-- lecture held at the international
design indaba, capetown / rsa --
-- indaba-magazine article with hans_extrem can be found here --
-- a
video about the conference --
hello!
my name is haaaaaaans!
my name is liz!
my voice is victoria, my voice is liz, i will be your accoustic host this afternoon.
haaans will operate the web
for your eyes, i will talk and hopefully pronounce all words the way you need
them to understand what this madman and his lovely sharp partner
liz are doing.
so, first of all. thanks for the invitation, thanks for the invitation, thanks
for the invitation, it is a great honor to speak here in south
africa and in front of you! i hope you enjoy the flight with ubermorgen.
for questions, blows to my head, or just some feedback, please await the end
of my presentation. i am victoria, i am not so interactive... please listen
carefully, there is a full load of story and visual content coming! therefore,
lets go straight to it and rock da house with some real corporate shit and media
hacking samples...
i will tell you stories on my, or should i say hans, business and art ventures,
the etoy-holding
and the ubermorgen group, both networks of companies, me and my partner lizvlx,
own and operate on our own, and with local managers and artists. our network
and friends includes ventures such as micromusic
dot net , jodi dot org , lo-res dot org , irational dot org , d-planet dot
org , type 01 dot com , dextro , eduardo kac, slycer dot org , alexei shulgin
, art mark dot com and many more net art and media art entities.
to not only have myself talk and tell stories.. i will show you key
visuals, performance and related web-sites along with the stories, plus
a nice 15 minutes video sequence from our smash internet-hit of the year 2000,
the vote-auction action.
french philosopher jean beaudrillard
once said about ubermorgen: "ubermorgen means the day after tomorrow, a slight
tip towards their aestehtic and activist vision and prejudice, they are hardcore
and radical in their actions and they are extremely strange and highly
intelligent people". end quote.
i intentionally do not solely focus on visual aspects, but on the, what we call
gesamtkunstwerk, or in english overall art concept , sort of the meta-level
bringing together all our legal, corporate and aestehtic art forms and activities.
cause.. the visuals and the designs are produced for individual screen-consumption
and not primarily intended for big time projections. and also, the net enables
you to look at our stuff, how, when and where you want to, and best, for
free! that is what it has been designed for and how you should all look
at it !
the title of my talk: "things she wants to have : design versus media hacking"
refers to my partner liz, who sadly can't be here with us, but is mainly responsible
for the way the uebermoorgen group visually communicates... she is a sweet,
and tough girl, with her very own way, she loves fire extinguishers, rabbits
and ikea furniture, these are all the things
she wants to have, otherwise she will not work.
so. in very general terms, or better said, in global terms, our core-focus is
on radical global
business ventures and the production and maintenance of these corporate
structures. we look at this from a business, a financial, a profit-driven angle.
and secondly, from a purely aesthetic angle. we produce corporate style and
excitement on a global level. i have been called a maverick businessman, or
the etoy promotion hammer, or "the nasty shock marketing maniac" by many mass
media platforms such as wired magazine, the washington post, MSNBC, frankfurter
allgemeine, le monde, but also by italian underground magazines, korean business
magazines and german theory publications.
. that is why we say a loud and a very affirmative yes to globalization and
technology! along with some our partners in crime, for example the yes-men!
especially in business
opportunity recession times world-wide, stocks and asset prices very low..
this is the best time to invest into new ventures!!
we are kids from the 80s , influenced by cocaine
high speed brokers making 1 billion on day a and losing 2 billion on day
b and still having the most beautiful ferraris and super-models. thats what
the kids from the 80s are all about, and thats their obligation and desire ,
forever! i am really passionate about that, so. for starters, i wanna now introduce
you to one of my very first ventures to gain wealth and women.
etoy. and the etoy-corporate network. in 1996 pop-star be-iork from iceland,
said the following about etoy.
"yes!... and all our children will be playing in their garden of joy surrounded
by glamour and perverted disco tunes.. etoy, immature digital priests from another
world..."
the general slogan for all etoy-activities and products is. leaving reality
behind. . etoy was founded in 1993 in a swiss mountain training-facility, funded
by japanese venture capital and managed and ran by 7
highly trained etoy-agents.. one of them being myself , etoy-hans respectively
etoy-brainhard.
together with 3 other founding members, we are currently running the
etoy-HOLDING, the honest corporation, the mother company, holding major
and minor stakes in all etoy-companies, such as the etoy-venture-association
based on the cayman islands, the original etoy-corporation based in zurich switzerland,
the etoy-ltd germany and the etoy-ltd in bulgaria.
the etoy-holding is primarily dealing with financial, legal, trademark buying
and strategic planning, so, my involvement is purely profit-oriented, in terms
of financial, communicative, pop-starish and aesthetic profit. in 1996, etoy
was awarded with the golden nica, the first price of the ars electronica festival
award for new media. this legitimation push was mainly generating a massive
followship and open markets in japan, taiwan, namibia, new zealand and chile,
south america.
to give you a quick idea about the history of the various etoy-corporations.
it all started with the etoy-tanksystem, the home base of the etoy-agents emigrating
into the internet in 1994, with the very symptomatic slogan: "etoy: the pop-star
is the pilot is the coder is the designer is the architect is the manager is
the system is etoy"... from this
etoy-Tanksystem, all etoy-operations were initiated and operated by the
etoy board, consisting of the seven founding members. since 1999, due to personal
conflicts, the board has been split in two parts. but that is too contemporary.
to look at the early days. the corporate identity and new panic management strategies
were core to our high pressure explorations. always online - some times lost.
the etoy agents used the web as the stage, disrupt the data flow, abuse technology
and expand pop-music. flashing into the future. releasing the edge game, run,
jump, shoot for the digital generation. no seatbelt - no backup. so please dont
forget, this was conceptually, actionwise and visually created for online use
in 1993 to 1996, in a time when the world wide web was unknown to the general
public.
for example. the digital
hijack - with 1.4 million internet-hostages taken in a 4-month period in
1996, by legally hacking into the five major search-engines of this time. etoy
software robots infiltrated the web, the etoy gang configured a trap for net-travellers.
the twilight zone of the medium formed the place of action. search engines were
transformed into a stage. designed as a merger between a hollywood movie script
action and a real airplane hijack, the digital hijack was a shocking experience
and a very violent attack on the naive internet-user of the mid 90s
.and. the etoy-tanks - these are globally traveling cargo-containers built into
operational structures [offices, studios], removable within 8 hours, the etoy-tanks
are constantly moving around the globe and host etoy-agents during their duty...
then, in 1998, the etoy-corporation did their IPO and issued the etoy-shares.
640.000 class-A shares.. you can monitor the share-price and get some information
on etoy on www etoy dot com and etoy dot ag.
the mission is to invest into the code of tomorrow..."
etoy investors include gianni agnelli, david zwirner, lego international, laurie
anderson, francois mitterand and many more. dividends are not paied out in cash
but in cultural value in the form of artistic projects, such as the digital
hijack or pervert business and community actions and wars such as... the
toywar.
the etoy versus california e-commercia giant etoys [at the time valued at 8
billion dollars stock value in 1999]... this legendary battle of the etoy-corporation
had only one winner, the etoy-corporation!
this may 20, two thousand two, harpercollins london will publish a book about
the background and the history of the etoy-corporate network, the fight with
e-commerce giant eToys, and the people behind etoy. and the latest etoy publication
just released is an article in rem
koolhaas new book called "mutations" with the title: "breakthrough to the
world code: etoy's concept of net architecture."
so.. you better watch out for corporate press-releases and possible pop-ups
on your computer screen or some news-feature in your preferred financial news
or fine art publication. the mother of all etoy companies, the etoy holding,
will go public may two thousand two with a press-release regarding various legal
and trademark conflicts and possible law suits against the editors and publishers
of any articles, documentaries or books on or about or mentioning etoy.
now i would like to move away from the very fascist etoy-businesses to the network
of companies i started to found in 1999 together with liz. we wanted to expand
our vision of corporate aesthetics to a more network and contemporary form of
companies and other legal entities.
we call this network the
ubermorgen group, it is also a holding. the ubermorgen group consists of
companies in germany, austria, switzerland and bulgaria. we are heavily involved
in software development, licensing deals, high-end consulting services for global
multinationals such as skim dot com and the allianz insurance corp, and in fine
art and applied design...
the core ubermorgen people, or like we say, the ueber-people are, business-terror-style
bitch lizvlx a-k-a maria haas, who holds a masters degree in market research
and advertisement from the vienna school of economics. she currently works and
lives in berlin and vienna. and myself, hans extreme, a-k-a, net-callboy, or,
hans a bernhard, or luzius bernhard, since 2 years trying to get some words
on paper for my phd thesis.
founded in 1999, ubermorgen has completed an amazing amount of legal entities,
projects, law suits and publications. global mass media communications as art
form, as fine art and as business strategy. shock marketing, drama marketing,
character marketing are some of our communications strategies we applied in
our work and also sold to DOT com and old-school corporations willing to pay
our excessive prices for consulting and campaign-production. this year we have
raised our fees 22% respectively 25% just to make clear that we are the best
and you have to pay your best, so you can get us. so, if, for example madonna
wants to release her new album online, or if the world needs another superstar
fine artist, we are ready to communicate ourselves in order to give the world
what it wants!
self-funded by our excessive fees, and by controlling our budgets to be slick,
swell and with minimal overhead due to intelligent and effective use of new
technology. we host our server farm in our bedroom, but our bedrooms are our
offices, and our 2 cats are our current kids.
out of such activities, a series of companies was released in the last three
years due to liability and aesthetic reasons, our ventures are such dangerous
and radical approaches, that we have to distribute the possible areas of attack
by enemy companies or governmental institutions.
so, our key-companies currently are.
the ubermorgen holding company, with headquarters and legal body in vienna,
austria.
the ubermorgen ltd in sofia bulgaria, the main entity to channel liability cases.
the e-sof ltd in sofia bulgaria,
a software production company with a bulgarian style web-site done by eyeriz
from eyeriz dot com.
and the vote-auction ltd, sofia bulgaria, the legal body for the vote-auction
action...
and as i said and explained initially, the ongoing growth and activities of
the etoy-holding and its subsidiaries.
since january this year, you can regularly update yourself at the ubermorgen
news agency, just visit ubermorgen dot com and get yourself the daily ubermorgen
briefing. it is right there popping up into your face..
so what are we actually doing?
our initial pr-launch was a press-release we issued in the name of the jury
of the ars electronica in linz in 1999, the most important new media art festival
and new media art award. the press-release was headlined: "li-nux wins pris
ars electronica due to microsoft intervention". this very detailed and in-depth
e-mail describing the potential bribery of the net-category jury, was sent out
in the name of the head of the jury, to
over 100-thousand e-mail-adresses globally, including journalists, media-and
culture people and the global tech-community.
on the festivals opening monday morning, over 250 journalists required information
on this press-release from ars electronica representatives. 6 hours after the
release, the first articles, claiming this e-mail to be a fake, appeared in
international media-art and technology publications such as slashdot org and
li-nux-today.. but it was way too late, the virus was spread and even myself
received our press-release by colleagues and biz-partners over 50 times the
next day. so the multiplication of the e-mail goes into 2 digit million figures
by viral distribution. hundreds of articles about this supposed manipulation
of the award by the corporate sponsors, but also about the then obvious fake
character of this message were published all around the world. revelations do
fuel even more attention with our method. during the festival, it was the topic,
and representatives of the etoy-corporation were agressively asked wheter they
were the authors. due to internal etoy conflicts, the etoy reps were not able
to deny or confirm any relation to this incident, although they were knowing
that ubermorgens was behind it all. it was big fun and although it was a hard
manipulation, the claim that the open source li-nux will be taken over by corporate
entities became reality just a year later, by companies such as h p , compaq
and others.
but this was just a teaser-action and a artistic show-off of ubermorgens capabilities
in terms of communications and perversion. this way we launched the etxtreme
dot ru brand, one of our early content creations and ubermorgen group message
into the public consciousness and especially into the minds of the global media
art and tech scene.
then, we hit pay dirt with our feature action in the year twothousand. we got
our hands on the everlasting and totally swell Vote-auction.
vote-auction was a platform originally invented by united states art student
james baumgartner in spring two-thousand. it was a platform for american citizens
to offer and sell their individual votes during the us-presidential election
two-thousand, al gore against georg dubbya bush] . on november seventh, companies,
political parties or individuals could then auction off these votes via the
vote-auction web-site and buy whole states. due to heavy pressure by governmental
officials, james baumgartner offered the at this time very small venture to
the ubermorgen group, middleman to this transaction was art-mark dot com, an
american corporation specialized in globalization activism.
there are many other new american industries that we were considering investing
in, including the prison industry and the K-12 education industry. america continues
to privatize many of its public sectors, and this presents many
opportunities for the foreign investor.
so, ubermorgen took over controll of vote-auction and pushed the limits in terms
of public relations, shock marketing and global business-development of the
platform, to a global mass media level unseen before! the vote-auction core
message, the programm of vote-auction is: "bringing capitalism and democracy
closer together!"
the american principles of capitalism and their idea of democracy is already
tightly interwined, the corruption of the election process is legal for large
corporations, but illegal for individuals. vote-auction consequently pushes
this direction and wants to develop a perfect market for votes. vote-auction
was not and will never be political. it is purely business, art and market oriented.
there is no underlying ideology, but only the very strong belief in affirmation.
you say democracy. you say capitalism, we say vote-auction. bringing capitalism
and democracy closer together!
the key-facts of this 4 month public relations and business action. ubermorgen
immediately founded the vote-auction ltd in bulgaria for liability reasons,
although most law suits were on private persons such as myself or the ceo of
our provider and on james baumgartner.
i have some of these documents with me, so dont hesitate to come up and have
a look!
thirteen state attorneys, for example from arizona, massachussetts, new york,
california, wisconsin, missouri, texas, washington, investigated and very aggressively
communicated with us. we received up to ten legal threats per united parcel
services or fedex daily with temporary injunctions, court complaints and much
more legal stuff, actually we received the whole web-site per photocopies for
over a 150 times. state and federal attorneys must have spent 1000s of hours
and millions of dollars investigating vote-auction.
we have started to do exhibitions with such legal
documents all around the world. i will actually do one in the johannesburg
gallery the premises next week, opening the 9th. .
. federal attorney janet reno investigated the case. the central intelligence
agency, the federal bureau of investigation and the the national security agency
investigated the case, we suspect them to have done break and entries on our
servers running the vote-auction site, but we can not prove this. we were hacked
during the action and had to invest serious money into our new security system
of our server-farm.
two domains were illegaly shutdown by united states authorities. vote dash auction
dot com and voteauction dot com were taken away illegally and are still not
operative until today.
we had approximately 20
to 30 interviews per day over a period of 3 months. we would therefore develop
the story in realtime and see our new stories and ideas printed in real-time
or next day, all around the globe. we call this art form media hacking.
four temporary injunctions were actually granted and issued by courts in missouri,
wisconsin, massachussetts and illinois.
we counted over two thousand five hundred press-features alone, including international
television, radio, newspapers and magazines, online publications. from daylies
to business magazines, from art to entertainment radio shows. in reality, you
can probably tripple the number of news features and you might be close to the
real amount of press vote-auction was getting globally during this four-month
period. we reached over 500 million people with our brand and some kind of pervert
commercial message.
james baumgartner was questioned and taken in custody several times. federal
bureau of investigation agents were observing him and frequently questioning
him. once, i was talking with james via ICQ, this online-chat system. i was
totally stoned on dope and l-s-d in my hotel room in bulgaria. james would not
answer for about ten minutes, then he came back on chat and told me about some
two federal agents knocking at his door. they wanted to talk to him. he didnt
wanted to talk to them so he sent them away. later he did talk, and he talked
way too much. due to his talking, there is still a law suit ongoing in chicago,
with the electronic frontier foundation and the american union for civil rights
involved. an endless story without any proof of illegal activities, like in
all cases vote-auction representatives have been named plaintiffs! but the beauty,
we get a continuous stream of legal documents.
all other temporary injunctions and law suits announced were settled or dismissed.
but we have just entered a law suit against a german company selling dot com
domains. so there we will generate money and legal documents for our fine art
branch. this company sold us the vote-auction domain. it was illegally turned
off way too early, actually five days prior to election day, due to a court-order
delivered by e-mail to a company in geneva, switzerland! this is an international
legal scandal, but actually very hard to go after. so we decided to go step
by step and start suing the german company. they will then sue this company
in switzerland and so on. but it was not a problem that they shut us down. we
had over three hundred press features in america on election day alone, we had
entities such as hell dot com and over hundred other sites pointing their full
web traffic to vote-auction. so we were there, we won, because all the united
states officials wanted was to shut us down on election day, so the integrity
of the election process was not in danger. they did not succeed! with the mess
in florida, vote-auction found its historical continuation in full screen hardcore
reality, so we could just sit back, finally just relax, watch it and enjoy.
the not design of the web-site design was initially from james baumgartner.
we updated it, but did not want to manipulate it too strongly in order to keep
it authentic. we just added some pervert visual features and fucked around in
the code in order to show off. it is hard to publish such visual work for the
sake of enabling communications with a mass public, but sometimes you just have
to work with very painful visuals in order to achieve your goals. the gifts
we got for that are for example e-mails from veterans of the second world war.
they were writing us about the totally red sunset in the normandie 1945 at invasion
day, the sunset mixing with the blood of killed soldiers in the atlantic and
the aesthetic of the war for democracy, and how we were destroying democracy
with vote-auction and how they gonna kill us for that. we felt honored and threatend
by these poetic emails.
so. now, for some more real good entertainment and in-depth information on the
venture. here a excerpt of the "burden of proof" show on cnn international,
an exclusive on vote-auction and the legal consequences. haaaans a. bernhard
has also taken part in the discussion by phone from europe. actually i was in
our underground lab in berlin just doing a tv-interview for a german news channel,
parallel listening to the cnn realmedia stream with approximately 10 seconds
delay, and talking to cnn via my communicator. this is fine prime time material
from the global news leader. enjoy!
*** VIDEO
in the aftermath of this action, we are getting requests from all over the world
to franchise vote-auction to local elections. we bought the voteauction
biz domain for potential use in the united states two thsousand four presidential
elections, but are not really keen on operating the next level ourselves. and
we are ready to exhibit original legal documents, sculptures and installations
including the vote-auction seal in museums and galleries. the documenta in kassel
was not interested in our work, although we especially designed a installation
and the topic is exactly what they need. but, it seems that we are way ahead
of our times and really have to pay the price to be there. so we are still looking
for first class gallery representation in different countries, for agents and
our official fine art market entry at documenta or art basle switzerland. we
are also currently working on a fiction-movie-script about vote-auction, still
looking for producers!
now, to give you the quick look at our two thousand and one feature action called
nazi line. a corporate
campaign to promote integration of neo nazis into activ work, actually as actors
in a hamlet interpretation by german superstar director filmmaker christoph
schlingensief. he was our campaign mascott due to his massive popularity in
the german speaking part of europe. that is also where our campaign was targeted,
switzerland, germany and austria. the question was, who needs neo nazis? the
answer, the political system, the police and secret services, the corporations
and last but for very sure not least, the whole german-speaking population.
everybody has racist and fascist elements coded into his or her body and mind,
but it is hard to be honest about it, so neo nazis are really the best to blaim
for our own incapability to deal with that. but that is the psycho angle of
the whole thing. mainly we wanted to promote our NAZI LINE ltd company also
based in bulgaria. we do consulting for hate crime infected companies around
the globe. we help companies deal with these problems by analyzing the environment
and the market and the company and its clients. we hope to pick up some business
in south africa, for example the conflict about the nudist sandy bay beach,
where local white males have asked the mayor of cape-town to close this beach
for black males, because they were only looking at white pussy. it seems there
are some people in south africa not aware about the new constitution in place,
and that obviously needs some communication and discussions on the topic. so
this would be a symptomatic business-case for the nazi line corporation to step
in and help the local governements or companies to deal with.
now to come back to our campaign. we organized neo nazi castings in berlin,
which actually i took part in and had a great pleasure to meet people from the
right wing scene and look at them from a pure human point of view. on the other
hand, the theatre people were walking around the streets in switzerland, asking
for some conservative party to be banned. great chaos started to happen, mass
media was going hot for our campaign and the whole press thing kicked off again.
now, one of the main questions was, why does NAZI line uses such fascist aestehtics.
from a marketing point of view a stupid question. or would you not talk with
your target group in the visual language they understand? we sure do speak with
the people in their language. i love this corporate nazi line web site, i think
it is one of liz best design work of the last year.
the identity, especially the nazi line logo we created for the campaign was
massively used in print, in the theatre play as arm-tags and mainly as huge
3
meters radius flags on both sides of the stage and at central stage and
also as uniforms for the neo nazis in the play but also for the street actions
with caps, pens, jackets, posters and much more.
on the corporate nazi-line web-site, we do get hate crime reports and consulting
requests on a regular basis, so the campaign was a full success, not only in
terms of public discussions, neo nazi, press, politicians tours in the german
parliament and actions like that, but also from an intellectual point of view.
to touch such a hot topic in germany and switzerland requires a lot of smarts
and experience in order to not be misused by governemental, political and corporate
entities. we turned it all around and announced about thirty top german and
swiss corporations and governmental agencies as partners. some of them are are
still researching which department did the sponsoring and partnership deal with
ubermorgen and nazi line ltd. we regularly tell them, that we are also trying
to internally research which nazi line ltd department did these deals with the
respective companies. and, the german ministry of the interior is constantly
threatening us with law suits, because we run a
copy of their technically so poor web-site, we enhance this web-site by
slightly manipulating the content. they think it is illegal, we think it is
not, it will probably end in front of a court, and that is very good so, because
we are in permanent need of foriginal legal documents for our art market branch
and fine art products.
now. to wrap up this talk and to give you some outlook on our future activities.
since fall two thousand one, the ubermorgen group is focusing on the international
art market, we are investing into the pre-production of several fine art products,
ranging from oil on canvas to large scaled scultures and installations, from
net-art pieces, to activist-web-sites. our products are as fine as you can get
contemporary a-vant-garde.
visually and physically, the seal,
the symbol of governemental power and authority has become a real obsession
for us. so.. to be able to monitor the progress of our visual publications and
of the ubermorgen news, please consult the ubermorgen dot com web-site from
time to time and also lookup the keyword: ubermorgen, lizvlx or hans extreme
at google dot com to get a picture on our activities from your very own viewpoint.
if there is some time left now, i would just like to surf a bit on the ubermorgen-site,
show you some visual stuff and then finish off exactly within the given time-frame.
most people have little
choisce but to follow the herd, ubermorgen will infect potential alpha-animals
and show some disruptive and l-s-d ways of thinking, acting and enabling.
ueber-dwarf sex . ueber-euro-burning . ueber-screen-animee . ueber-screen-flash
. ueber-kitsch . ueber-euro-washingpowder . ueber-attack-on-democrazy . ueber-screen-classic
. ueber-south-africa . ueber-styler . brainhard dot com . bannster dot net .
bernhards dot net .
it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, such a great pleasure to speak here!
if you wish to get in contact, in contact, in contact, with ubermorgen or myself,
please direct your e-mails to officeR @ ubermorgen dot com officeR@ubermorgen.com
officeR @ ubermorgen dot com . we would be glad for any publication of our highly
difficult to communicate work, we are really looking for gallery representation
and an agent to work with us on our fine art market strategy, to deal with our
timetable and press-time-line. so please let us know, please let us know, please
let us know, if you have some contacts you would be willing to share with us
or you know people from the art world that would be interested in our work.
we are also thinking about publishing a book of our previous work, but dont
have the necessary contacts to publishers and editors. so , please tell them,
we are bitchy, tough and razor blade sharp to work with but we do always deliver,
in time and in quality!
as a trade, i will put this transcript
online on the design indaba and on the ubermorgen web-site, so you can download
it and run it with the voice of your choice!
now, after my head and hair manipulated on worked on by tom from tomato and
joshua from praystation, my body will be sold to the museum of modern art for
a disgustingly high price, because it is the first ever collaborative art work
by tomato and praystation!
ubermorgen: "we make money"!
ubermorgen: "it's different because it's fundamentally different"!
. so. thank you so veddy much for your attention! i love you! god, allah, let
us all bless south africa and the first african in space!