From Britannica, July 21, 2000

0100101110101101.ORG: they're Not Just Mean

"Who are you? What do you do?" Britannica.com asks 0100101110101101.ORG and gets a slap in the face answer.

This week Britannica.com provides an interview with the renegade cyber-entity known only as 0100101110101101.ORG, along with some background information.

Who is 0100101110101101.ORG?

0100101110101101.ORG never answers this kind of question. Anonymity is not merely a "proper name" matter but deals also with backgrounds and biographies. 0100101110101101.ORG's activity is not concerned with artistic individuality.

Who is your favorite Futurist?

Benito Mussolini. The fascist revolution has been the most coherent development of avant-garde utopias. The overcoming of the barrier between art and life - the slogan of the historical avant-garde - and the dream of modeling reality according to aesthetic canons found their most implacable and rigorous author exactly in Mussolini.

Does America need a national missile defense system to defend itself against nuclear attack?

No.

How are Web art and music related?

It is happening more and more frequently that musicians produce their music starting from sampling - Negativland is one of the most concrete examples - and from rearrangement of sounds, taken from the infinite number of available sources. Anyone is therefore, at the same time, a producer of raw materials, transformer, author, interpreter, and listener, in a circuit of cooperative creation and fruition. 0100101110101101.ORG proposes the same practice in art; the "hybrids" are just some samplings of the materials we have at our disposal. Nowadays the problem of creativity is not creating something new but learning how to use what already exists.

Is the subversion of viewer expectation an important part of your artistic technique, or are you just mean?

0100101110101101.ORG is interested in the subversion of the means. A good movie, like a good painting or a good novel, conveys the energy that its author has put into it; the subversion of the means becomes a metaphor for subversion tout court and wakes up the consciousness of the beholder. A movie by Jean-Luc Godard, for example, is successful because it imposes the beholder to take up a position. It is not so much a matter of renewing contents as of renewing the mechanisms of fruition. Only by deconstructing such mechanisms can we understand and, if necessary, modify them. We do not need other objects of art, but works of art able to make the beholder more conscious.

What advice would you give readers interested in starting their own Web art collection?

To look in their cache folder.

Could you summarize your position concerning the concepts of "author" and "originality"?

Theoretically every work of art can be reproduced, but with Net art the reproduction is absolutely identical to the original one. It follows that it becomes a "non-sense" to perpetrate such concepts that seemingly functioned in the real world. The notion of author in general, and therefore concepts like authenticity and plus-value, are strictly connected to the economic, institutional, and juridical aspects of traditional art. After the invention of printing, so with the automation of text reproduction, it became necessary to define the rights of the author as inventor and not only as artisan. The figure of author was born in a very particular economic and social organization, it's only too natural that it fades into the background when the system of communications and social relations changes. The non-prominence of the author conditions neither the cultural production nor the artistic creativity. Net art requests new production, preservation, and fruition criteria that often conflict with the old rules of the art system, like the necessity of critics and museums. The creation of new forms of commercialization of intellectual property appears to be evidently necessary.

What are you currently working on?

At the moment 0100101110101101.ORG is engaged to solve the contradictions of capitalism.

Are there any links readers should check out?

nSk, Johannes Baader, Negativland, R. D. Laing, Richard Stallmann, Alfred Jarry, /I/O/D, Godard, Pan Sonic, Marcel Duchamp, Leni Riefenstahl, Luther Blissett, etoy, Aleksander Brener, Mongrel, Werner Herzog, Netochka Nezvanova, Kraftwerk, Carpenter, RTMark, Bertolt Brecht, Sex Pistols, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Ernest Hemingway.