February 12, 2006
UBERMORGEN.COM (Lizvlx/Hans Bernhard)
Lilly controls my Foriginals
Lilly controls my Foriginals by UBERMORGEN.COM (Lizvlx/Hans Bernhard); February 25-April 8, fabioparisartgallery via Alessandro Monti 13 - 25121 Brescia - tel. 030 3756139 - skype: fabioparisbs.
For his first Italian personal exhibition, the Austrian collective UBERMORGEN.COM (Lizvlx/Hans Bernhard) offers a synthesis of his recent work, that deals with the subtle membrane that connects the digital and the biological: a mix that UBERMORGEN.COM, an identity that lives and works on the Net, experienced on his own body. One of the best-known exponents of the net.art scene, UBERMORGEN.COM is the theorist of digital actionism, a radical practice of artistic action which experiments on the market of attention and takes place into the media scape. The most astonishing result of this kind of practice was Vote-Auction (2000), a web site that, during the American presidential elections 2000, helped people to sell their vote to the highest bidder. The legal prosecution against UBERMORGEN.COM, and the media hysteria it produced, are an important part of the whole project. During the performance, UBERMORGEN.COM were interviewed up to 30 times per day, and was broadcasted by CNN in a 30 minutes show, the legal format Burden of Proof; but he never said whether the project was a real threat to the integrity of the U.S. election or wheter it was a political satire.
In the mass media storm, the digital actionist works with his whole body, as well as part and victim of the network around him.“We are the children of the 1980s, We are the first Internet-pop-generation... Hans Bernhard is loaded with 10 years of Internet & tech [digital cocaine], mass media hacking, underground techno, hardcore [illegal] drugs, rock&roll lifestyle and net.art jet set...” His neuronal networks are connected to the global network, and his mental illness – the bipolar affective disorder that in March 2002 sends him in a mental hospital – is the network's illness. The video called Psych|OS (2005) sums up that experience, in which those two levels – digital and real, bio & tech, nervous system and operative system – merge.
This nervous system, infected by the hi-tech, needs a treatment, and the hi-tech society prescribes its remedies, “bio-chemical 'agents' which control the internal information flow”. Olanzapine, an antipsychotic drug produced by the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly as Zyprexa®, is one of these agents. In the digital prints Zyprexa “Lilly 1112” and Zyprexa “Lilly 4117” (2005), UBERMORGEN.COM paints its molecular structure, but during this translation process the molecule discovers to be made by bits. “Just pixels on a screen, just ink on paper”, like the Foriginals (forged originals), the conceptual device UBERMORGEN.COM uses to change legal documents into legal art. The title of the show – a declaration of poetics that seems a declaration of love – comes from here. “Lilly controls my Foriginals” means “Lilly controls my artistic work”, where Lilly, that seems the name of a woman, is in fact the name of a pharmaceutical company. Lilly “controls”, inspires as well as oversees, supervises the contact between my brain and my hard drive.
Besides, UBERMORGEN.COM is not the first to say that “the pixel is the molecule” and that technology is the demon under the skin. RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) chips are one of the leading technologies of the future: an identification system which can collect all the required informations about the products, or the people, they are attached to. From a formal point of view, RFID chips reveal an organic structure, surprisingly similar to a cellular structure. With the ART FID (2005) series, UBERMORGEN.COM tells us, with the visual impact of a suprematist painting, this mix between biotechnologies and digital technologies, this neverending overlapping of two contiguous levels that is shaping our identity – and that, by now, already shaped his own one." --Domenico Quaranta, NOEMA.
Posted by jo at February 12, 2006 02:34 PM
