HANS BERNHARD, 2000-2002 texts
2002_RACE_CLASS
+++ unfinished +++ unfinished +++ unfinished +++ +++ unfinished +++ unfinished +++ unfinished +++ dear creamerZ as discussed with karin from b-city, here my text concerning the reception of products by ubermorgen.com within the realms of the global net.art and media art scene and the conflict of global brands such as etoy.com and RTMark.com eating products of people working horizontally within our net"works". we split the text in two parts in order to work out our two arguments. vienna, november 2002 CNN, UBERMORGEN, RACE AND CLASS! how mass-media products by ubermorgen are consumed and received within different communities, with a focus on the global media art community mailinglists during our top-internet hit [V]ote-auction in the year 2000 [1] , global mass-media including the CNN [30 min. special feature on voteauction "burden of proof"] and all relevant news media of the western and eastern world have reported in different forms and from different viewpoints on ubermorgens [2] business-stunt. approximately 500 million people have been in contact and sometimes in conflict with this "message". we have reached people from all social and economic levels in almost all countries of this world. within the eastern and western media art community, the ubermorgen holdings sub-company voteauction ltd [sofia/bulgaria] would send out their press-releases to the respective mailinglists [7-11, syndicate, rhizome, empyre, nettime, rohrpost...]. worst case scenarios were lists such as nettime, where the postings would be considered trash or simple announcements [obviously the "moderators" are not capable of differentiating spam and a different approach towards discourse, for example in the form of a press- release]and would be sent out with massive delay. for this reason, ubermorgen content was not delivered and could therefore not be discussed by the media art community. now, many people from this scene have never learned that [V]ote-auction was a collaboration between james baumgartner [the founder] and ubermorgen. they considered [V]ote-auction to be a business-venture, which it actually was! business art and legal art by ubermorgen seems to be too difficult or too primitive to be received by this .net population. other lists would simply forward the press-releases through to their users without getting much discussion. today, 2 1/2 years after the action, ubermorgen holds talks all around the world and presents [V]ote-auction, the foriginal documents [court documents of the case] and tv-material such as the CNN tape [pure pop!]. it is very well received by the live audiences, although the seriousness of the project and business- venture seems to be too much reality for almost all spectators, so they prefer to laugh rathern than think and be confronted by the reality: "bringing capitalism and democracy closer together" with a market orientation and media hacking strategies. how strong brands such as RTMark.com and etoy.com eat others fruit and sweat do a search on google for voteauction, and then try to find the credits for ubermorgen [hans bernhard [7,8] and lizvlx] on the RTMark web-site [3], very hard to find! it took us 2 months of negotiations with RTMark just to get a mentioning, a link is still not in there]. in the now more prominent french-version, ubermorgen is not even mentioned at all. [4,5] ubermorgen took the beating and most of the heat for the [V]ote-auction project and james took some more heat for his "naive" talking to the US feds. we are sorry about this. we told him to not talk about the user database to the FBI. he has support by the ACLU and EFF and does local fundraisers, and he always gets proper credits all over the place. as far as we are informed RTMark.com took no legal heat at all, they just claim the project to be "theirs" [at least people perceive it that way, although they use the trick with the funds, but it would be dishonest to excuse it with such a trick. it is about who speaks where, and whom the people believe and what ressources the journalists use!. and to have james as an RTMark.AGENT, come on! he was able to create something fucking genius like voteauction, for what does he need RTMark.com? to loose his credits? [sorry, cynical] we pushed [V]ote-auction to the limit so it could get exposure on CNN, so it would be in practically ALL MASS MEDIA GLOBALLY for over 3 months. without our tactical intelligence and our nerves, this project would have died right after it got some press. but no! it became one, if not the biggest fucking MEDIA HACKING stunts of the last years! 1000s of articles, tv and radio shows... we got threatend and physically and digitally spammed by the CIA, the FBI, by janet reno and 13 very very agressive state attorneys with legal documents and court orders, our provider was sued in 4 cases as we were all sued personally many times. i had my attorneys investigate the possibility of extradiction. we invested over 4 months, fully dedicated to this project. we were near bankrupcy at the end. your, rtmarks support was 1 press- release, some press-consulting for james baumgartner in the early stages [james is the inventor of the vote-auction idea and the creator of the first web-site], and to connect james baumgartner with hans bernhard, for which we are very greatful. we think we deserver the proper credits for the whole project and for the risks and "creative" work we did and we deserve not to be misused the way you do it on your web-site and in your presentations! because in our work, the projects themselves are more important than our own label [ubermorgen or hans bernhard or lizvlx], we don't push ourselves into the foreground. but this makes us and our projects [voteauction, NAZI~LINE, ipnic.org,....] extremely vulnerable to people like RTMark and etoy, always pushing your the label ontop of everything, as a core strategy. for me, these strategies is based on TAKING, rather than the GIVING or SHARING! and this gets problematic within a network of people working/giving for "free" on projects together and exchanging free and open information! i am not naive about it, but for me there is a line between fair use/natural opportunism and unfair and strategic misuse. another example, WTO / CILS salzburg [6], we financed the action, we invented the dr. andreas bichlbauer character [and you later turned him into andy bichlbaum, instead of having a collective virtual character together!], we gave you access to our infranstructure and know how. and what comes back, a correct link on the web-site, but no mention at all in the bloody video your acolytes show all over the place [transmediale.de, d-i-n-a.net/ campobasso, etc..].. oh man! this is not good. i get very upset every time i have to see this funny video. is it asking for too much to include your partners, sponsors and friends? i expect proper credits, disclosing the real facts about who and what, or then making an obvious joke about it so people can understand and laugh. i also would expect from you to immediately change the necessary web-entries, meta-tags and site-descriptions, and to not misuse our material, especially on the U.S. market, but also in europe, and to change your strategy in terms of presenting [V]ote-auction. the best would be to close the fund and to remove the material, we would be glad to host it on the vote-auction.net/voteauction.biz [and maybe soon voteauction.com and vote-auction.com] web-site. but most important, i would like to start a general discussion on rohrpost, syndicate, empyre, 7-11, rhizome, betacity or nettime about the powerful labels such as RTMark.com and etoy.com and their misuse of "our" net"work". personally, i start to distrust this net/work and all the collaborations. and again, that makes me very sad! i see no other possibility than finally going solo, doing products and project simply under my name, to not have such problems and the frustrations in the future. but isn't that totally fucked? i would love to hear other peoples opinions or strategies on above mentioned problems and cases. [1] http://www.vote-auction.net [2] http://www.ubermorgen.com [3] http://www.rtmark.com [4] http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=voteauction [5] http://www.rtmark.com/voteauction.html [6] http://www.theyesmen.org/wto/ [7] http://WWW.HANSBERNHARD.COM [8] http://WWW.HANSBERNHARD.COM/introduction.html +++ unfinished +++ unfinished +++ unfinished +++ +++ unfinished +++ unfinished +++ unfinished +++
copyright 2002 HANS BERNHARD