"JODI: Something Wrong is Nothing Wrong", Ad by Motherboard TV (DELL)

Keywords:  counterculture, social networking, Web 2.0, business & advertisement.

The above image, published in VICE magazine Vol 7 Nr 2 (2010), is an advertisement for the social networking platform Motherboard TV, sponsored by DELL. But people into digital culture would immediately recognize something else.
The advertisement shows a reconstruction of the homepage http://wwwwww.jodi.org, a work by the Dutch artists JODI.org, a very well known symbol of the early net.art. JODI were part of a recent show at Eyebeam gallery in New York (December 2009) and got interviewed by the team of Motherboard TV (see here).
But this advertisement, branded by DELL, might also be the symbol of something more. What were once the values and philosophy of the hacker ethic are since some years the domain of many of the business companies which represent the development of “Web 2.0” and contributed to create the notion of social media. I have analyzed this matter on an article which is going to be published on the next issue of the Arnolfini journal, ‘Concept Store’ (Bristol, UK) .

The ideas of sharing, openness, decentralization, free access to computers and the hand-on imperative of the hackers’ imaginary, today are strictly connected with the use of commercial platforms. We are facing a progressive commercialization of contexts of software development and sharing, which want to appear open and progressive (very emblematic is the motto “Don’t be evil” by Google), but which are indeed transforming the meaning of communities and networking, and the battle for information rights, placing it into the boundaries of marketplace.This process is changing the meaning of collaboration and art itself.

In the last half of the twentieth century Avant-garde art practices from Fluxus to mail art have promised the creation of collaborative art and the production of new models of sharing knowledge. Today, social networking platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Twitter and Second Life have established themselves among Internet users, representing a successful model of connecting people, an a successful business strategy. But these networking platforms have their roots in a series of experimental activities in the field of art and technology started in the last half of the twentieth century which  transformed the conception of art as object into art as a network of relationships, possibilities of collectively intervening in the creation of an artistic product.

For example, the figure of the artist as a creator of sharing platforms and of contexts for exchanging is part of a background of artistic and technological experimentation from Fluxus and mail art to hacktivism and net.art; collective identities and multiple singularity projects have direct references on the Luther Blissett Project and the Neoist network-web conspiracy (as I wrote on my previous book Networking, 2006). Today, techniques of networking developed in grassroots communities have inspired the structure of Web 2.0 platforms and have been used as a model to expand the markets of business enterprises. The principal success of a Web 2.0 company or a networking enterprise comes from the ability of enabling communities, providing shared communication tools and folksonomies.

Is it today still possible to speak about “counterculture”, when social networking has become the motto of the Web 2.0 business? Digital economy and artistic subversive practices look fully interconnected. It should not surprise that Motherboard TV choose the work of JODI to represent its corporate image, writing on it: “JODI: Something Wrong is Nothing Wrong. Viruses, 404s, spam, and other exquisite works of art”. The marketing is demonstrating to have learned the lesson very well: “language is a virus from outer space”, wrote William S. Burroughs.

The act of responding with a radical opposition does not look like an effective practice anymore. Artists should probably answer becoming cultural viruses themselves, generating cultural Trojan Horses – or better, social hacks – adopting the strategy of disruptive business as a model of artistic creation. The understanding of how network business works might show the way. Creative intersections between business and art become an important territory for the re-invention and rewriting of symbolic and expressive codes. A possible field of intervention  to create artistic, cultural and political experiences, using the unexpected, and a deep level of irony and social criticism.

AHAcktitude 2009, Milan

The community of aha@lists.ecn.org, the Italian mailing list on art and hacktivism is organizing a 3 day event in Milan at the Cantiere Social Centre. They called it AHAcktitude, as a collective development of the AHA: Activism-Hacking-Artivism project which I founded in 2001. I will contribute via Skype from San Francisco with a presentation on the topics I am researching during my visiting scholarship at Stanford University (starting August 2009).
The name of my presentation is: From Silicon Valley with Love, and it will connect art, tech and grassroots projects in the Bay Area (Saturday November 28, 9.30pm).

Here is the AHAcktitude press announcement:

In Milan on the 27, 28, and 29th of November the artivists of the AHA mailing list will meet at the “Il Cantiere” social centre.
Activist-artists, artistic hackers, social-artistic activists, call them  whatever you like. The 600 subscribers to the AHA mailing list are just a small part of all those people who, in Italy and in the world, know that the medium is not just the message, but the massage and the ‘mixage’. They know that it is not enough to complain about TV (be it mainstream, communitarian or niche), or blabber on about alternative communication, because the experience must be developed, and because communication without bodies only communicates stereotypes, and the body without intelligence only produces manipulation.

For this reason from last year the subscribers of aha@list.ecn.org meet face to face periodically, each time in a different city, to open the black boxes, to get their hands inside the technological devices for communication and imagination, to deconstruct the official knowledge and share new knowledge, to work at collective intelligence of bodies and not at capital intelligence, to broaden the resistance to globalization of multinationals.

AHAcktitude will be three days of activity and activism, of enjoyment and sharing, of study and fun. Technology, music, Internet, literature, telecommunications, marketing and social networks: everything will be targeted at open sourcing and open sharing. Methods, approaches, attitudes that are different but that communicate in order to explore, understand, and act in our condition of technologically modified beings.
Because human beings are worth more than merchandise, and we will not be satisfied while the life of someone who has more is worth more than the life of someone who has nothing.

aha@lists.ecn.org is an Italian mailing list created in 2002 within the AHA: Activism-Hacking-Artivism project, founded by Tatiana Bazzichelli,
aka T_Bazz. AHA wants to promote networking and critical thinking, connecting artistic practices to political and social activism. We define these practices as artivism.

(Txt from the AHAcktitude community website)

More info:

AHAcktitude 2009:
http://www.ahacktitude.org/event/2009/
Social Network:
www.ahacktitude.org

AHA mailing list:
http://lists.ecn.org/mailman/listinfo/aha

AHA – Activism-Hacking-Artivism:
www.ecn.org/aha