-- the original transcript with
corrections, stamped and signed is a foriginal document --
-- it will be scanned and exhibited online +++++++++++++++++++++++++++
-- i / we sell this documents to the art market with some delay, so if you are
interested, ---
-- there is also a spanish translation foriginal available! a scan of the document
will --
-- be put online --
-- if interested, pls give us notice with the reference url to officeR@ubermorgen.com
--
-- THIS TALK WAS HELD AS THE D-I-N-A
/ digital is not analog series in --
-- BARCELONA AT THE CENTRO CULTURAL
CONTEMPORARY
-- 10/2002, THE PREVIOUS DAY, SCP/BILL
BROWN --
-- along with the talk, visuals [in the text indicated as links] are beeing
surfed --
-- down by specialists who know the ubermorgen universe in-and-out --
-- due to a live [paragraph] translation,
serious amounts of text had to be cut out of
-- the lecture --
hello!
my name is haaaaaaans bernhard! from ubermorgen and the etoy.HOLDING.
mr. vanni from D-I-N-A is operating the visualz
so, first of all. thanks for the invitation, it is a great honor to speak here
in barcelona 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, if you absolutely cant wait, then ask... . 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 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, partners and artists.
our network and friends includes ventures such as micromusic
dot net , jodi , lo-res, irational , d-planet, no org , dextro , kac, slycer,
01, shulgin , eyeriz, tomato, textz, praystation, spooky, rtmark and many more
net art and media entities.
to not only have myself talk and tell stories.. i will try to show you key
visuals, performance and related web-sites along with the stories, plus
a swell 20 minutes video sequence from our smash internet-hit of the year 2000,
the [V]ote-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!
our core-focus is on radical
global business ventures with MEDIA HACKING capabilities, and the production
and maintenance of necessary corporate structures. we look at this from a business,
a profit-driven and a communcative 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 of 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!! , and ideas
i consider myself as a kid 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 as girlfriends.
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 beautiful
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 etoy-ltd germany and the virtual etoy ltd in
bulgaria.
the etoy-holding is primarily dealing with financial, legal, and trademark aspects,
plus with strategic long term planning for brand and financial success, so,
my involvement is purely profit-oriented, in terms of financial, communicative,
pop-starish and aesthetic long-term 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.
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 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 into two parts, and legal battles are in
the pipeline within the next 10 years.
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, to 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 the family 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! check this out by
searching google with the key-word TOYWAR;
this year, the book "leaving reality behind - the battle for the soul of
the internet" was published by fourth estate in london. this book about
the background and the history of the etoy-corporate network, the people behind
etoy, the fight with e-commerce giant eToys, and many technical, social and
economical backgrounds about the internet are packed into a mindblowing thriller.
check this book out, you wont regrett it.
one of the latest etoy quality-publications
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." exhibitions in tokyo and torino
were executed by the etoy.com team.
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.
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. for me it was the logical next step after
conceptually + practically creating etoy.
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, fine art production, media hacking
actions and high-end consulting services for globally and digitally acting
corporations..
the core ubermorgen people, or like we say, the UBERpeople 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 bernhard, or luzius bernhard, etoy.HANS;etoy.BRAINHARD,david arson ; dr.
andreas bichlbauer, piotr zendai, bart kessner,h_e. with a masters in fine art
at the university of applied arts in vienna, prof. peter weibel. since 2 years
i am trying to get some words on paper for writing my phd thesis i am currently
writing with prof. bazon brock in germany. the topic is MEDIA HACKING and negative
affirmation strategies in the 1960s civil disobeiance and liberation times and
in the 1990s internet time.
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
bjoerk or madonna want to release her new album online, 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, although liz and hans just split
up personally and artistically, we are still highly engaged in the companies
we own, and this guarantees stability to our image, our projects and our clients.
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 accompanied by some juicy
micromusic..
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: "linux wins prix 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
THE topic, and representatives of the etoy.com entity and RTMark
representatives were agressively asked wheter they were the authors.
due to current internal etoy conflicts, the etoy reps were not able to deny
or confirm any relation to this incident, although they knew 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, SUN MICROMSYSTEMS
and others.
but this was just a teaser-action and a artistic show-off of ubermorgens capabilities
in terms of communications and perversion, we call this strategy MEDIA HACKING.
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 in a violent but brandwise
very subtle way, because ubermorgen was only know as author to a absolute elite
within the .net.art, tech and theory community.
then, we hit pay dirt with our feature action in the year twothousand.
we got our dirty hands on the everlasting
and totally swell Vote-auction.
vote-auction was a platform originally invented by the 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 vote-auction, at this time a tiny venture
without much chance to survive, to the ubermorgen group, middleman to this transaction
was art-mark dot com, an american corporation specialized in globalization activism.
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!
-->INSERT WHY EU CITIZENS INTERFER WITH US-ELECTION!
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 targeted 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! are beeing exhibited at the madreTTor exhibition
space "locus" during the festival.
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 UPS or fedex daily, filled with temporary injunctions, court complaints
and much more legal stuff, sometimes beyond a 100-pages per package, actually
we received the whole web-site per photocopies for over a 150 times. state and
federal attorneys have spent 1000s of hours and millions of dollars investigating
vote-auction.
we have started to do exhibitions with such legal
documents in the united states, south africa, the netherlands, austria and
switzerland...
. federal attorney janet reno investigated the case. the central intelligence
agency CIA, the federal bureau of investigation FBI and the the national security
agency NSA 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, credits for our security and for high-end tech support
go to aaron kaplan from lo-res.org.
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 have entered a law suit in germany against joker.com/CSL
ltd, the company who sold us vote-auction.com, but the law suit was rejected
because the damage was done by CORE, a dubious company in geneva/switzerland,
which turned off the domain after receiving an EMAIL with a temporary injunction
court oder from wisconsin. we talked to them and they simply stated from their
point of view our activities are illegal, and they are afraid of repression
against CORE emplyees in the united states. what a farce! but this led us to
our current project "the
injunction generator".
but, the action was running hardcore. 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 new art form media hacking.
it is the highest level of global interactive visual art and storytelling. the
dynamics of the news-networks and its consumers is amazing and can be used for
all means. terrorist attacks as well as artistic expression, commercial as well
as social or political statements... there is no wright or wrong, no true or
false, it is an experiment you need some experience in order to not fuck up
your brain and your brand, but there is no security at all in the end, with
etoy, we called it the edge game, with ubermorgen we would rather call 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... 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 stories.
james baumgartner was questioned and taken into custody several times. FBI agents
were observing him and frequently questioning him. once, i was talking with
james via ICQ, 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 one 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, and we work with
them in the art and fine art context.
all other temporary injunctions and law suits announced were settled or dismissed.
the illegally turned off vote-auction domain was a tactical mistake. the shutdown
was way too early, actually five days prior to election day. 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, the logical
continuation of james idea and our execution.. so we sat back, finally relaxed
and enjoyed the show.
some of the most prescious gifts we received for our action... for example e-mails
from veterans of the second world war... 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 honoured and highly threatend by such 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. hans bernhard has also
taken part in the discussion by phone from europe. actually i was in our underground
bootlab in berlin just
doing a tv-interview for the german news channel n-tv, 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. so enjoy!
*** CNN VIDEO ---> CNN = POP PURE , INTERVIEW STYLE = LOW KEY!
in the aftermath of this action, we are getting requests from all over the world
to franchise vote-auction to local elections. 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
[V]ote-auction installation and performance. 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 in negotiations regarding book releases about vote-auction. one of the
great outcomes
now, to give you the quick look at our 2001 feature action called NAZI~LINE,
a campaign to promote integration of neo nazis into activ work, actually as
actors in a hamlet interpretation by german superstar director filmmaker christoph
schlingensief in the worldfamous schauspielhaus in zurich/switzerland. schlingensief
he was our campaign mascott due to his massive popularity in the german speaking
part of europe.
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.
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 right wing party to be banned. great chaos started to
happen, mass media was going hot for our campaign and the MEDIA HACK was getting
momentum. 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 the
corporate nazi line web site, i think it is one of liz best design work
of the last year.
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 ????
if yes, 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.
if not...
most people have little
choice but to follow the herd pack, ubermorgen will infect potential
alpha-animals and show some disruptive and l-s-d ways of thinking, acting and
enabling.
now, it was,a great pleasure to speak here! if you wish to get in contact,
with ubermorgen or myself, please direct your e-mails to officeR @ ubermorgen.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-strategy.
this transcript
can soon be found online on the ubermorgen web-site.
and to end, i would like to quote 2 ubermorgen slogans:
ubermorgen:
"it's different because it's fundamentally different"!
. so. thank you so veddy much for your attention!
-- total of 11 printed pages --
-- edited manually by HANS BERNHARD 27.10.2002 VIENNA/AUSTRIA --
-- REF.NO.: DIBA200210 --