternativ grænseflade til fri software, der inviterer til refleksion, stillingtagen og deltagelse.

Installationen er bygget op omkring en todelt ’fortælling’ om styresystemet X-Devian. Fortællingen udspiller sig henholdsvis i en reklamekampagne, hvor man præsenteres for X-Devian som en vare, og i et slags laboratoriemiljø hvor man har adgang til at udforske styresystemet på egen hånd og til forskellig information om fri software. De to fortællinger eksisterer parallelt og uafhængigt som tematiseringer af specifikke aspekter af fri software, men installationen skaber også forbindelser mellem dem, der er både komplekse, problematiske og subversive. Og i disse forbindelser, hvor de to fortællinger mødes, opstår der en udveksling, korrelationer og brudflader, der åbner for nye forestillinger om fri software, i forhold til den almene bevidsthed såvel som til fri software-miljøets selvforståelse.

Formelt er X-Devian en såkaldt ”distribution” af styresystemet Ubuntu, hvilket inden for fri software-miljøet refererer til en variant af et system baseret på GNU/Linux, som fx Ubuntu. [3] X-Devian er også en distribution i den forstand, at installationen faciliterer onlinebestilling af den nyeste version af Ubuntu på cd-rom, så publikum kan få styresystemet tilsendt og køre det på deres egne computere. Som variant i den fagspecifikke forstand adskiller værket sig da heller ikke fra Ubuntu. Softwaren er identisk. Men som navnet indikerer er X-Devian også en særlig ”variant”. Som værk er X-Devian en reel distribution af GNU/Linux gennem en fortælling om en fiktiv variant af systemet der ’kun’ eksisterer som kunstværk og hvis repræsentation og konceptualisering af systemet er væsentligt forskelligt fra Ubuntus egne. Inden for fri software-miljøet er programudviklingen det primære fokus, mens repræsentation og konceptualisering har begrænset interesse udover logo-design og formulering af licenser. I X-Devian er fokus omvendt på repræsentation og konceptualisering som en strategi til at italesætte fri software i forhold til en række tematikker, der ikke udelukkende handler om software, men om softwarekultur. Med det kunstneriske sprogs evne til bringe betydninger i spil udvikler værket de kulturelle fortællinger, billeder og begreber, der former vores forestillinger om (og brug af) fri software og som udgør en lige så vigtig del af ’distributionen’ som selve programudviklingen.

Som del af denne repræsentationelle og konceptuelle udvikling benytter værket sig af en række komponenter med mere eller mindre direkte relation til styresystemet X-Devian. Der er selve softwaren, en grafisk profil, en hjemmeside, en reklamevideo, en videodatabase, en samling af licenser og manualer, specialdesignede borde, ’kodgraffiti’, hardwareaffald og workshops. De enkelte komponenter kan kombineres og modificeres i forhold til den enkelte udstilling og som sådan har værket ikke nogen fast form, men udgør en fleksibel og omskiftelig størrelse. [4] I sin æstetiske form afspejler X-Devian således fri softwares forestilling om mulighed for forandring og tilpasning i forhold til specifikke situationer. [5] I videre forstand afspejler formen også, at distributionen af fri software kan finde sted på mange planer samtidigt og i et netværk af forskellige måder at udvikle, begribe og bruge software på. I stedet for at udkrystallisere fri software som en essens, folder værket fri software ud som en assemblage af kontekstuelle praksisser og diskurser.

Dobbelttydigt bagtæppe
Installationen af X-Devian i Århus Kunstbygning involverer både reklamekampagne og laboratorium og forbinder dem på en mere bogstavelig måde end i Andújars tidligere installationer af værket. På den ene sidevæg, der gennemløber begge ’fortællingsrum’, står ”Access to Technology is a Human Right” – sloganet for Technologies To The People – så man må bevæge sig fra det ene rum til det andet for at læse hele sætningen. Sloganet danner således et samlende konceptuelt udsagn som aktiviteterne i begge rum spilles op imod, et slags scenisk bagtæppe for værkets to akter. Technologies To The People lancerede sloganet i midten af 90erne, hvor virksomheden drev pionerende forretning på Internettet med en række projekter, der med stilbevidst ironi og politisk holdning tematiserede Internettets potentielle demokratisering (og parallelle hyperkommercialisering) af teknologikulturen, fx en kampagne for produktet iSAM™, en bærbar kreditkortmaskine til tiggere. [6] Sloganet udtrykker virksomhedens forståelse af teknologi som funderet i universelle principper om en mere fri og lige verden, som en progressiv social proces, i modsætning til teknologi som et profitgenerende produkt, der kun er for fagligt indviede og økonomisk velstillede folk. Som det også fremgår direkte af virksomhedens navn arbejder Technologies To The People for teknologi til folket, ikke folket i en traditionel national forstand, men den globale civilbefolkning der er opstået med informations- og netværkssamfundet. Virksomheden er ikke mindst interesseret i den del af denne befolkning, der ellers er umyndiggjort og ekskluderet, netop fordi de ikke har adgang til teknologi. I forbindelse med iSAM™ beskriver virksomheden sin målgruppe på følgende vis: ”Technologies To The People er rettet mod den såkaldte Tredje Verden såvel som mod de hjemløse, forældreløse, arbejdsløse, flygtninge, immigranter, alkoholikere, narkomaner, mentalt handicappede og alle andre ”uønskede”. Technologies To The People er for dem der er nægtet adgang til det nye informationssamfund og de nye teknologier. Technologies To The People ønsker flere mennesker i flere netværker.” [7] Ifølge Technologies To The People kan teknologi aktivere dette globale folks civile, autonome og kreative engagement i netværkssamfundet. Samtidig indeholder sloganet også et ekko af Stallmans forestilling om fri software som et etisk regelsæt og forestillingen om, at teknologi skal tjene det godes og retfærdighedens sag.

Men ”Access to Technology is a Human Right” introducerer også den dobbelsidethed eller rettere tvetydighed, der kendetegner alle Technologies To The Peoples projekter inklusiv X-Devian. For kan gode intentioner præsenteres som et marketingsslogan? Er det ikke netop hvad den proprietære softwareindustri gør, når den markedsfører sig på at berige den enkeltes tilværelse såvel som samfundet generelt, samtidig med at den udnytter dem i egen interesse, til egen berigelse? Man anspores til at spørge hvad sloganets undertekst, den reelle reference i det symbolske udsagn, er. Det er i hvert fald uklart, ligesom Technologies To The People som virksomhed heller ikke umiddelbart kan identificeres. Som det er blevet skrevet om den ”kan man ikke helt afgøre om TTTP faktisk er en politisk korrekt virksomhed eller om dens sociale og kulturelle engagement blot er en strategi til at kontrollere markedet.” [8] Tvetydigheden signalerer, at teknologi i sig selv ikke indeholder nogen indre nødvendighed, men er et redskab hvis ’politik’ afhænger af dets anvendelse. Teknologi kan lige såvel tjene kontrollerende kræfter som den kan frisætte mennesket individuelt og kollektivt, alt efter hvordan man definerer fx ”adgang til teknologi” og ”menneskelig ret”. Derfor må enhver teknologihype og –utopi, hvad enten den formuleres af dotcomsucceser eller af ’teknohippier’ som Stallman, imødegås med dobbelt bevidsthed, politisk diskussion og kritisk praksis. Ellers risikerer man at teknologi(forståels)en farer vild i ideologiske blindgyder. Udover at forbinde værkets to verdener iscenesætter sloganet en gennemgående usikkerhed og ambivalens, der koder tilgangen til X-Devian med en blanding af skepsis og idealisme, mistroiske og visionære forestillinger.

At hacke ”verdens mest avancerede styresystem”
Installationens første del er centreret omkring et larger-than-life billede af en hånd, der fremviser en cd med et hvidt ”X” trykt på sort baggrund. Det stilrene grafiske design danner en let identificerbar og stærk visuel ramme, mens X-Devians slogan ”the evolution of the species”, der også står skrevet på cd’en, signalerer, at dette produkt er det fremmeste inden for softwareindustrien/-kulturen og en naturlig del af den menneskelige udvikling. Til venstre for billedet kører en reklamevideo, hvor en entusiastisk programmør (iført jakkesæt og med dreadlocks = både seriøs og afslappet) i højt tempo og akkompagneret af dramatiserende synthesizermusik snakker med andre kreative brugere om styresystemets mange fantastiske muligheder. De er uformelt samlet foran en computer i et butikslandskab, der med sine glasvægge og hektiske aktivitet signalerer, at X-Devian henvender sig til et åbent og dynamisk miljø. Til højre for billedet er en fysisk udgave af cd’en placeret på et belyst podium, nærmest som var det et kunstværk i sig selv. Delen har således karakter af en messestand, der med samme retorik som kommercielle softwareprodukter skal tiltrække opmærksomhed, fascinere og stimulere et begær for styresystemet. Faktisk i bogstavelig forstand. For logo og video er approprieret fra Apples kampagne for dets styresystem Mac OS X. Andújar har blot manipuleret videoen ved at udskifte screen shots og logo. Det samme har han gjort på X-Devians hjemmeside, hvor man under sloganet ”advancing the world’s most advanced operating system” kan læse om Debian og fri software i stedet for om Mac OS X, hvis hjemmeside sloganet og designet er approprieret fra. [9]

Appropriation er et greb og en genre inden for den moderne og postmoderne kunsts opgør med forestillingen om det originale og unikke kunstværk – det værk der skabes ud af ingenting, ikke har nogen referencer udover sig selv og ikke kan reproduceres. Det er imidlertid ikke sådanne kunstfilosofiske problematikker der er Andújars fokus i X-Devian, om end de udgør en implicit betingelse for værket. Snarere ligger X-Devians appropriationsstrategi i forlængelse af hacking (i den ikke-kriminelle forstand!) og hackinginspirerede fænomener som culture jamming, adbusting og tactial media [10] . Og kunsthistorisk har den forbindelser til situationisternes begreb om detournément og den mediebevidste latinamerikanske konceptkunst, især Cildo Meireles’ Insertions into Ideological Circuits (1970), hvor kunstneren skrev politiske budskaber på tomme Coca-Cola-flasker, der først blev synlige, når flaskerne igen blev fyldt op. Her har appropriationen en anderledes samfundsorienteret karakter, hvor tegn og retorik ikke bare forstås som æstetiske størrelser, som et spørgsmål om stil, men som betydningsbærende elementer, der fundamentalt er integreret i spørgsmål om politik, magt og ideologi. Denne form for appropriation kendetegner også flere af Andújars tidligere værker [11] og udtrykker, som han formulerer det, en gennemgående optagethed af at ”hacke systemet”, hvad enten det er dotcomkulturen, overvågelsessamfundet eller som med X-Devian den proprietære softwareindustri. At hacke systemet refererer til en uformel, kunstfærdig og ofte humoristisk taktik, hvor Andújar i stedet for at kritisere systemet ud fra en dialektisk eller konfrontatorisk opposition, ved at være direkte imod, intervenerer i systemet for at operere kritisk indefra, fx ved at køre systemets logik ad absurdum eller simpelthen overtage logikken. Han vender systemets egne midler og værdier mod det selv, samtidig med at han, hvilket er særlig tydeligt i X-Devian, skifter symbolsk fortegn og reelt indhold. I stedet for at acceptere og lade sig kontrollere af systemets betingelser ’bruger’ han systemet på andre måder og til andre formål end dem systemet foreskriver (i øvrigt parallelt til, at de forskellige fri software-licenser approprierer den gældende ophavsretslovgivning for at sætte selv samme lovgivning ud af kraft). For Andújar er systemet ikke bestemmende, selvkørende og balanceret som i den klassiske videnskabelige forstand, men forstås som en åben, heterogen størrelse, der kan formes gennem interagerende analyser og fortolkninger.

X-Devian fejllæser bevidst Apples ”X” som en figur for det udefinerede og potentielle, en essentiel figur for udviklingen af fri software, frem for at læse det som en eksakt numerisk værdi til beskrivelse af en version af Apples styresystem. Værket tager Apple på ordet og udnytter med subversiv snilde x’ets dobbelttydighed. Systemets identitet forstyrres og transformeres til et skizofrent mulighedsfelt. Appropriationen rekonceptualiserer det lukkede system som vareproduktet Mac OS X repræsenterer i forhold til en radikal åben netværkspraksis. Den ophæver Mac OS Xs produktmæssige enhedskarakter og afgrænsethed i X-Devians forbindelser til betydningsfærer hinsides systemet, til fx fri software, til Technologies To The People og til kunstinstitutionen i og med at det udstilles der.

Andújars brug af appropriation er yderligere relevant, idet X-Devian netop tematiserer betydningen af ophavsret og ejerskab, ikke kun i forhold til software, men til sprog og koder på et mere overordnet samfundsmæssigt plan. I X-Devian er det således en væsentlig pointe, at det klassiske hackermotto ”information ønsker at være fri” (i øvrigt et motto der harmonerer med Technologies To The Peoples slogan) både angår programmeringskulturer og informationssamfundet generelt. For ved at appropriere Apples kampagne, frem for dets produkt, fokuserer værkets første del ikke på software som information, men på information om software, dvs. dets visuelle og sproglige repræsentation og de softwarekulturelle begreber, mytologier og politikker denne repræsentation er funderet i og genererer. Som repræsentation skal kampagnen ikke udelukkende stimulere et begær for at købe produktet, kampagnen har også den funktion at introducere en specifik bruger, en specifik brug og en specifik kultur, som man skal identificere sig med, i tilfælde af at man køber det. Når Apples kampagne taler om at ”forbedre verdens mest avancerede styresystem”, der er ”bygget op omkring dig for at gøre dit liv endnu lettere”, så definerer den nogle yderst almene forestillinger om software i forhold til en specifik vare, et kommercielt brand og en proprietær softwarekultur. Hverken Apple eller andre proprietære softwarevirksomheder har dog ophavsret til at bruge sådanne forestillinger og definere hvad de betyder. [12] Fri software kan lige så godt være referencen for disse forestillinger, og betydningen ville så være en ganske anden både i forhold til ’varen’ og kulturen. Når Andújar approprierer Apples kampagne er det således for at vise vigtigheden af, at denne repræsentation af software konceptualiseres i forhold til samme frihedsprincipper som fri software selv. Ligesom software må informationen om software distribueres og udvikles hinsides nogen form for intellektuelt ejerskab gennem en åben og fælles proces af hacks. Ved at hacke repræsentationen af software – i betydningen at sætte den fri – præsenterer X-Devian fri software som en fundamental forskel, dels som en anderledes distribueret diskursform end den centraliserede form som den proprietære softwareindustri opererer med, dels som en anderledes social og autonom kulturel kontekst for forestillinger om ”verdens mest avancerede styresystem”.

Inden for fri software-miljøet betragtes repræsentationen som tidligere antydet for sekundær, hvis ikke ligefrem ligegyldig. En del af miljøets identitet har netop været at distancere sig markant fra den spektakulære og spekulative repræsentation af software, der kendetegner den proprietære softwareindustri. Free Software Foundations og Linuxs hjemmesider er symptomatiske i den henseende: De indeholder ingen billeder (på nær de minimale gengivelser af deres respektive logoer) eller andre æstetiserende elementer, men består af ren tekst. Om end distanceringen har profileret fri softwares andethed, så synes den også at have sat grænser for fri softwares integration og muligheder i en bredere softwarekulturel kontekst. [13] For i denne kontekst er fri software i stort omfang også et bevidsthedsfænomen, ikke bare programmel. Derfor handler fri software ikke bare om at bruge et andet software, men om at skabe andre fortællinger, billeder og begreber om software, om andre interfaces kunne man sige. For det er ikke ved den konkrete installering af styresystemet på den personlige computer, at forståelsen og brugen af fri software starter, men i de abstrakte kulturelle betydninger som de forskellige interfaces i ’butikken’, i medierne og på nettet genererer. Og det er disse interfaces X-Devian hacker for at skabe hvad man kan kalde et kunstnerisk interface til fri software. Om end det er ironisk både i forhold til Apple og fri software, så er det et seriøst bud på at repræsentere og konceptualisere fri software som andet end data. Det anvender kunstens frihed til at skabe forestillinger om fri software, der er funderet i og handler om menneskelig erfaring, fantasi og leg. Og ved at medregne dette felt – kunstens felt – peger værket mod nye symbolske, imaginære og begrebslige horisonter for udviklingen af fri software.

Information og kollektiver bag
I installationens anden del kommer man bag X-Devians interface til selve softwaren og fri software som miljø, netværk og aktivitet. Overgangen ’illustreres’ med en væsentlig anden informationsæstetik og et væsentligt andet forhold mellem værk og publikum, mellem software og bruger. Delen har karakter af en blanding af et amatørlaboratorium, et midlertidigt klasselokale og et udefineret offentligt rum. Spredt i rummet står borde med online-computere, der kører X-Devian, hvor man kan orientere sig i hjemmesidens indhold og gøre sig erfaringer med hvordan softwaren rent faktisk fungerer. En af computerne indeholder også en videodatabase om fri software, hvor man blandt andet kan se taler af Richard Stallman. Fremme på bordene ligger dele fra adskilte computere (igen et kig bag interfacet) sat sammen på ikke-funktionel vis samt tekster om programmering, software og ’fri kultur’. Og endelig, på en sortmalet væg modsat væggen med teksten ”Access to Technology is a Human Right” hænger, der fotokopier af forskellige fri software-licenser og manualer, som man kan tage ned og læse i. Rundt om fotokopierne har Andújar med kridt skrevet forskelligt ’kodegraffiti’.

Hvor X-Devians første del kommunikerer med visuel og sproglig enkelhed (symboliseret i den sort-hvide grafik) og stiller skarpt på ’produktet’, er værkets anden del anderledes kompleks og uden centrum (blandt andet symboliseret i mørklægningen af vinduerne, de uudgrundelige sammensætninger af computerdele, der ligger spredt ud på bordene og kodegraffitien). Her kan man gå på opdagelse i tekster, programmer og videofiler om fri software. Her udgør fri software et rum for aktivitet integreret i en fysisk virkelighed af materiel, mennesker og energier (det er også her Andújar afholder sine workshops). Her reklameres der ikke for et fiktivt stykke software, her inviteres og udfordres man på et både personligt og kollektivt plan til et engagere sig i en reelt eksisterende softwarekultur.

Med sine konnotationer til en arbejdsplads iscenesætter X-Devians anden del en interaktiv omgang med fri software. Ikke i den banale klik-og-se forstand som anden software og megen digital kunst foreskriver, men i en udvidet forstand som udvælgelse, tilegnelse og fortolkning af information. Publikum adresseres ikke som en uniform masse af forbrugere, men som en mangfoldighed af selvstændige brugere, vidensproducenter og kulturelle kritikere. Værket dikterer heller ikke en bestemt læsning af informationen, men understreger netop dens tilgængelighed og potentialekarakter.

Hvor første del præsenterer software som et færdigt produkt præsenterer anden del fri software som en database af information, der ikke ’tilhører’ værket, men indgår i værket gennem dets forbindelser til eksterne informationsprocesser og –netværker. X-Devians hjemmeside linker udelukkende til hjemmesider for projekter ’udenfor’ værket, fx Free Software Foundation og The Debian Project, og i samlingen af videoklips taler andre stemmer end Technologies To The People, fx Stallman. Databasen refererer med andre ord ikke til en bestemt vare, men til en kultur af muligheder, der i stedet for ensrettethed og standarder er kendetegnet ved en grundlæggende åbenhed og diversitet.

Denne pointe illustreres også i de forskellige variationer af fri software-licenser, der er hængt op på den ene væg. Inden for fri software er licenser modsat den generelle ”all rights reserved”, som proprietær software er udgivet under, ikke en universel tekst, men et spørgsmål om forsat fortolkning og udvikling i forhold til en konkret (kon)tekst, til variationer af praksis, af fri software.

I det hele taget er denne fremtrædende placering af licenserne i værket en accentuering af deres vigtighed som kulturelle redskaber og ikke blot som juridiske dokumenter (ophængningen alluderer stærkt til ophængningen af værktøj). Det er tekster, der muliggør og ansporer til videre aktivitet, kreativ og kollektiv brug af software. De er printet på almindeligt papir og står således i kontrast til de eksklusive farveprint i forrummet. Den æstetiske kontrast signalerer, at fri software opererer med en mikro-informationsøkonomi både i konkret og overført forstand, og at penge ikke er en afgørende præmis for at deltage i kulturen. Det er en inklusiv og generøs økonomi, hvor det er engagement, der tæller. I sit udtryk og sin tematisering af informationsøkonomi ligger X-Devian her i forlængelse af installationsværker fra 60ernes konceptkunst af blandt andre Joseph Kosuth, Mel Bochner og Art & Language; men selvom der er formelle æstetiske ligheder, så er der også betydelige forskelle mellem X-Devian og disse værker. Hvor de nævnte konceptkunstneres værker overvejende bestod af selvrefererende tekster og tegn, refererer tekster, koder og filer hos Andújar til en verden og aktivitet hinsides værket. I stedet for intern struktur er informationsøkonomien i X-Devian funderet i handlekraft, produktion og relationer i en ikke-institutionel kontekst.

Et andet aspekt af installationens informationsøkonomi er i denne sammenhæng spørgsmål vedrørende oplysning om og uddannelse i fri software. Som uformel ’info-stand’ og ramme om workshops anticiperer værkdelen en tilegnelse af fri software gennem hacks af information, lig de ’hardware-skulpturer’, der ligger på bordene, snarere end gennem indlæring af definitiv viden. At hacke vil her sige at fortolke og bruge den foreliggende information på nye selvstændige måder, der ikke nødvendigvis er direkte funktionelle, men som ikke desto mindre kan bidrage til udviklingen af en abstrakt viden om og forståelse af fri software. Opfordring til hack er også en kritik af en rationalisering af information og af en rationaliseret softwarekultur og samtidig en argumentation for potentialet i det irrationelle, det spekulative og eksperimenterende. [14] Selvom der er viden man skal have kendskab til, hvis man vil bruge fri software, så viser værket også, at fri software ikke udelukkende er noget man kan læse om i en manual. Det er også noget man selv ’skriver’ i sin omgang med det og udtryk for en aktiv stillingstagen til – frem for passiv accept af – den softwarekultur man indgår i. Den viden om fri software som værket præsenterer er ikke defineret af et system, men genereret af en kollektiv intelligens, der ikke lader sig disciplinere, retningsbestemme og kontrollere. Andújars installation Information Society (2000) rummer en tilsvarende pointe. I en blanding af en overvågningcentral og et bibliotek har publikum her adgang til information hentet på nettet om hvordan man hacker forskellige systemer, fx mobiltelefoner og UNIX-styresystemer, som eksempler på alternativ og fri brug af information (en mere brugervenlig version af X-Devian s kodegraffiti). Med ironi og dramatik iscenesætter installationen information, software og nettet som stærkt politiserede størrelser (som modbillede til industriens og statens billede af dem som politisk neutrale) forbundet med spørgsmål om frihed og kontrol, muligheder og begrænsninger. I den forstand udgør Information Society og X-Devian ’modeller’ for en ikke-autoritær kultur, hvor viden produceres i en udveksling mellem autonome subjekter i et netværk. Og derfor er en workshop om fri software også en naturlig integreret del af begge værker.

X-Devian peger også på fri softwares kollektive karakter. Hvor indholdet i installationens første del (officielt) er produceret af Technologies To The People, er det i anden del produceret af et unavngivet og ikke-registreret kollektiv af autonome subjekter. Dette kollektiv arbejder hverken for en virksomhed eller for værket, men for et fælles projekt uden ejerskab, og det er et forhold, der reflekteres af værkets appropriation af indholdet. I stedet for at indskrive indholdet i en fremmed kontekst, at forbinde det til et produkt eller et brand, gør værket den frit tilgængelig, dvs. uden ophavsretsbeskyttelse, og inkluderer så at sige kollektivet på dets egne præmisser.

Kollektivet ’bag’ X-Devian producerer (gennem) kommunikative relationer og processer på tværs af grænser og er som sådan ikke defineret af andet end deres multiple aktiviteter, af faglige og sociale interesser frem for finansielle eller geografiske. Flere teoretikere har argumenteret for, at dette kollektiv i en vis forstand konkretiserer Marxs begreb om ”General Intellect”, den sociale hjerne, hvis produktion ikke er betinget af maskineri og fabrikker, men af det levede liv. X-Devians ’produktionsfaciliteter’ reflekterer dette forhold. Anden dels på en gang uformelle, intime og åbne karakter signalerer, at her produceres informationen af frie subjekter i fællesskab. [15] Og at der er flere borde indikerer på simpel vis, at den information, som kollektivet producerer, er til deling og således hverken kan approprieres af Kapitalen, Staten eller for den sags skyld af Kunsten. Informationens betydning og værdi vil altid overskride sådanne institutioner og deres bestræbelser på at fiksere informationen i objekter. Kollektivet producerer information, der er med til at udvikle og styrke en dynamisk fælleskultur. Hvor første dels reklamevideo appellerer til den kreative do-it-yourself-mentalitet, er X-Devians anden del i ånd og praksis kendetegnet ved en forestilling om do-it-together – om samarbejdet som en grundsten for en alternativ udvikling af softwarekultur såvel som af softwareæstetik.

Teknologikunst hinsides teknologien
X-Devian adskiller sig fra megen af den teknologikunst, der i dag præsenteres på festivaler som Ars Electronica. For til trods for at Ars Electronica i 1999 pointerede en forbindelse mellem fri software og samtidskunsten, så er det ikke en forbindelse festivalen siden hen har fokuseret på i nævneværdig grad. Tværtimod er den teknologikunst og teknologiæstetik som festivalen promoverer ofte kendetegnet ved en fascination af hardware og en positivistisk fejring af teknologiens formelle (læs: videnskabelige) udvikling. Det kulturelle, konceptuelle, kritiske og kollektive perspektiv på teknologi som fri software repræsenterer, i sig selv og for kunsten, synes at være forsvundet fra horisonten. Og dermed også i stort omfang den menneskelige og samfundsmæssige dimension. Teknologien begribes og udstilles overvejende som værdifuld i sig selv og kunstens funktion er reduceret til at æstetisere, i betydningen at forskønne den. [16]

Men måske er sådanne festivaler heller ikke den rette kontekst for X-Devian, ligesom det måske er en misforståelse at begribe værket i forhold til ’teknologikunst’. For selvom værket involverer og handler om teknologi, så er dets fokus de kulturelle diskurser, som teknologien indgår i. Andújar arbejder i en konceptuel tradition fra 60erne og 70erne, hvor formelle kategorier og problematikker er sekundære i forhold til de samfundsmæssige tematikker og kontekster som et værk indeholder og indgår i. Det er en tradition der ikke er specifik teknologisk, endsige mediespecifik, men begriber kunsten som en generel konceptuel kapacitet til at ’formgive’ analytiske, kritiske og spekulative diskurser.

Snarere giver det mening at forstå X-Devian i forhold til den del af samtidskunsten, der ligeledes i forlængelse af den konceptuelle tradition er engageret i det sociale felt, hvor menneskelige erfaringer og kulturel politik mødes, og som ofte arbejder med installationer og interventioner, både i og uden for institutionen. Et stort antal udstillinger har præsenteret denne kunst under overskrifter som ”kontekstuel”, ”relationel” eller ”politisk” og argumenteret for kunstens transformation til social(æstetisk) praksis og funktion. Det er en sådan æstetisk diskurs, der gennemstrømmer X-Devian, men værket udtrykker ikke et ønske om at identificere kunsten med det sociale felt, sådan som neoavantgardistiske tendenser inden for samtidskunsten gør. Det opretholder en forestilling om kunstnerisk autonomi, ikke i betydningen formalistisk selvrefererende, men som et uafhængigt og privilligeret rum for informationsprocessering og vidensproduktion i forhold til det sociale felt. Værket reproducerer ikke direkte det sociale felt men producerer kunstneriske interfaces til det, specifikt til fri software som socialt felt. Disse interfaces er ikke orienteret mod funktionalitet og brugervenlighed, men mod åben refleksion. Derfor er værkets positive holdning til fri software som en force og værdi heller ikke afgørende. Selvom X-Devian er et idealistisk udsagn lig Stallmans, så er dets pointe den æstetiske iscenesættelse af fri software som en kulturel diskurs, hvor betydninger er i spil. For så vidt er iscenesættelsen et affirmativt hack af den fri softwarekultur (modsat værkets subversive hack af den proprietære softwarekultur), der på et abstrakt plan åbner nye kulturelle muligheder for kritisk, fantasifuld og social udvikling.

[1] Se www.fsf.org.

[2] Technologies to the People er en konceptuel rammekonstruktion i form af en non-profit organisation med identitet som virksomhed, som Andújar bruger til at ’sponsorere’ og ’markedsføre’ sine projekter. Technologies To The People fungerer dog også som et selvstændigt værk i form af et konceptuelt udsagn med eget merchandise og egen reklamevideo. Se http://www.irational.org/tttp/primera.html.

[3] Ubuntu er baseret på en anden distribution af GNU/Linux, Debian, som der refereres til i værkets titel. Se www.ubuntu.com og www.debian.org.

[4] Således kan X-Devian både have form af en installation og en skulpturel opstilling.

[5] Andújar benytter så vidt muligt også den fri software-distribution som de lokale GNU/Linux-brugergrupper foretrækker, ligesom han involverer grupperne i værkets workshopdel.

[6] iSAM™ var et fupprodukt, der kun eksisterede som reklamekampagne. Ikke desto mindre resulterede værket i henvendelser fra Apple, der ønskede at vide mere om produktet, mens det i forbindelse med en udstilling i Tyskland fik en ’venstreorienteret’ kunstkritiker fra Texte zur Kunst til at harcelere mod teknologikunstens kynisme. Se http://www.irational.org/tttp/*siteTTP/dpro.html.

[7] Technologies To The People. Annual Report 2000, Technologies To The People Publicity Department, Alicante 2000. (egen oversættelse)

[8] Technologies To The People. Annual Report 2000, Technologies To The People Publicity Department, Alicante 2000. (egen oversættelse)

[9] Siden Andújar udstillede X-Devian første gang har Apple opdateret Mac OS X flere gange, og hjemmesiden som er blevet lavet til installationen i Århus Kunstbygning er således fra den nyeste version Mac OS X Leopard, mens reklamevideoen er for Mac OS X Panther.

[10] De tre fænomener er tæt beslægtede og refererer alle til kulturelle praksisser, hvor man (her er der ekstra mellemrum i pdf’en) trænger ind i eksisterende mediestrukturer og på subversiv vis omformer deres udtryk. Se http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adbusters, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_jamming og http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactical_media.

[11] Til en plakat for iSAM™ approprierede Andújar Apples flerfarvede iMACs.

[12] At de imidlertid forsøger med den intellektuelle ejendomsret som instrument viste Andújar allerede i 1997 med værket Language (Property)/Remember, language is not free™, hvor han kortlagde disse virksomheders – og TTTPs – ™-registrering af de sætninger, der udgjorde deres slogans, som var det en linje programkode. Derigennem søgte virksomhederne at fiksere og ensrette betydninger i diskussionen af Internettet og softwarekulturen, og det nærmest inden den var begyndt.

[13] I den sammenhæng er det interessant, at Ubuntu, der netop arbejder med det kulturelle interface, er den mest populære distribution.

[14] Denne holdning kendetegner også ånden i webkollektivet irational, som Andújar har været medlem af siden det startede i midten af 90erne, og som hoster de fleste af Technologies To The Peoples projekter. Se http://www.irational.org.

[15] En indirekte reference er 70ernes hackermiljø, der blandt andre talte Apples grundlægger Steve Jobs. Dette eksperimenterende kollektiv, der havde afgørende indflydelse på udviklingen af den personlige computer, opererede ’hjemmefra’, i kældre og garager, under helt andre vilkår og efter helt andre principper end den officielle computervidenskab.

[16] Ved sin installationskarakter og intermediale virke adskiller X-Devian sig også fra decideret ”softwarekunst”, hvor programmeringen og koden er det afgørende kunstneriske udtryk og computeren det primære medie. Kategorien ”softwarekunst” blev introduceret i forbindelse med festivalen read_me i 2002. Se endvidere platformen Runme.org for værker og tekster – http://www.runme.org

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By Jacob Lillemose

In 1999, when the art and technology festival Ars Electronica awarded The Golden Nica, first prize in the ”.net” category, to the programmer Linus Torvalds for his development of the Linux operating system, it was pointing in general to the relationship between free software and art, and more specifically to the affinity between free software and that part of contemporary art which is concerned with software’s constantly increasing influence on social, economic and political conditions. Like Linux, this part of contemporary art works against the proprietary software industry’s standardization, repression and rationalization of the software culture, and instead explores alternate possibilities for freeing the software culture through more open, expressive and speculative processes.
On a more indirect level, Ars Electronica’s choice of Linux also emphasized another relationship between free software and this contemporary art, i.e. the idea informing both that software is not just a question of programming, but of producing culture – of understanding and using technology as a means of engaging in a social context. According to the founder of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) Richard Stallman, free software is about ”practical material advantages” but also about ”what kind of society we want to live in, and what constitutes a good society”. 1 Stallman himself imagines an extremely collective and creative society founded on the freedom to ”use, study, copy, modify and redistribute software”. For him, the free software’s fundamental abolishment of intellectual property rights represents a chance to structurally and conceptually ”reprogram” society for the better, and this is an opinion he shares with much of contemporary art.
Ars Electronica’s linking of free software and contemporary art turned out to be almost prophetic. What then was still limited to a few isolated projects has since developed into a far-reaching and agenda-setting discourse, so that free software and related trends today make up an integrated and considerable part of artistic practice and theory. Free software code is translated to aesthetic principles for the development and renewal of social conditions, ranging from material interpretations of open sources and digital challenges to intellectual copyrights to a general interest in independent networks and self-organized communities based on collective production and sharing.

”Distribution” and ’Distribution’ of Linux
The installation X-Devian. The New Technologies To The People® System (2005- ) by the Spanish artist Daniel Garcia Andujar and his company Technologies To The People® 2 is a literal and at the same time fictionalized example of this exchange. Of how free software as a thematic field, model and ethic can inspire contemporary art to take new directions, and of how the visual, spatial and conceptual language of contemporary art can stage free software on an abstract level and discuss its meaning in relation to general problems in society. For, even though Stallman emphasizes the societal perspective, free software in the broad public consciousness is still a specific, and for the most part, unfamiliar question of programming. Only a few understand free software as a living, inclusive and creative culture where it is possible to change important social relationships. And precisely this challenge to and expansion of the general awareness of free software – and for that matter also the free software community’s self-understanding – is at the heart of X-Devian. Using information, criticism and staging in equal measure, the work creates an alternative interface to free software – one that invites you to reflect, assume a position and participate.
The installation is built up around a two-part ”story” of the operating system X-Devian, which unfolds in an advertizing campaign in which you are introduced to X-Devian as a product, and also in a sort of laboratory environment in which you have access to hands-on exploration of the operating system and to various information on free software. The two narratives exist as parallel and independent thematizations of specific aspects of free software, but the installation also establishes connections between them that are complex, problematic and subversive. And, in these connections, in the encounter bewtween the two narratives, exchanges, correlations and fractures emerge that open possibilities for new conceptions of free software, in the general consciousness as well as in the free-software-environment’s self-understanding.
Formally, X-Devian is a so-called ’distribution’ of the Ubuntu operating system, which within the free-software community refers to a variant of a system based on GNU/Linux, e.g. Ubuntu3. X-Devian is also a distribution, in that the installation hands out the newest version of Ubuntu on CD-ROM, so that visitors can take the program home and run it on their own computers. As a variant – in the technical sense – the work does not differ from Ubuntu; the software is identical. But as the name indicates, X-Devian is also a special ”variant”4. As a work, X-Devian is an actual distribution of GNU/Linux via a narrative of a fictional variant of a system that exists ”only” as an artwork and whose representation and conceptualization of the system is substantially different from Ubuntu’s own. In the free software community, program development is the primary focus, while representation and conceptualization have limited interest aside from logo design and the formulation of licenses. In X-Devian, the focus, on the other hand, is on representation and conceptualization as a strategy to discuss free software in relation to a number of themes that do not deal with software alone, but also with software culture. With the ability of the artistic language to bring meaning into play, the work develops the cultural stories, pictures and concepts that form our ideas (and use) of free software and constitute a part of the ’distribution’ that is just as important as the actual program development.
As a part of this representational and conceptual development, the work utilizes a number of components that are more or less directly related to the X-Devian operating system. There is the software itself, a graphical profile, a homepage, a promotional video database, a collection of licenses, specially designed tables, scrapped hardware, and workshops. The individual components can be combined and modified in relation to the indvidual exhibition and as such, the work does not have a fixed form, but constitutes a flexible and changeable entity.5 In its aesthetic form, X-Devian thus reflects free software’s idea of changeability and adaptability in relation to specific situations (utilizing local distributions as far as possible). In a wider sense, the form also reflects that the distribution of free software can take place on many levels at the same time and in a network of various ways of developing, understanding and using it. Rather than isolating free software as an essence, the work unfolds free software as an assemblage of contextual practices and discourses.

Ambiguous Backdrop
The installation of X-Devian in the Århus Kunstbygning involves both the advertizing campaign and the laboratory and connects them in a more literal way than in Andujar’s earlier installations of the work. The words ”Access to Technology is a Human RightTM ” – the slogan for Technologies To The People® – are displayed on the one side-wall that runs through both ”story rooms” so that you have to move from one room to the other in order to read the entire sentence. The slogan thus forms a unified, conceptual statement that the activities in both rooms are played against, a sort of theatrical backdrop for the work’s two acts. Technologies To The People® introduced this slogan in the mid-90s when the company ran a pioneering business on the internet with a series of projects that with style-conscious irony and political attitudes thematized the internet’s potential democratization (and parallel hyper-commercialization) of the technological culture, e.g. a campaign for the product iSAMTM, a portable credit card machine for beggars.6 The slogan expresses the company’s understanding of technology as being based in universal principles of a freer and more equal world, as a progressive social process, in contrast to technology as a profit-generating product that is only for the technically initiated and economically well-off. As indicated by the company name, Technologies To The People® works for technology for the people – not the people in the traditional national sense, but the global, civil population that arose together with the information and network society. The company is especially interested in the part of the population that is otherwise unempowered and excluded – precisely because they do not have access to technology. In connection with iSAMTM the company describes its target group in this way: ”Technologies To The People® is aimed at people in the so-called Third World as well as the homeless, orphaned, unemployed, runaways, immigrants, alcoholics, drug addicts, people suffering from mentally dysfunctions and all other categories of ’undesirables’. Technologies To The People® is for people denied access to the new information society and new technologies. Technologies To The People® wants more people to be networked”.7 According to Technologies To The People®, technology can activate this global population’s civil, autonomous and creative engagement in the network society. At the same time, the slogan also echoes Stallman’s concept of software as an ethical set of rules and the idea that technology should serve the cause of goodness and justice.
But ”Access to Technology is a Human RightTM ” also introduces the double-sidedness or rather the ambiguity that characterizes all Technologies To The People® projects, including X-Devian. For, can good intentions be presented in a slogan and be trademarked? And, doesn’t the proprietary software industry market itself as enriching the life of the individual as well as society in general, while exploiting them in their own interest and to profit? What is the sub-title of the slogan, the actual reference in the symbolic statement? It is, in any case, unclear, just as Technologies To The People® as a company cannot be immediately identified. As has been written about it, ”one can’t completely determine whether TTTP® is in fact a politically correct company or whether its engagement in social and cultural issues is just a strategy to control the market?” 8 The ambiguity signals that technology in itself is not characterized by any inner ”necessity”, but is a tool whose ”politics” is dependent on its usage. Technology can just as well serve controlling powers as it can free human beings individually and collectively, depending on how one defines for example ”access to technology” and ”human rights”. Therefore all technology-hype and utopia, whether formulated by dotcom successes or ”techno-hippies” such as Stallman, must be countered by a dual consciousness, political discussion and critical practice. Otherwise there is a risk that (the understanding of) technology gets lost in ideological dead-ends. Besides connecting the two worlds of the work, the slogan dramatizes a general uncertainty and ambivalence that encodes the access to X-Devian with a mixture of skepticism and idealism, distrustful and visionary views.

Hacking the ”World’s Most Advanced Operating System”
The first part of the installation is centered around a larger-than-life picture of a hand displaying a CD with a white ”X” on a black background. The stylistically clean graphical design forms an easily identifiable and powerful visual framework, while X-Devian’s slogan ”the evolution of the species” – which is also written on the CD – signifies that this product is the most advanced in the software industry / culture and a natural part of human progress. To the right of the picture a promotional video is playing in which an enthusiastic programmer (wearing a suit and dreadlocks = serious yet relaxed) at high speed and accompanied by dramatic, synthesizer music talks with other creative users about the operating system’s many fantastic features. They are informally gathered in front of a computer in a boutique landscape that, with its glass walls and hectic activity signals that X-Devian addresses itself to an open and dynamic environment. To the left of the picture is a physical version of the CD, placed on an illuminated podium almost as if it were a work of art itself. This part thus has the character of a convention stand, that – using the same rhetorics as commercial software products – is meant to attract attention, fascinate and stimulate a desire for the operating system. It does this quite literally, for the logo and video have been appropriated from Apple’s campaign for its Mac OS X operating system. Andujar has simply manipulated the video by replacing the screen shots and logo. He has done the same thing on X-Devian’s homepage, where under the slogan ”advancing the world’s most advanced operating system” you can read about Debian and free software instead of about Mac OS X from whose homepage the slogan and design have been appropriated.9
Appropriation is a both an act and a genre in modern and post-modern art’s confrontation with the idea of the original and unique artwork – a work that is created from nothing, that has no references except to itself and cannot be reproduced. However, these kinds of art-philosophical problems, even though they constitute an implicit condition for the work, are not Andujar’s focus in X-Devian. Its appropriation strategy lies rather in an extension of hacking (in the non-criminal sense!) and hacking-inspired phenomena such as culture jamming, adbusting and tactical media.10 And art-historically, this has connections to the Situationists’ concept of détournement and the media-conscious Latin-American conceptual art, especially Cildo Meireles’s Insertions into Ideological Circuits (1970) in which the artist wrote political slogans on empty Coca-Cola bottles becoming visible only when the bottles were filled up again. Here we have appropriation of a rather different, society-oriented character where symbols and rhetorics should not be understood as aesthetic elements – as a question of style – but rather as carriers of meaning, an integral part of questions of politics, power and ideology.
This form of appropriation also characterizes other earlier works11 by Andujar and express a general preoccupation with ”hacking the system” – whether that of the dotcom culture, the surveillance society or – as with X-Devian – the proprietary software industry. Hacking a system refers to informal, artificial and often humoristic tactics where Andujar, instead of criticizing the system from a dialectic or confrontational opposition – by being directly against it – intervenes in the system in order to operate critically from the inside, for example by taking the system’s own logic to an absurd consequence or by simply taking over the logic. He turns the system’s own resources and values against itself, while at the same time – which is especially clear in X-Devian – he symbolically reverses the sign and the actual content. Instead of accepting and allowing himself to be controlled by the system’s conditions, he uses the system in other ways and for ends other than those the system prescribes ( parallel to the way various free software licenses appropriate prevailing copyright laws in order to cancel out these very laws). The system is not determinational, self-maintaining and balanced in the classical scientific sense, but is understood as an open, heterogeneous quantity that can be formed via interacting analyses and interpretations.
X-Devian intentionally misreads Apple’s ”X” as a symbol for the undefined and potential, an essential figure for the development of free software – instead of reading it as an exact character for the description of Apple’s operating system. The work takes Apple at face value and utilizes the X’s ambivalence with subversive cleverness. The system’s identity is disturbed and transformed to a schizophrenic matrix. The appropriation reconceptualizes the closed system that the product Mac OS X represents in relation to a radical open network. It cancels the unity-character and limitation of the product by establishing connections to spheres of meaning beyond the system – for example to free software, to Technologies To The People® and to the art institution by force of being exhibited there.
Andujar’s use of appropriation is furthermore relevant in that the work thematizes the very meaning of intellectual property and copyrights – not only in relation to the software but to language and codes on a higher, societal level. A classic hacker motto is ”information wants to be free” (by the way, a motto that harmonizes with the slogan of Technologies To The People®’). The freedom of information thus relates not only to programming communitites, but to the information society generally – which is a basic point in X-Devian. For, by appropriating Apple’s campaign, rather than its product, the work’s first part focuses not on software as information, but on information about software, i.e. its visual and linguistic representation and the software-cultural concepts, mythologies and politics it is based on and generates. As representation the campagn is meant not only to stimulate a desire to buy a product, but also to introduce a specific user, a specific use and a specific culture which you are meant to identify with, in case you buy it. When Apple’s campaign talks about ”improving the most advanced operating system” that is ”built up around you to make your life even easier” it is defining some extremely ordinary conceptions of software in regard to a specific product, a commercial brand and a proprietary software culture. Neither Apple nor other proprietary software firms, however, have the property rights to use such concepts and define what they mean.12 Free software can just as well be the reference for these concepts, and the meaning would then be totally different both in relation to the ”product” and the culture. When Andujar appropriates Apple’s campaign, it’s to show the importance of conceptualizing the representation of software in relation to the principles of freedom that underlie free software itself. Just like software itself, information about software must be distributed and developed beyond any form of intellectual ownership by way of an open and shared process of hacks. By hacking the representation of software – in the sense of setting it free – X-Devian displays free software as fundamentally different, partly as a differently distributed form of discourse than the centralized form that the proprietary software industry uses, partly as a different social and autonomous cultural context for conceiving of ”the most advanced operating system”.
In the free software community, as indicated above, the representation is considered secondary, if not actually irrelevant. Part of the community’s identity has been to distance itself markedly from the spectacular and speculative representation of software that characterizes the proprietary software industry. The Free Software Foundation’s and Linux’s homepages are symptomatic in this respect: they include no pictures (except the minimal reproduction of their respective logos) or other aesthetic elements, but consist purely of text. Though this distance-taking has profiled the free software’s ”otherness”, it also seems to have limited the integration and possibilities of free software in a wider software-cultural context.13 For in this context, free software is to a large extent a consciousness-phenomenon, not just software. Therefore, free software is not just about using a different program, but is about creating other stories, pictures and abstract ideas of software and other interfaces. For it is not by way of a concrete installation of the operating system on a personal computer that the understanding of the use of free software begins, but rather in the abstract cultural meanings that the various interfaces in the ”shop”, in the media and on the net generate. And it is these interfaces that X-Devian hacks in order to create what you might call an artistic interface to free software. Though it is ironic both in regard to Apple and free software, it is still a serious attempt to represent and conceptualize free software as more than just data. It uses art’s freedom to create ideas of free software which are based on and deal with human experience, imagination and play. And by including this field – art’s field – the work points towards new symbolic, imaginary, and conceptual horizons for the development of free software.

Information and the Community Behind It
In the second part of the installation, you get behind the X-Devian interface to the software itself and the free software as environment, network and activity. The transition is ”illustrated” by using significantly different information-aesthetics and by a significantly different relationship between the work and the public, the software and the observer. This part has the character of a mixture of an amateur laboratory, a temporary classroom and an undefined public space. Spread about the room there are tables with online computers – running X-Devian – on which you can aquaint yourself with the content of the homepage and experience how the software actually functions. One of the computers also contains a video database on free software, where you can see – among other things – interviews with Richard Stallman. Lying on the tables are various parts from disassembled computers, interconnected in a non-functional way (another look behind the interface), as well as books and texts about programming, software and ”free culture”. Finally, on a black-painted wall, across from the wall with the ”Access to Technololgy is a Human RightTM” text, hang photocopies of various free-software licenses that you can take down and read.
While X-Devian’s first part communicates using visual and linguistic simplicity (symbolized by the black-and-white graphics) and focuses on ”the product”, the work’s second part is much more complex and non-centered (symbolized by – among other things – the blacked-out windows and the inscrutable configurations of computer parts that are spread out on the tables). Here you can explore texts, programs and video-files about free software. Here free software constitutes a space for activity integrated in a physical reality of material, human beings and energy (It’s also here that Andujar runs his workshops). Here there’s no advertizing for a fictitious piece of software. Here you are invited and challenged both on a personal and collective level to participate in an actual existing software culture.
With its connotations of a ”workplace”, X-Devian’s second part sets the scene for an interactive round with free software. Not in the banal click-and-see sense as other software and much digital art prescribes, men in an expanded sense as the choice, acquisition and interpretation of information. The public is not addressed as a uniform mass of consumers, but as a multiplicity of independent users, knowledge producers and cultural critics. Nor does the work dictate a particular reading of the information, but rather underlines its availability and potential.
While the first part presents software as a finished product, the second part presents free software as an informational database that does not ”belong” to the work, but participates in the work by way of its connections to external informational processes and networks. X-Devian’s homepage links only to project homepages ”outside” of the work, e.g. The Free Software Foundation and The Debian Project – and in the collection of video clips other voices are heard besides Technologies To The People®, for example Stallman. In other words, the database refers not to a particular product, but to a culture of possibilities that instead of uniformity and standards is characterized by a fundamental openness and diversity.
This point is also illustrated by the different variations of free-software licenses that are hung on the one wall. Free-software licenses – as opposed to the ”all rights reserved” licenses under which proprietary software is issued – are not a universal text, but rather a question of continued interpretation and development in relation to a concrete (con)text, to variations of practice.
All in all, this prominent placement of licenses in the work accentuates their importance as cultural tools – not only as legal documents (their hanging is a strong allusion to the hanging of tools) but also as texts that enable and stimulate further activity and the creative and collective use of software. They are printed on ordinary paper and thus contrasted to the exclusive color print in the initial room. The aesthetic contrast signals that free software operates with a micro-information-economy both literally and figuratively, and that money is not the decisive premise for participation in the culture. It is an inclusive and generous economy, where engagement counts. In its expression and its thematizing of information economy X-Devian lies in extension of installations by conceptual artists of the 60’s such as Joseph Kosuth, Mel Bochner and Art & Language. However, even though there are formal aesthetic similarities, there are also significant differences between X-Devian and these works. While they consist predominantly of self-referential texts and symbols, Andujar refers to a world and activity beyond the work. Instead of internal organization and structuring, the information economy in X-Devian is based on activeness, production and relations in a non-institutional context.
Another aspect of the installations’s information-economy is, in this connection, questions concerning information on and education in free software. As an informal ”info-stand” and framework around workshops, the work-part anticipates an acquisition of free software via hacks of information – comparable to the ”hardware sculptures” lying on the table – rather than through acquiring definitive knowledge by learning. Here, to hack means to interpret and use the available information in new independent ways which are not necessarily functional, but can nonetheless contribute to the development of an abstract knowledge and understanding of free software. So the encouragement to hack is also a criticism of the rationalization of information and a rationalized software-culture and an argument for the potential in the irrational, the speculative and the experimental.14 Even though a certain amount of knowledge is needed if you want to use free software, the work also shows that free software is not just something you can read about in a manual. It is also something you ”write” yourself as you use it and an expression of an active attitude-taking to – rather a passive acceptance of – the software culture you are a part of. The knowledge of free software, which the work presents, is not defined by a system, but generated by a collective intelligence which does not let itself be disciplined, directed or controlled. Andujar’s installation Information Society (2000) contains a corresponding point. In a mixture of a surveillance center and a library, the public here has access to information found on the net on how you hack various systems, for instance mobile telephones and UNIX operating systems, as examples of the alternative and free use of information. Through irony and drama, the installation presents information, software and the net as powerfully politicized phenomena (in opposition to the industry’s and state’s picture of them as politically neutral) linked to questions of freedom and control, possibilities and limitations. In that way, Information Society and X-Devian are ”role-models” for a non-authoritative culture where knowledge is produced in an exchange between autonomous subjects in a network. And therefore, a free-software workshop is naturally an integrated part of both works.
X-Devian also emphasizes the collective character of free-software. While the content of the installation’s first part (officially) is produced by Technologies To The People®, the second part is produced by an unnamed and unregistered community of autonomous subjects who work neither for a company nor for the installation itself, but for a common unowned project – a situation reflected by the work’s appropriation of the content. Instead of inscribing the content into a foreign context, connecting it to a product or brand, the work makes it freely accessible, i.e. without copyright protection and, one might say, includes the community on its own premises.
The community behind X-Devian produces (by way of) communicative relations and processes across borders and as such is defined only by its multiple activities – by professional and social rather than financial or geographical interests. Several theoreticians have argued that this community in a certain sense is a concrete expression of Marx’s concept of a General Intellect, the social brain whose production does not rely on machinery and factories, but of life as lived. X-Devian’s production facilities reflect this relationship. The second part’s informal, intimate, open character signals that here information is produced by free subjects working together.15 And the presence of several tables indicates in a simple way that the information that the community produces is to be shared and thus cannot be appropriated by Capital, the State, or for that matter, Art. The meaning and value of the information will aways exceed such institutions and their attempts to freeze information into objects. The community produces information that helps to develop and strengthen a dynamic common culture. While the first part’s promotional video appeals to the creative ”do-it-yourself” mentality, X-Devian’s second part – both in spirit and practice – is characterized by a concept of ”do-it-together”, by cooperation as the foundation for the alternative development of software culture as well as software aesthetics.

Technological Art beyond the Technology
X-Devian distinguishes itself from much of the technological art that is today presented at festivals such as Ars Electronica. In spite of the fact that Ars Electronica in 1999 emphasized a connection between free-software and contemporary art, this is not a connection that the festival has since concentrated on to any appreciable degree. To the contrary, the technological art and technological aesthetics promoted by the festival are often characterized by a fascination with hardware and a positivistic celebration of technology’s formal (read: scientific) evolution. The cultural, conceptual, critical and collective perspective on technology that free software represents – in itself and as art – seems to have disappeared from the horizon. And thus to a great extent the human and societal dimension as well. Technology is understood and exhibited predominantly as valuable in itself, and the function of art is reduced to aesthetics – to embellishment.16
But perhaps such festivals are not the right context for X-Devian, just as it might be a misunderstanding to comprehend the work in relation to ”technological art”. For even though the work involves and is about technology, its focus is the cultural discourse in which technology takes part. Andujar works in the conceptual tradition of the 60s and 70s, where formal categories and problematics are secondary in relation to the societal themes and contexts that a work contains and is part of. It is a tradition that is not specifically technological – or even media specific – but comprehends art as a general conceptual capacity to give form to analytical, critical, and speculative discourses.
It makes more sense to understand X-Devian in relation to that part of contemporary art which – also in continuation of the conceptual tradition – is engaged in the social field where human experience and cultural politics meet – and often works with installations and interventions, both inside and outside the art institution. A large number of exhibitions have presented this art under the heading of ”contextual”, ”relational” or ”political” and have argued for art’s transformation to social (aesthetic) practices and functions. An aesthetic discourse like this flows through X-Devian, but the work does not express a wish to identify art with the social field, as the neo-avant-guarde tendencies in contemporary art do. It maintains a concept of artistic autonomy, not in the sense of being formallly self-referential, but as an independent and privileged space for information processing and knowledge production in relation to the social field. The work does not directly reproduce the social field, but produces artistic interfaces to it, specifically to free software as a social field. These interfaces are not oriented towards functionality and usability, but towards open reflection. Therefore, the work’s positive attitude to free software as a force and a value are not decisive. Even though X-Devian is an idealistic statement like Stallman’s, its emphasis is the aesthetic staging of free software as a cultural discourse where meanings are in play. For that matter, the staging is an affirmative hack of free-software culture (in contrast to the work’s subversive hack of the proprietary-software culture) that, on an abstract level, opens new cultural possibilities for critical, imaginative and social development.

1 See www.fsf.org
2 Technologies To The People® is a conceptual framework in the form of a non-profit organization with identity as a company which Andujar uses to sponsor and market his projects. Technologies To The People® functions, however, also as an independent work in the form of a conceptual statement with its own merchandise and its own promotional video. See http://www.irational.org/tttp/primera.html.
3 Ubuntu is based on another distribution of GNU/Linux, Debian which is referred to in the work’s title. See www.ubuntu.org and www.debian.org
4 The name X-Devian refers to the use of programs from another free software distribution, namely Debian.
5 Therefore X-Debian can both be an installation and a setup.
6 iSAMTM was a bogus product that existed only as a promotional video. Nontheless, the work resulted in an inquiry from Apple who wanted to know more about the product, while in connection with an exhibition in Germany it provoked a ”left-wing” art critic from Texte zur Kunst to make sarcastic remarks regarding the cynicism of technological art. See http://www.irational.org/tttp/*siteTTP/dpro.html
7 Technologies To The People® Annual Report 2000. Technologies To The People® Publicity Department, Alicante 2000
8 ibid
9 Since Andujar exhibited X-Devian for the first time, Apple has updated Mac OS X several times, and the homepage that was made for the installation in the Århus Kunstbygning is thus from the newest version Mac OS X Leopard, while the promotional video is for Mac OS X Panther.

10 The three phenomena are closely related and all refer to cultural practices where you penetrate an existing media structure and subversively distort their expression. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adbusters, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_jamming and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactical_media

11 For a poster for iSAM, Andujar appropriated Apple’s multicolored iMACs.
12 That they nevertheless attempt to do so – with intellectual property rights as an instrument – was shown by Andujar as early as 1997 in the work Language (Property) Remember, language is not freeTM, in which he charted the TM-registration by these firms’ – and TTTP® – of the sentences that made up their slogans as if they were a line of program code. In this way, companies tried to lock and unify meanings in the discussion of the internet and the software culture – almost before it had begun.
13 In this connection, it is interesting that Ubuntu, the one that works with the cultural interface, is the most popular distribution.
14 This attitude also characterizes the spirit of the web-collective irational, of which Andujar has been a member since it started in the mid-90s and which hosts most of Technologies To The People®’s projects. See http://www.irational.org.
15 An indirect reference to the 70s hacker environment which, among others, included Apple’s founder Steve Jobs. This experimental collective, which had a decisive influence on the development of the personal computer, operated out of cellars and garages, under totally different conditions and according to totally different principles than those of the official computer science.
16 By its installation character and intermedial function, X-Devian differs from ”software art”, where the programming and the code are all-important in terms of artistic expression and the computer is the primary medium. The category ”software art” was introduced in connection with the festival read_me in 2002. See also the platform www.runme.org for works and texts.

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• 1998/2006
• Website with linked images
• www.irational.org/tttp/Crypto/armed1.html
• Presented in the exhibition with large-format DVD slide projection and Folder

Presented in the exhibition as an upgrade of almost 100 images, the internet project Armed Citizen shows a series of 17 small arms. No information is given on their origins. Who owns them? Are they being used as criminal evidence? Are they perhaps murder weapons? Who does the ›armed citizen‹ of the title refer to — the police? Or a citizens’ defence group that has taken up arms? Is there some allusion to the liberal firearms laws in the United States, to bloody incidents like the amok shootings that took place in Columbine High School, Colorado, in 1999, or in the Gutenberg Gymnasium in Erfurt in 2002? Armed Citizen is difficult to pin down. But it is safe to assert that it deals with an indeterminate feeling of fear and menace, and, by association, with the growing longing for security in a world felt to be increasingly less safe. The exhibition deliberately groups Armed Citizen in a kind of »security zone« together with Heath Bunting’s CCTV and Rachel Baker and Heath Bunting’s CCTV Sabotag — further irational works pointing to the essential futility of technology — or weapons based protective measures. (Inke Arns)

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El 9º Festival Internacional de Fotografía y Artes Visuales, que se celebrará en Madrid del 1 de junio al 23 de julio, presentará 63 exposiciones de 375 artistas y creadores de 33 nacionalidades, en torno al tema de la naturaleza, entre los que figuran Olafur Eliasson, Ramón Masats, Karl Blossfeldt, Cristóbal Hara y Joel Sternfeld. El festival se extenderá a Toledo, con varias muestras; en Aranjuez se celebrarán unas jornadas, con clases de Hiroshi Sugimoto, y se rendirá homenaje a la cineasta Agnès Varda.

Las relaciones entre cultura y naturaleza es el tema propuesto por Horacio Fernández para la próxima edición de PhotoEspaña 2006 (www.phedigital.com), que cierra un ciclo como comisario general tras las anteriores dedicadas a la ciudad y a la historia. Las propuestas de los fotógrafos y artistas visuales se acercarán a una “reinterpretación del concepto de paisaje”, en donde intervienen “la memoria y los conflictos en una historia compleja”. Otras aportaciones se centrarán en el mundo rural, en un momento de cambio.

El festival, que tiene como patrocinadores institucionales al Ministerio de Cultura, el Ayuntamiento y la Comunidad de Madrid, se desarrolla en una sección oficial, en museos y centros de Madrid y Toledo, donde habrá exposiciones de John Davis, Chris Jordan, Daniel García Andújar, Bae Bien-U, Gonzalo Puch y Caio Reisewitz, entre otros, y un festival Off, en el que participan 35 galerías de la ciudad, con trabajos recientes de Axel Hütte, Juan Uslé, Marisa González, Jota Castro, Cristina García Rodero, Adrian Tyler, Pierre Verger, Eva Koch y Chema Prado, entre otros.

En esta edición se han incorporado al programa el Museo Thyssen y el de Ciencias Naturales, y pabellones del Matadero Madrid, con obras de jóvenes autores, según destacó Pablo Berástegui, director del certamen, que se extiende a la calle, en el Barrio de las Letras, además de talleres y clases en Aranjuez (con Sugimoto, Hütte, Madoz y Ouka Leele) y encuentros sobre la naturaleza.

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Introduction

In 1998 a 21 year old guy named ïto messed up the world of marketing by inventing a very unconventional marketing campaign for a Macintosh computer: the so called “hack- Mac”.  This design for a computer cited a military look with camouflage pattern and a solid-defensive casing, thus looking like both a fancy accessoire and a possible weapon. Consequently, the campaign was made up with the obvious slogan “think weapon” in the original Apple Macintosh-fond and the apple motive in slightly darkened colours.

About 80 years before the 32 year old shooting star of the American art scene, Marcel Duchamps, started a campaign featuring good old Mona Lisa with a fashionable moustache. Duchamps used a postcard of the Mona Lisa painting and added the beard with pencil. He then sent out the so treated postcards and claimed them to be art.

Both projects are classical examples of use of guerrilla strategies in communication and art, the latter could even be taken for the first communication guerrilla activity in art history.

So what makes those two activities guerrilla campaigns?

Let’s start with Duchamps’ mail art action: his intention was to dodge the commercial art market and its traditional distribution channels by both bringing the art directly to the recipient and by pointing at the commercialisation and trivialisation of art. Therefore he uses the industrial product of an art postcard and deflowers the icon of Mona Lisa with a moustache. Naturally this provocative strategy arrested a lot of attention and lead to the aspired discussion. Thus Duchamps attacked the art system by the use of an ordinary communication system, the mail, and became a predecessor of the mail art movement that reached its zenith in the 50’s with the smart and provocative mails by Ray Johnson.

Coming back to the “hac-Mac”, ïto designed it without any commission by Apple Macintosh, though it looks like a real advertisement for a real computer, neither the computer existed nor was it published for Apple Macintosh’s commercial purpose. Instead it was only invented for the commercial purpose of the designer ïto, who at that time was rather unknown and who applied this campaign for the promotion of his freshly founded design label “Ora-ito”. Besides ïto designed a number of other virtual products and campaigns like a Gucci-house and promoted them on his website. From there those products were quickly picked up by design magazines that spread the information widely and provided ïto with international attention. In fact, ïto made use of a classical marketing strategy: the so-called “guerrilla marketing” that intends to achieve attention through surprising, extraordinary and entertaining actions with only a tiny budget.

Guerrilla Marketing was invented around the mid 60’s in the US first as a strategy of attack and attrition and the term “guerrilla marketing” referred to the then held dispute about the guerrilla tactics used in the Vietnam war. Since then guerrilla marketing has become a popular practice especially for small and financially weak companies as it promises maximum attention with a minimum capital invested.
Significantly, Ito did not only apply guerrilla marketing tactics but created a fictional tool for guerrilla communication activities: a computer specifically designed for hacking.

Explaining the term

But what do I exactly mean by this catchy term communication guerrilla, which art projects and activities can be summarised under this idea in a meaningful way?

Starting with the semiotic roots of the composite term, the word ‘communication’ implicates ‘the act of communicating; transmission; the exchange of thoughts, messages, or information, as by speech, signals, writing, or behaviour’, whereas the term ‘communications’ stands for ‘a means of communicating, like a system, such as mail, telephone, or television, for sending and receiving messages or a network of routes for sending messages and transporting troops and supplies’.

‘Guerrilla’ means ‘an irregular, usually indigenous military or paramilitary unit operating in small bands in occupied territory to harass and undermine the enemy, as by surprise raids.’

Connecting both terms, the ‘Communication Guerrilla’ term describes an irregular, aggressive unit, operating with the help of communications and media to harass and undermine the power of the enemy who occupies (public) territory.

In the younger past, a huge number of strong media projects have been realised that make use of guerrilla tactics in order to intrude on social, political, economic or communication systems, and to infiltrate, misuse and alter them finally. Intrusion is usually achieved by hacking the borders of the respective system, and here the term ‘hacking’ is used regarding to its both meanings, which are ‘to break up the surface’ and ‘to gain access to a system or network illegally or without authorisation’.

Particularly in media culture, political activism and art melt into one another due to the quality of the Internet serving as a distribution channel both for information and for art, and its ability to connect communities of artists and activists globally. Internet is fiercely embattled public territory that after some initial moments of cultural and legal liberty progressively was understood by entrepreneurship and the global market leaders as economic space where the old juridical and capitalist system should be applied.

This occupation of territory caused a vivid and diverse countermovement that today is labelled with terms like ‘net piracy’ or ‘net activism’ which have the creation of an innovative economic, political and cultural system in view including the account for copy left and open source. In his article ‘pirates in the kingdom of data’ Bernhard Günther illuminates the history of piracy and its connection to net activism and comes to the surprising conclusion that pirates’ republics were ancestors of welfare states because of their distinct court system and progressive democracy. Consequently it is stated, that ‘net piracy’ could have the same potential of pointing to a future social and economic system.
So does Communication Guerrilla Art, which is not limited to the Internet as public domain only and creates space for new utopias by radical means.

Whilst some guerrilla art activities are executed in reality, others just quote guerrilla tactics in order to confuse and operate indirectly. Often the amateur recipient or viewer cannot recognise the difference between the real and the fictional hack.

In order to illustrate what Guerrilla Art is all about I would like to show one first example from 1999 that exactly sounds the boundaries between fiction and real attack. The video by the Spanish Manuel Saiz is entitled ‘Video Hacking’ and a suitable beginning for it shifts between a satire with its humorous and entertaining qualities and a documentary that can be taken for serious. It focuses on the question of authorship and intellectual property in art.

Pre-requisites of Guerrilla Art

In Media Art, we can detect four mayor pre-requisites for the emergence of communication guerrilla tactics:
-    the availability of the medium
-    the deep impact of technology on life
-    the cultural and economic surplus in society
-    the politicisation of art in general

The first point, the availability of the medium, is evident: since the computer has become an affordable machine in the 90’s, it rapidly became a medium for artistic expression. With the Internet, it quickly evolved into a networked communication machine, thus offering artists a new channel for distribution of art and for forming new audience groups.

Secondly, computer technology has a deep impact on our everyday live: it led to sustainable changes of working processes, communication, medicine, travelling etc. This dependence on technology has deeply affected personal value systems and interpersonal relationships. The actual scope of the implied consequences is by no way clear, but is by common consent taken for the biggest societal shift since the industrial revolution.

Thirdly, I would argue that we live in times of a large cultural and economic surplus in the western world: we produce more cultural content and goods than we can consume or even need. In face of both, mass media creating an oversupply of aesthetic appeals, and the everyday encounter and consumption of art in urban environment, the use of guerrilla tactics in art and in economy promises attention. In his publication “Reiz und Rührung – über ästhetische Empfindungen” (appeal and emotion – about aesthetic sensation), Konrad Paul Liessmann who teaches philosophy at the Vienna University) puts it like this: “One could risk the thesis that the efforts in contemporary art first and foremost aimed at evoking mixed feelings in radical and intensive forms through pushing the boundaries of the general understanding of art.”

Finally, we can observe a general and international politicisation of art and culture. Current shows like documenta or Venice Biennial document a large field of art production dealing with political, social or economic topics whilst it remains fairly unclear if it’s the present curatorial trend that entails this specific art production or if curators just pick up an enhancing trend in art readily. However, art and culture undergo a noticeable shift of content and form towards a reflection of the everyday reality and its potential conflicts.

Hacking legal borders

The discussion about copy left, open source, liberty of information has had a deep impact on the creative work with technology and results in a couple of outstanding pieces that do not only cross the borders of legality but also undermine the current concept of art.

As a kind of introduction to this chapter I will show a short video by Robert Luxemburg that is taken from the film ‘Matrix’. In Matrix the hero Leo fights against a system of machines ruling the world and exploiting humans. Luxemburg took one of the key scenes of Matrix in which Leo learns about the ‘system’ that he should counter. By ripping the movie (which explains its bad quality) and framing it anew, Luxemburg cleverly employs the protagonist’s statement about the ‘system’ against the economic Hollywood system in which it was born.

In this year’s transmediale competition Luxemburg was nominated with a piece titled ‘The Conceptual Crisis of Private Property as a Crisis in Practice’ for the so-called Software Art Award. The piece’s title is derived from a quote from the book ‘Empire’ by Michael Hardt and Toni Negri: “The conceptual crisis of private property does not become a crisis in practice, and instead the regime of private expropriation has tended to be applied universally.” In the main, the book‘Empire’supposes a reorganisation of the global society and economic system based on the idea of a global network. In this network the principle of sharing dominates and leverages the ancient capitalist profit orientated system.

Luxemburg’s piece is in its core a software programme that is not distributed in binary format, but as a screenshot which can be printed and actually is for sale. The screenshot shows the complete source code which, if executed, transforms the screenshot into the full text of the novel ‘Cryptonomicon’ by Neal Stephenson. This novel not only deals with cryptography, but was actually subject to U.S. export restrictions since it contained a cryptographic algorithm that was considered a trade secret. As you can see, again a download window of ‘Matrix’ appears as a reference to the ‘system’ that should be fought against.
The screenshot, as an artistic work, may be the ‘intellectual property’ of Robert Luxemburg, but, as a piece of software, inherits the free software license.
So on the one hand the screenshot is a circumvention device exploiting the structural flaws in the concept of ‘intellectual property’; on the other hand it is a highly complex, almost labyrinthine and conceptual piece of art.

There isn’t a long history in crime as art, maybe the Russian Alexander Brener can be named as one of its ancestors.  His spraying of a green dollar sign on Kasimir Malevich’s painting Suprematism’ and adjacent hunger strike were aiming at fighting art as commodity.

Though media art in big parts opposes the traditional art market and the common notion of art indirectly, there are only few examples of direct fight against the art system.
Instead the hack of legality in media art takes place in various juridical grey zones. I would like to give two more examples of hacking legal borders:

RE-CODE.COM was a free web service that allowed its customers to share product information and create barcodes that can be printed and used to re-code items in stores by placing new labels over existing barcodes to set a lower price.  RE-CODE.COM at its core was a shared database, update able by customers.

It was meant so be a satire and a mockery of the website PRICELINE.COM, made to look nearly identical to its counterpart that uses as they call it “revolutionary” advertising approach to entice people to name their own price for goods and services.

After going live on March 12th, 2003, the RE-CODE.com web site went unnoticed for close to 10 days when suddenly it began receiving attention. The project was presented on March 23 at the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Chicago. On April 10th, RE-CODE.com received a cease and desist letter from attorneys representing the world’s largest retail employer, Wal-Mart.
The video shows an extract of the project’s documentation by the authors that was made after the website was taken down.

Another project called ‘Minds of Concern’ by the artist group Knobotic Research was equally stopped when it was first exhibited in May 2002 at the New Museum of Contemporary Art New York. Minds of Concern determines the borders of what is and what is not legal in the (US) public domain and tries to seek out the areas of friction between an active construction of the public domain, the expansive US legal system, and the dimensions of an intensively patrolled, supposedly open communication and information infrastructure like the Internet. The art project consists of a spatial installation designed by Peter Sandbichler and a web interface. The installation is build with a woven hyperbolic matrix out of the risk factor band which creates a border in the space, closes the passage through the space. Knowbotic Research designed a software, the so called, ‘Public Domain Scanner’ which remotely audits the server of Non-Governmental Organisations and inquires their state of security. This act of scanning the public domain on the Internet is on view in the installation, and insecure servers which are easily to attack are published. After the opening of the show and heavy press coverage, the Museum was set under pressure and finally decided to cut it of from the Internet. Though the Public Domain Scanner did not actually harm any of the NGOs servers, the hack itself was assesses to be illegal.

Hacking Technical Borders

The core of the ‘Minds of Concern’ project was the hack of the servers’ security system, so to say the hack of a technical border. The next step would be the infiltration of a virus into a system. Actually, the artistic potential of viruses was nicely on show in the exhibition ‘I love you’, first shown at the Frankfurt Museum for Applied art in 2002. It put the conflicting and divers scene of virus culture on display and presented a recommendable chronology of computer viruses. Beside parasitic viruses that are built in order to destroy data, particularly the 90’s gave birth to a number of artistic software programmes designed and acting like viruses. Maybe the ‘Cascade Virus’ could be taken as a starting point for this emerging field. This virus was released in 1988 and produces a waterfall effect with letters raining down on the display screen. Today, activists and artists like Jaromil or epidemiC create virus programmes that still search for the weaknesses of the system and direct our attention towards their loopholes but at the same time produce an aesthetic result. For most virus programmers no borderline between art and programming does exist. In the catalogue of the ‘I love you’ show, Massimo Ferronato states for the virus scene that he is part of: ‘The viruses are manifestation of creative brain work, which projects the name of its creator in the scene and in the outside world, a replicant capable of travelling in a way that sends out a message about the accomplishment of its inventor.’ And furthermore: ‘Programming is not seen as a means for producing art but an art form in its own right, valued using criteria of beauty, elegance, proportion and effectiveness.’
A first encounter of the two rather hermetic scenes of contemporary art and the art of programming took place in 2001 at Venice Biennial when the representatives of Slovenia, epidemiC collective and the group 01001101110101101.org, launched the biennale.py virus that attached itself to rather rare Macintosh .py and .pyw files in the Biennial’s network but caused no real damage. During the Biennial the source code of biennale.py was on show at the Slovenian Pavilion.
In their press release the artists’ collective state about the function and impact of the virus:

“…a virus wants to exist instinctively and without mediations, and it is just this the main and only function of “biennale.py”: to survive. A new idea of a “virus that is not just a virus” is gaining acceptance, and that it can represent the outbreak of the social into the most social thing of all: the Net. (…)The paradox becomes even clearer if you think that the virus, a vague and dangerous entity by definition, is for sale to adventurous curators and collectors. To buy a computer virus is probably one of the most exciting investment one could make today.”

But as the virus was relatively harmless and easy to remove, and there wasn’t any aesthetic output, Biennale.by did not arrest big attention – which made it to one of the weak communication guerrilla projects.

Hacking Surveillance Systems

One of the favourite targets for hacks is definitely the ubiquitous surveillance system. Long time ago, public sphere has lost its innocence when surveillance cameras entered almost unnoticed, and wiretapping and control of data traffic on the Internet became standard under protection of law especially after the tightening up in the follow-up of 9-11. Artists strongly responded to this increase of surveillance with their artistic work or campaigns, often by using the same technology as the one that they were acting against or by revealing and attacking the respective system’s weak point. A good survey of works can be found in the exhibition Control space that was shown at he ZKM in Karlsruhe Germany in 2002.

With the reproduction of a famous spy software called DCS1000 used by the FBI to perform electronic wiretaps a whole field of artistic experimentation evolved. The Radical Software Group improved the programme and offered it publicly under the title ‘Carnivore’ for artistic use. At the heart of the project is CarnivorePE, a software application that listens to all Internet traffic (email, web surfing, etc.) on a specific local network. Next, CarnivorePE serves this data stream to interfaces called “clients.” A number of artists have designed clients that animate, diagnose, or interpret the network traffic in various ways. So does the client ‘Back and White CNN’ by the famous Net Art veteran Mark Napier. It connects to the internet traffic on the website of CNN.com and transforms the data into clouds of black and white pixels. This visualisation of data can be altered interactively, so that not only the clouds change their appearance due to the individual data passing the client but also though manipulation of the visitor.
In 1996, a group named Surveillance Camera Players began to create made-for Closed-Circuit-Television versions of avant-garde plays, such as Alfred Jarry’s ‘Ubu Roi’and Samuel Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’ and performed the so edited plays in front of surveillance cameras in public space. In 1998 the last literary work, ‘1984’ by George Orwell was adapted, since then the group shifted to performances for the benefit of members of the public who stop to watch their plays in the street or the subway and less for those monitoring the screens. Whilst before 1998 the plays were silent versions only made for the guard staff in front of the monitor, the newer performances directly address also the people on the street and convey a much simpler message.
The participatory network project Track the Trackers is designed to target the same CCTV system, but with a different technology and tactical media components. The work makes use of existing personal technologies in conjunction with the satellite GPS infrastructure to provide participants with an expanded audible experience of the proliferation of video surveillance in the urban public sphere. The mobile unit, a bag containing a laptop, GPS-receiver, earphones, and a generic mouse is taken on a walk through the city. The sound in the headphones changes whenever the participant enters the vicinity of a surveillance camera. This effect is not automatic but created by other participants who are continuously adding new locations to the existing database.
The Internet platform servers as an exchange point for these coordinates: the data gathered in this way is made available to the other participants by uploading it.

The conjoined hack

‘Track the Trackers’ made use of what has been labelled by Geert Lovinck and David Garcia as ‘tactical media’ which are ‘media of crisis, critics and opposition’ and which direct our attention towards a system’s sore point and demanding for the better, often for the utopia, for the unreachable.

The potential of tactical media lies in its quality to build communities as solid structures of participation in which artistic activism evolves. Often artists only design a process or tool whereas active participants carry out the real action. Beside Track the Trackers, another good example for this is the public participatory performance ‘Radioballett’ (radio ballet) by the German radio group Ligna which was premiered at the Hamburg central station in 2002. Its subheading was ‘Übung in unnötigem Aufenthalt’ (exercise in superfluous stay). The performance took action against the practise of the railway company Deutsche Bahn to ban people who want to stay at the station without consuming or travelling. The project used the radio aside the usual way and aimed at constituting a kind of counter-public in quasi public space. In the up-run of the performance leaflets were distributed inviting people to turn up at the station and to bring a radio and headphones. Over 300 people without any intention to buy or travel finally appeared, dispersed at the platforms and the adjunct shopping centre and executed the performance. They moved simultaneously after the instructions transmitted by the local and non-commercial radio channel FSK. Thus gestures and behaviour that the Deutsche Bahn tries to eliminate were brought back to what is usually still perceived as public space.
This occupation of space to some degree likens the occupation of web-servers for instance through the community of users of the ‘AntiMafia’ Software. The AntiMafia program was created by the group epidemiC and is a software programme for co-ordination of collective actions as social events and campaigns. Once the programme is installed on your PC, your computer acts as a node in the AnitMafia community of users. Exchange of information takes place through the Gnutella protocol, so anyone in the community can easily initiate new actions like server blockades and any community member can participate just by registering at the AntiMafia list for the blockade. The rest, which in case of blockade is the connecting to the respective server, is done by your computer automatically.

The channel Internet is a perfect place for collecting and distributing information which was formerly difficult to access. With the Internet an huge number of alternative, participatory information services like for instance ‘Guerrilla News’ popped up, and a couple of artists developed work into a similar direction. Out of these two of the most exposed ones are They Rule by Josh on and the Future farmers and BorderXing Guide by the British Heath Bunting. They Rule was extremely covered by press and widely shown in art shows because it reveals the closely interwoven power structure of the US American economy reminding one of a secret society. This information is open to all Internet users and can even be filled with new maps. Instead the Borderxing Guide allows only access to registered users and can only be visited on a couple of computers around the world that are admitted by Bunting. On the website of Borderxing Guide Bunting publishes information about his illegal crossings of European borders, together with directions of walking, photographs and maps of the area and lists of equipment and do’s and don’ts.
So Bunting addresses questions of immigration, illegality, national state and makes possible visitors to his website painfully experience borders, limited access and registration procedures.

Hacking Human Borders: Deceit and Hoaxes

I want to close my lecture by coming back to the fictional projects that do not primarily aim at hacking technical borders but instead successfully hack human borders. These are artistic works that predominantly pretend and act as a sort of virus which infects man instead of machine, or like Armin Medosch put it: ‘creep in the human feeling world like a Trojan horse.’
I guess we all have experienced virus hoaxes that flood our E-mail accounts since its first breed in 1988, and nearly everyone at least once has been taken in by hoaxes like the Japanese kittens in glass bricks or the famous Internet cleaning day hoax.
Political hoaxes like the online auction of votes for George W. Bush by the activist group Ubermorgen arrested enormous attention such as 400 press articles and finally led to 4 charges and the shutdown of the site.
Naturally virus hoaxes are a very effective marketing tool for anti-virus software sales, because they make people feel insecure and stir their fear of losing control. Fictional guerrilla art uses the same strategy and takes advantage of the illiteracy of the recipient. In order to deceive him, artists try to provoke strong emotions and follow the formal rules and conditions of a real event -  just as E-mail hoaxes do that pick up the semiotic and semantic schemes of real E-mails.
Within the Net Art scene there have been a couple of hoaxes that in a very smart way pretended professional debates for example between the theoretician Timothy Druckery and the net artist and poet Mark Amerika or the argument between the renown net activist Geert Lovink and ICANN expert Ted Byfield.
In 2000 the fictional artist Netochka Nezvanova appeared on the stage of media art. Named after a famous character in a novel fragment by Dostojewski, Nezvanova started to post on net art mailing lists. Her postings were extremely polemic, provocative and arty; additionally she authored some artistic software with which she won several awards like the transmediale software award in 2001. To those occasions every time someone else showed up as Netochka Nezvanova and never did what had been agreed upon. So for example at transmediale, the person who claimed to be Nezvanova came for a lecture about her Nebula software in a white dress containing living insects. She successfully hacked the transmediale programme as she preferred to read poems instead of explaining the artistic software.

In 1999 the Spanish artist, Daniel Andujar distributed and exhibited a CD-ROM called ‘Phoney’ that in case of execution of its programmes would attack telecommunication networks through dialling in and launching viruses or spy programmes like Trojan horses. The actual processes that any amateur user of the CD-ROM could easily set going were visible on the computer screen and looked so authentic that it caused maze and fear among users. Most people, who started the programme out of curiosity, ignoring the initial warnings, were convinced to really hack the network and became frightened of the possible consequences of this illegal action. Thus the project achieved what it was aiming at: growing awareness of the weakness of computer networks, recognition of a missing technical or a personal inhibition threshold.

The last project that I want to refer to is a video by the Bureau of Inverse Technology which in 2001 won the International Media Art prize of the ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany. The video ‘Bit plane’ was recorded by mini camera attached to a model aircraft that flew over the area of the Silicon Valley. It recorded pictures of famous hardware and software company buildings like Xerox and HP, thus moving to an allegedly inaccessible air space and illegally collecting modern effigies of the real. The bad quality of the video and its drop-outs support its authenticity and improve its abstract quality. The commentary supposes that the disturbances actually are caused by companies’ air shield and thus evokes associations of military protection systems.

These fictional projects that infect us like viruses reinforce our immune system and sustain our scepticism. They all aim at stopping us to believe ourselves safe and to attract our attention to the obscurity of categories and simple explanations. When facing such a project we are forced to practice our abilities to judge and become alert the next time we have an encounter with apparently easy-to-judge incidents.

Resume

This leads me to some final thoughts about the type of work that I have shown and contextualised during the past hour: As I have said already in the beginning, the presented projects are very difficult to categorise simply as art or as political activities, many lie just in between or oppose to any of those classifications. Actually most project authors don’t understand themselves as artists and try to avoid any kind of statement on their type of work – or even further any kind of contact with the contemporary art system. So it does not surprise that institutions like contemporary art museums or galleries often refuse to exhibit and contextualize communication guerrilla art projects. The deepness of that gap between the institutions and media art practice is emphasized in a statement by Friedrich Kittler, who teaches aesthetics and history of media at the Berlin Humboldt University. In his comment on the winners of the International Media Art Prize of the ZKM in 2001, where ‘Bit Plane’ won and he was on the jury, he demands for a computer art that eventually should drop the old concepts of the ‘oeuvre’ or and the ‘object’, be it a CD ROM or a video tape.

Evidently a large segment of media art and some parts of the contemporary visual art reject any labelling and ask strongly for a different treatment on both levels: sensual perception and intellectual analysis. Those content-heavy, often process-based and participatory projects that we have seen do not address the art sensorium like eyes and ears predominantly. This might be regarded as a weak point and to some degree I share this view. But the neglect of beauty and the overemphasis of the real and righteous is a current trend in art that is evident throughout all media.

Using technology for artistic purposes has broadened the playground and expanded the forms of artistic expression as well as the way of working creatively. The quantity of works with new media do not fit to ordinary and traditional concepts of art but ask for new ways of thinking, judging and understanding. This kind of artistic media practice takes place outside the museum mainly, and finds only a forum in bottom-up organisations like media art festivals or media labs and initiatives which still operate aside the main contemporary art scene.

These festivals, media art associations and exhibition spaces are ‘attention machines’ in their field, comparable to what contemporary art museums are for their audiences. Once a piece or project has accessed this platform successfully, the media art community notices and very often salvages the creative work. The media art system to some degree is still like a parallel world beside the ‘real’ art system that is more compatible to the market and the audience.

It should be asked whether guerrilla art projects are still effective if they don’t leave the media art ghetto. Projects like re-code.com or Minds of concern hit the public because they leave the art system and multiply its effect though press publishing.
Videos like Bit Plane or Video Hacking only function in the small ghetto of the media art system, thus reaching only a rather limited audience which is already critical and shares the views of their authors.

However, beside the variety of projects (and I’ve shown only parts) which might be summarized under the term of communication guerrilla and which may be labelled as art or not in the future, there is interesting creative artistic work with new media that waits to be discovered and experienced.

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Espai Zer01 Olot
El Espai Zero1 del Museu Comarcal de la Garrotxa lanza una atrevida apuesta con su ciclo “Dimensions variables”, que abre Daniel G. Andújar con una instalación que sorprende por su creatividad
El proyecto cuestiona, mediante la parodia, un arte a la medida de las instituciones y del mercado
Suplement Culturals. La Vanguardia
MERY CUESTA Y ROC PARÉS – 28/01/2004

“Dimensions variables” es el título del ciclo recién inaugurado en el Espai Zero1 del Museu Comarcal de la Garrotxa en Olot. El ciclo está compuesto de dos exposiciones, la primera consagrada al valenciano Daniel G. Andújar y la siguiente, del andaluz Pedro G. Romero, que será inaugurada a finales de febrero. A la hora de diseñar el ciclo, los responsables de éste, David Santaeulària y Valentín Roma, se han ceñido a tres firmes propósitos: en primer lugar, tener en cuenta las particularidades de una ciudad como Olot y su condición periférica, pero también el incipiente germen activista existente en la ciudad (nos referimos en el caso de la exposición de G. Andújar al colectivo Olot Wireless). Por otro lado, los artistas seleccionados para “Dimensions variables” encajan en el perfil de lo que sus organizadores consideran “independientes”, creadores que supuestamente trabajan al margen (o en los márgenes) de los intereses institucionales y ajenos (o acaso sólo críticos) a las órbitas expositivas comerciales. Por último, “Dimensions variables” tiene como objetivo la resistencia a la simplificación que conlleva la turistificación, un movimiento preocupante en la Garrotxa y tristemente paralelo a lo ocurrido desde el desarrollismo en la Costa Brava.
La propuesta “Individual Citizen Project TM” es a la vez una instalación y el lanzamiento de un CD-Rom que, bajo el título “X-devian”, contiene una distribución del sistema operativo Linux, así como algunas aplicaciones informáticas de código abierto. La instalación juega a defraudar las expectativas del típico espectador de museo y pone en cuestión el propósito, el tiempo y el espacio de la visita a una exposición. Con este planteamiento, deudor de la deconstrucción analítica y de las denuncias conceptualistas de los setenta, G. Andújar profundiza en la línea de sus trabajos anteriores, donde las reminiscencias de Muntadas o el Grup de Treball son actualizadas con las problemáticas específicas de la mediatización y la globalización. La interesante propuesta de G. Andújar busca la participación social al involucrar al visitante en la manipulación de los recursos técnicos que se ponen a su disposición, como si de un taller de trabajo se tratara. ¿Se consigue esta interacción? Pasemos a recorrer las tres salas en que se articula la instalación.

La instalación sorprende a su entrada con una primera sala enmoquetada, brillantemente iluminada y llena de los elementos persuasivos propios de una campaña de lanzamiento de un sistema informático comercial. Logotipos y colores corporativos nos invitan al consumo del producto, el paquete informático X-devian. Éste se encuentra dentro de una vitrina junto a la cual presentadores televisivos pregonan las excelencias desde un monitor de vídeo. Este vídeo promocional ha sido construido por el artista mediante la apropiación de fragmentos de anuncios de Macintosh. Su pregón tecnoeufórico rompe el silencio de la sala del museo. X-devian es presentado, así, siguiendo los cánones publicitarios de incitación al consumo tecnológico desenfrenado y acrítico. En la pared unos rótulos de vinilo recuerdan que estamos en una exposición de Daniel G. Andújar en el espai ZERO1 del Museu Comarcal de la Garrotxa, con el patrocinio de Fundació Caixa Catalunya, organizada por el Institut de Cultura del Ayuntamiento d’Olot y la colaboración del Departament de Cultura, Olot Wireless y la corporación ficticia que el propio artista creó hace años bajo el nombre de Technologies to the People.

Desde esta sala, se accede a una segunda presentada como la trastienda de la primera. Como si de un lugar clandestino se tratara, sin moqueta y en penumbra, manuales de programas pulcramente impresos cuelgan de la pared a disposición del público, y una serie de elementos de la cultura “cracker” como móviles destripados o una tarjeta de Canal+ pirateada, reposan sobre una gran mesa de taller. En esta silenciosa sala se han instalado seis ordenadores que funcionan con el sistema X-devian. Los puntos de trabajo revelan una concepción del espacio expositivo alejada de la convencional, puesto que no requiere del visitante una actitud meramente contemplativa, sino que promueve el uso.

Acabemos nuestro recorrido como espectador convencional en la tercera sala, quizá la parte más críptica de la instalación. Una sala de conferencias, a la que se accede por el lugar del orador, coloca al visitante de pronto y como colofón ante una sala llena de sillas vacías, invitándole a poner en crisis su papel contemplativo para involucrarle en una ceremonia de simulacro sobre la liberación global de la información.

Si en nuestro camino de vuelta hasta la entrada recapitulamos, es posible que la escenificación cuidadosamente planificada de la sala de conferencias y el taller de “hackeo” se nos antoje una mera representación que sugiere, pero no permite la participación que plantea. Sin embargo, también es cierto que G. Andújar es sabedor de que su público no será específicamente artístico, y que el usuario habituado a trabajar en esta dirección hará una lectura de este espacio más pragmática. Por tanto, una cuestión referencial alude a si es la sala de exposiciones el lugar adecuado para ubicar esta suerte de taller informático.

En definitiva, G. Andújar asume así el papel de artista como facilitador de la información. Con esta dinámica que se aproxima a la parodia del cuadro dentro del cuadro cuestiona la vigencia y necesidad de una producción artística a la medida de un modelo expositivo. Con su propuesta social, García Andújar sigue retando tanto a las instituciones como al mercado a mantener su incesante incorporación de nombres, que como el suyo, emergen con fuerza en el panorama internacional muy a pesar de políticas culturales tan deleznables y populistas como las que promueve el PP de Valencia. Estaremos atentos para escuchar a los comisarios de este interesante ciclo en sus balances finales para saber hasta qué punto la participación social que se busca en esta propuesta legitima este tipo de trabajo que se mantiene aparentemente equidistante del mundo del arte y de la cultura hacker. Dos mundos que se resisten a poner en obra los puentes que algunos teóricos dibujan con la esperanza de resucitar el humanismo a golpe de evangelizaciones tecnófilas.

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Presented with advertising video in the exhibition, and during the Irational Action Weekend in Dortmund Judging from the aesthetics x-devian looks like your standard commercial proprietary software. With its minimalistic »X« and slogan reading »With over 150 innovative new features, it’s like having an all-new computer«, the stylishly designed black-and-white cover effectively signals that this product means business — which it does. However, the content and not least the ethics of the product is explicitly opposed to the software culture promoted by neo-liberal corporations like Microsoft and Apple. As a bootable operating system (i. e. it does not need to be installed on your computer but can be run directly from the portable disk) based on GNU/Linux, x-devian is involved not in the business of capitalism but of free and shared culture. The system represents a comprehensive conceptual and practical reconfiguration of the economics of mainstream software culture. To use it, no investment in expensive software or hardware is necessary. Just insert the disk – which your can order for free at the X-Devian website – in your personal computer and you are ready to “go free”. Thus with X-Devian Technologies To The People invites the common user to experience and reflect upon the alternative wonders of Free and Libre Open Source Software, the true social and political »evolution of the species« in the computer age. (Jacob Lillemose)

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