Ubermorgen are nothing
if not a little contrarian. Operating mainly as a digital and net art project
since forming in 1995, their work cuts stridently against two quite prominent trends
(clichés) in the way digital media and art is discussed: first, the celebration
of the utopian potentials of digital media and technology; secondly, how
participatory dynamics in artistic practice are argued to form the basis of
political engagement, whether in relational aesthetics, social practice, or
some other framework. And these two ideas often converge, where the alleged
democratizing potentials of digital technology and participatory artistic
converge are supposed to converge into wonderful net that will liberate us all.
Perhaps the best example of this is the NSA’s current work
of social sculpture “Every Breath You Take We’re Watching You, Sersly.”
Ubermorgen however have focused their work much
more on exploring the dark sides of tech technology and the net. While this may
have seemed a bit strange in the various cycles of new economy fuelled tech
fetishizing, today is makes all too much sense. The approach has varied across
their many projects, but tends to focus on exploring the formal properties of technologies
and systems, as well as the more antagonistic elements found within them. This
can be seen clearly in their projects like Vote Auction and Super Enhanced.
Today their first solo show in the UK opens at
Carroll / Fletcher in central London. I went
and interviewed them during last weekend as the exhibition was being set up.
This interview is scheduled to appear soon in Mute Magazine. It should be quite good,
as the topics we discussed were quite far ranging, from the changing nature of
anti-terror laws and their effect on artistic practice to difficulties with
collective artistic practice and working with their kids. Given that the
exhibition opens today I thought it would be a good idea to produce a quick
excerpt from the interview for posting.
Here it is. Read it, and then go check out the
exhibition. Cheers, stevphen
Stevphen:
One thing that I wanted to ask you about is previously Ubermorgen has been
described as a kind of digital Viennese Actionism.
Could you talk a bit a about that and how Actionism influences your work?
Ubermorgen:
In the first time we made this connection was around the time after the Vote-Auction
project, basically because we suddenly felt that it’s all about the body. It’s
just the body is the medium in the end, even if it’s a completely mass media digital
project. Because in the end all the energy, all the informational data, all the
pressure, all the fear, the aggression, everything is going through your body
and you’re like a membrane. So all the things we do, as we see it, there is a
consistency there, even if it doesn’t look that way. It’s socialisation and artistic
socialization. This aspect is always part of the work.
Stevphen:
That’s quite interesting in the sense of highlighting how digital, rather then
being dematerialised, is actually very about material effects on the body: how
media affects you, how everything comes back to, yes, back to the body
ultimately, right?
Ubermorgen:
Yes, it’s physical. It’s a very physical role. Even if the networks have become
part of our reality, the networks are very physical. We’ve always been majorly
fascinated by cables. Complete cable fetishism, deep-sea cable fetishism. That
first infected us by Neil Stephenson’s 1996 article in Wired Magazine.
It’s like a thirty or forty page essay where he travelled for two or three
months along cable building sites and with ships laying cable in the oceans. And
if you understand this and then if you’re close to the hardware – that’s why we
like to work here also with hardware and we want to show the routers and we
want to show the iPhone sized servers and shit like that. It is physical, it is
about hardware. That’s also where there is this link, because in the end the Actionists
were also kind of stating that in the end it’s all about excrement and sex and
body and violence and love and shit like that: that it comes down to the
basics. And you can go anywhere you want; you can go to space, you can go into
the cable, into what we did with e-toy in the 90s,
complete digital emigration. You use drugs along with it and you lose your
body, but your body fucks up. You end up in a psychiatric hospital to get
better, you end up as a chemical cyborg.
