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

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

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by Inke Arns (published in: Nam June Paik Award 2006, Frankfurt am Main 2006)
Almost ten years ago with Language (property), Spanish media artist Daniel Garcia Andujar, better known under his company name Technologies to the People, developed a work which addressed the increasing privatisation and commodification of language. On a simple HTML page he listed phrases which have been registered as trademarks, and with that, had become the property of their respective owners, for example, “Where do you want to go today?TM” (Microsoft), “A better return on informationTM” (SAP), “Moving at the speed of businessTM” (UPS), “What you never thought possibleTM” (Motorola). By entitling this project “Remember, language is not freeTM” Andujar anticipated the disputes concerning “intellectual property”, which emerged in the following years (visible as early as the second half of the 1990s in the fierce battles for the allocation of domain names on the world wide web). Read the rest of this entry »

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