English – Sistema Operativo SO(S) Operating System

Individual Citizen Republic Project ™: THE SYSTEM (x-devian), 2003

11 enero, 2015
por admin

x-devian is part of an installation promoting the fictive operating
system x-devian, which is a conceptual repackaging of Ubuntu’s latest
desktop version of the Linux distribution Debian. However, while
the installation distributes an actual piece of free software, it does
not simply distribute the source code and functionalities of x-devian
so much as the cultural vocabulary, discourses, and ideas of free
software—in particular, free software operating systems. Judging by
the “front end” of the installation, x-devian looks like standard
commercial proprietary software. Presented in a setting that resembles
a stand at a fair and with a design appropriated from Apple’s Mac
OSX Panther operating system, it epitomizes the image of a desirable
consumer product in the field of technology. In a poster covering an
entire wall, a larger-than-life hand holds out a disk with the logo of
the operating system written on it, suggesting that x-devian is a gift—
or, perhaps, an offer—from the gods of the IT industry. Thus, the setting
encourages the user to be in awe of the wonders of the operating
system and accept the gift as a unique opportunity to be included in
the next technological “evolution of the species.”
However, behind this seductive surface, the “back end” of the installation
tells a different story, one in which the wonders of x-devian
are not the creation of the IT industry but of free software culture.
In a darkened space resembling a cave or secret lab, the installation
discloses the true content of the system and how it is really involved
with economics of a rather different kind; namely, those of free software.
Through a diversity of material related to free software culture,
this part of the installation not only presents x-devian as an operating
system supporting creative practices that resist prepackaged product
thinking but also explore hacks, continuous speculation, and processes
of experimentation.
Rather than emphasizing the disconnect between the front and
back end of the x-devian, the installation suggests that the development
of an aesthetics or even poetics of free software is inherent to
an understanding and development of its unique form of progressive
resistance. The significance and capabilities of free software need to
be developed not only on the code level but also on the cultural level
and must be communicated in new imaginary and visionary ways
that trump the myths of proprietary software.

English

Anarchists and Hackers, 2000

11 enero, 2015
por admin

Many of the technologies that form the core of today’s IT products were
invented in the 1960s and 1970s by the hacker community. Despite
this legacy, hackers have been continually stigmatized as criminals
and, in several cases, have been imprisoned. However, in hacker jargon,
the term hacking refers to a creative approach to cultural products
and problems, whereas exploiting the hack for personal gain at
the expense of others is cracking and is condemned by the ethical
rules of hacker culture. The material that constitutes the installation
Anarchists and Hackers is testimony to this creative approach, its historical
context, and political significance. The installation displays
twenty-two “recipes” from the infamous The Anarchist Cookbook (1971),
written by a nineteen-year-old William Powell, along with twenty-two
file cards describing equally infamous computer viruses and instructions
on how to explore digital devices and networks. A bible of the
counterculture in the United States and the anti–Vietnam War protest
movement, The Anarchist Cookbook is a do-it-yourself manual containing
recipes for the production of “rebellious” things such as explosives,
drugs, and counterfeit money, as well as phone phreaking and
free radio. The viruses and instructions show how hacking develops
the do-it-yourself spirit of the The Anarchist Cookbook in the context
of contemporary digital society, from hacking Geocities websites and
Windows 95 to sending fake emails and intercepting cellular phone
conversations. The politically ambiguous material in the files raises
questions of security and vulnerability, making the audience aware
of how control exists and can be exercised in the digital society. At the
same time, the material demonstrates how hacking can challenge
the established power structures behind that control. As such, it emphasizes
hacking as a politically loaded form of creativity that, with
an advanced and inventive technological literacy, opposes existing
power structures in the name of common empowerment.
When Anarchists and Hackers was first shown, the notorious “i love
you” and “Melissa” computer viruses were spreading and causing
fear, even panic, among the public. The viruses, although they were
the work of just a few naive and malignant individuals, fueled misconception
of the hacker community as an underground culture that
should be made illegal and fought. Anarchists and Hackers is an attempt
to correct this misconception and demonstrate the creative forces of
hacking as a progressive and necessary cultural practice.

General

phoney™ (Informational Society), 1999

11 enero, 2015
por admin

Every society has a control room from where the activities of the
general public are monitored and kept in check. Control rooms are
usually occupied by the established power structure; for example, the
(imaginary) guard at the center of Jeremy Bentham’s model prisonas-
panopticon. In the age of the Internet, control rooms are built
into the network, allowing the guards—whomever they might be—to
access and exploit the data on our personal computers, often without
us knowing it. The installation phoney (Informational Society) gives
visitors entrance to the information society control room. Taking
the form of a “shed,” the control room is filled with instructions and
tools that empower the visitor to hack a wide variety of systems by,
for example, bypassing password protections, making free longdistance
phone calls, and carrying out online attacks on a company.
To what ends the visitor might apply the hacks remains an open question,
but the material presented in the installation demonstrates both
that digital security is a serious issue and that the means of digital
empowerment—or countercontrol—are at our fingertips. The point
is obvious: The information society is defined by its means of control
and how we use them. As such the information society is not a given
entity but depends on what we make of it. Will we let ourselves be
controlled, or will we take control?
The installation includes a CD-ROM that was given the Lux Ziffer #1
award at the 2001 transmediale festival in Berlin. The award was an
anonymously sponsored prize given to “those who feed or fight the
digital dragon.”

English

TTTP Net.Art Classics Collection, 1999

11 enero, 201511 enero, 2015
por admin

How do you collect an immaterial art form like Net.Art? The question
is all the more relevant since many first-generation Net artists
opposed the institutional framework of museums as well as the commercial
framework of the gallery system. Inspired by earlier avantgarde
movements, the first Net artists wanted to create art for the
Internet as the new public space. Continuing “the dematerialisation
of the art object” (Lucy Lippard and John Chandler’s phrase
describing the conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s), their works
did not manifest physically but existed solely in the network of digital
data in the form of webpages, Web browsers, and Web archives.
The TTTP Net.Art Collection—printouts of single webpages from
seminal Net.Art works, including TTTP’s first website, framed in
enameled frames—demonstrates the misguidedness of thinking that
Net.Art can be turned into collectible items. At the same time, the
collection pays homage to these works and their use of the Internet
as medium and material and recognizes that their art-historical
importance is comparable to that of classical painting.

English

TTTP Video Collection, 1998

11 enero, 2015
por admin

The dream of access to unlimited cultural material haunted the Internet
in the early 1990s, and one of the most sought-after items was
art videos. Access to such videos had been determined by the limited
number of videocassettes in circulation, but the advent of the
Internet led to the belief that these videos, once converted to digital
form, would soon be accessible on a global scale. The impressive list
of one hundred seminal media art works from the early 1970s to the
early 1990s that constitute the TTTP Video Collection is an accommodation
of this dream, fulfilling it with purported “Satellite and
Video Speed Internet.” However, the service does not quite work as
advertised. In fact, it was never supposed to. The collection has a significant
disclaimer stating that the videos are not accessible at times
when they are being screened in a museum. Users who try to access
the videos get messages such as “Your videos can not be downloaded
at this moment” and “Check you Internet Connection.” In the spirit
of open peer-to-peer communication, users can react to the collection
by clicking on the “Tells us!” button on the front page of the website.
Some users have expressed anger and called out the collection as a
joke, but the majority have praised it while desperately asking how
they could upgrade their system to access the collection and download
the videos. The complications were intended to generate critical
awareness of the new medium of the Internet and the promises of
its cultural imaginary. Even if several thousand art videos are today
accessible online on platforms such as Ubuweb, we still have reason
to be skeptical about how the Internet gives access to different kinds
of material.

English

TTTP Photo Collection, 1997

11 enero, 2015
por admin

What is the point of TTTP collecting and storing photographs from
the Internet on its computer cache memory? In typically self-important
company jargon, it claims to do so as part of “its aim to offer
pending aspects of our contemporaneity.” One of these aspects is
copyright, and the collection is a direct challenge to the discourse
and legal framework of copyright. Digital processes and the Internet
have solved the question of the scarcity of photographic images,
including famous art photographs by Cindy Sherman and Salvador
Dalí, as well as more-commercial photographs, including pornographic
images. Not only can an image now be copied an infinite
number of times without any reduction in picture quality; it can also
be distributed worldwide in multiple copies. Joseph Beuys claims,
“every man is an artist.” TTTP’s photography collection demonstrates
that in the age of digital reproduction everyone can become
a collector. That is the essence of a copyright-free society. The label
of exclusivity that the TTTP Photo Collection (ironically) highlights
is thus actually an anachronism. However, the installation display
of the collection’s photographs, printed on regular A4 paper, shows
that the picture quality of official art prints differs from that of homemade
reproductions. Rather than emphasizing one over the other,
however, the collection openly explores this space of difference as a
new aesthetic condition that connects with the avant-garde notion
of art-into-life.

English

Technologies To The People® Promotional Video, 1994

11 enero, 2015
por admin

The basic logic of marketing is that market success has less to do
with what product you are selling and more to do with how you are
selling it. That means competition is ultimately as much a question
of discourse as of the quality of the product itself. TTTP has engaged
with this competition from day one through its tactical use of words
and images in the material distributed in support of its projects and
the company in general. In this promotional video, which is one
of several the company has produced, international tech-economic
experts are shown praising the values and ethics of TTTP against
a background of emphatic imagery. These aesthetics were common
fashion at the time, when information technology was seen as a new
evolutionary step in the process of creation and civilization. TTTP
connected with this narrative. However, the experts in the video
were hired and paid not by TTTP but by its market rivals—global
corporations such as Dell, Microsoft, and so forth. The promotional
video strings together sequences hijacked from corporate public relations
videos and appropriates, to much different ends, the abstract
concepts they use to deliver ultra-positive descriptions of the role
their companies play in the world of advanced technology. Instead
of promoting a business-centered worldview, TTTP’s video uses these
concepts to express a human-centered worldview. The video thereby
confronts the viewer with the question of which of the two worldviews—
or sociopolitical economies—he or she wants to use to define
“freedom,” “the future,” “flexibility,” and, not least, “access to technology.”
The video ends with the quotation “Because You’re Worth It,”
which in the context of TTTP suggests that the public is worth more
than the money it pays for consumer technology.

English

Street Access Machine® (iSAM™), 1996

9 enero, 2015
por admin

An anecdote told by a company representative has it that when TTTP
launched its advertising campaign for the iSAM—or Street Access
Machine—at a conference in Hamburg, the company was immediately
contacted by Apple. Surprisingly, Apple was not concerned that
the design of the product might infringe on one of its copyrights.
Instead, it expressed a strong interest in the wireless technology
inside iSAM. At the time the California company was promoting the
creative and democratizing potential of personal computer technology
in the name of dot.com capitalism. Blinded by the fantasy of
wireless handheld computers, Apple did not realize that iSAM was
a fictitious product and that the advertising campaign was a subversive
comment on the very ideology Apple was promoting. Contrary
to Apple’s argument, the iSAM demonstrated that personal computer
technology does not necessarily make for a more equal society. With
the billion-dollar business of Apple as an example, personal computer
technology is evidently involved in a new form of capitalism
that, like earlier forms of capitalism, produces social hierarchies,
including figures like the beggar. Whether the beggar who is able to
take credit card payments is a promising or tragic figure remains a
deliberately open question, but the work makes clear that beggars
remain beggars in the new economy.
The iSAM was one of several (fictive) products registered and promoted
by TTTP via posters, leaflets, and a video designed according
to common corporate aesthetics. Other products included Street
Access Machine, the Recovery Card, and the Personal Folkcomputer.
They demonstrated how corporate logic was appropriating the language
of democratization and creativity as the new means of reinforcing
its social and cultural control. At the same time, the products also
pointed out that the techno-gadget can be reimagined according to
truly progressive, democratic, and creative principles. TTTP’s products
encourage the public, as the rap group Public Enemy was saying
in the late 1980s, to “Don’t Believe the Hype” and to reconsider the
notion of “technologies to the people.”
The products also got the attention of the leftish German art
magazine Texte zur Kunst, which read the products at face value and
criticized them for presenting “technology as a means to abolish
social injustice, blindly believing in the progressive function of these
technologies.” The review reflected the deep fear of technology (as
an inherently capitalist machinery) that at least at the time was still
prevalent in left-wing politics. The products, however, point beyond
such traditional preconceptions or knee-jerk prejudices to suggest
that technology can be appropriated by and for the people.

Project

Technologies To The People® Corporate Image, 1994

9 enero, 20159 enero, 2015
por admin

Logos and slogans are fundamental to companies. Not only are they
easily distributed; they also communicate, with visual and conceptual
pointedness, the heart and soul—the brand—of the company to
the public of possible customers. From its inception in 1994 TTTP
has understood the significance of the logo as a means by which to
distinguish itself from other companies in the competitive field of
contemporary technology. As its company logo demonstrates, TTTP
has embraced as well as challenged corporate aesthetics and made
them an integral part of its business strategy. The TTTP logo’s simple
graphical lettering signals that this is a company that is able to focus
on the essentials of a given situation and is aware of its core values.
Furthermore, the rainbow-colored bolt of lightning in the letter T
signals that the company acts with tremendous force, like Thor with
his hammer, or on a scale comparable to a power station. Combine
these messages with the slogan “Access to Technology Is a Human
Right,” and you have a strong impression of what kind of unique
company TTTP is and how cleverly and effectively it handles its subversive
and inventive business. Again and again it has paid dividends
to its “shareholders” with projects that have pushed the agenda for
the technological society of today in more democratic directions. As
stated in its 2000 annual report, the company’s priorities are driven
by the feedback loop that characterizes its relationship to its public.
In opposition to most other technology companies, such as Apple
and Microsoft, TTTP has focused on solutions aimed at people not
in their role as consumers but as critical and active participants in
the development of society.

Etiqueta: <span>English</span>