#8
In My Computer
Command-Shift-4 Screenshots 2001–2014 UBERMORGEN
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Outro Domenico Quaranta “This permanent contortion of reality and appearance into even new spirals provides their audience with the lasting pleasure of never knowing what UBERMORGEN.COM is ʼreallyʼ about.” Cornelia Sollfrank 1 Let's start personal. I teach many classes, sometimes I organize events and curate exhibitions, but my job is mainly a desktop job. I travel often and I enjoy the pleasure to be offline sometimes, but most of my time I'm sitting in front of a screen. The relationship between my life, my job and what happens on this screen is layered and convolute like an onion. Quite obviously, most of what happens in my daily life is arranged through online communication and somehow mirrored on my desktop. Either I prepare a presentation, I buy a flight, I write a text I was commissioned, or I discuss the setup of a work, I'm doing it at my desk, and it leaves a trace on my hard disk. A lot of private, more informal communication follows, of course, the same routes. Quite obviously again, most of what happens in my private and public life outside of the screen is somehow going through it: if I go on holiday, I enjoy time with my kids or I lecture somewhere, pictures are taken, uploaded and stored somewhere. If it's not happening on my desktop computer, it's often taking place on some other screen: mobile phones, e-readers, tablets. But what’s important for me, what I want to save for the future, is often rerouted through my computer, which is still the main hub of my informational self: from WhatsApp conversations to book quotes. 491
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How can one effectively document a life like this, either for personal reasons — the same that brought us to keep family photo albums — or for artistic purposes? A traditional photo album would say little about it, and would be actually misleading, unable as it is to document what happens when one is sitting in front of a computer screen. Keeping a complete backup of one's computer along her life would be equally ineffective and misleading in terms of representation and narrative: we can read all her emails and chats, snap into her folders, open her browser's cache, but besides being extremely boring, this “unboxing the library” process wouldn't say us anything about how this flow of information was lived and experienced by the person sitting in front of that computer screen. Even if quite limited as a medium, the screenshot — if done purposefully and systematically — would be an excellent tool for this process of personal documentation. If I'd press Command-Shift-4 right now, you may see that it's Friday at 2:02 PM, that I'm writing this text on the TextEdit application of a Mac OSX, that my university is trying to organize a meeting, that I recently checked UBERMORGEN's entry on Wikipedia and that my love just sent me a funny sticker in the Facebook chat. If I'd like to document this moment in my life, nothing would be more effective than this screenshot. Storing it in my computer, and looking at it in 5 years, it will render the atmosphere and feelings of this early afternoon much better than any other form of documentation. 117 I have no illusion that what I'm describing here should be considered a universal condition. I'm the average Western white male computer user, an humble part of that cognitariat
which, along the last two decades, has been enslaved by the Turing machine. Even if one billion people are currently on Facebook, I'm aware that some other billions have never seen or used a digital computer. I'm also aware that there are many people out there whose life was altered by the use of digital means of communication much more than mine, and that the members of the UBERMORGEN crew are among them. Founded in the late Nineties by Hans Bernhard and lizvlx, UBERMORGEN presented itself on its first website as “a european intelligence hub for digital uber:companies; projects and individuals”; and hit the headlines in the early 2000s with the project Vote Auction, 291 a web platform that offered US citizens the possibility to sell their vote to the highest bidder. But both Hans and lizvlx have been an active part of the European media art community since the early Nineties, and Hans was a founding member of etoy.com, a group that translated the digital experience into a lifetsyle: “always online, sometimes lost”, long before being “always on” became a widespread possibility for (almost) everybody else in Western countries. Taking screenshots became part of their daily routine since those early days, when to do it meant to take an actual camera and photograph a curvy CRT display. 356 601
“Then from 1999 on we started to take regular screenshots. The method is two-ways, first you use screenshots to keep certain stuff you have seen or just take a snap-shot of something you wanna keep or memorize or send to someone. And then, there are screenshots that you take on purpose of archiving things, or on purpose of taking a picture, a classic
photograph of your screen because the composition is so perfect or the moment is right to do so. The archive is on our central raid and since the mac has begun to add exact date/time stamps on the screenshots 45 it is very easy, you create a monthly folder where you centralize all the screenshots from the last 4 weeks and put them into the SCREENSHOT archive. That is it. We have taken about 40k screenshots in the last 2 16 years.” This book collects a selection of those 40,000 pictures: about 350 in the e-book version, and a few more in the printed version. The concept of navigation was developed by German designer Diane Hillebrand, who acted as a curator for the book, in strong collaboration with UBERMORGEN. The selection and arrangement process was done collaboratively and according to different criteria. UBERMORGEN first went through the 40,000 images, selected about 1,000 pictures out of them, and sent them to Hillebrand who organized them according to a rainbowcolors spectrum arrangement. The designer made a further 472 selection — in her own words, “irrationally” — and pooled the images according to different categories and keywords. These keywords are not made explicit, but helped her to design the navigation system for the book, that in both versions can be experienced linearly, as an usual book, or3 hypertextually, clicking on links (in the e-book version) or following notes (in the paper version). In the e-book version, hyperlinks are visualized using icons in 14 different kinds of gray, each of them representing a category. But since the surrounding of the icons changes on every page, it's almost impossible to see the exact kind of gray of the icon, and thus
deduce the category it represents in the designer's system. This, together with the reader's choices between two links, makes each experience of the book completely different and personal, not a walk through a designed path of any kind. I put some stress on the way this book was made because it's actually very important to understand what it 288 is. Command-Shift-4 is not an history book, collecting a selection of pictures in chronological order to build up some artist’s hagiography. It's not a personal slash family photo book either, featuring personal content and organized in an idiosyncratic way, for the sake of self-representation. Outsourcing the navigation concept to Hillebrand, who developed an hypertextual system that allows the reader even more freedom in the way she flips through pictures, UBERMORGEN created a distance from the content that doesn't allow any control on the way the book will be experienced, and connections will be made. According to Hillebrand, “the reader has to use her intuition while reading the book”. Furthermore, the book was conceived by Hillebrand as an e-book, and later translated into print form by converting hyperlinks into notes that point to page numbers. This makes the navigation of the print version counter-intuitive and hard, and requires concentration and focus, instead of serendipitous clicking. 233 So, what's this book about? UBERMORGEN is not just an artist duo, it's also a family. Lizvlx and Hans Bernhard met and started collaborating informally in 1995, are engaged and have two children, Billie-Ada (born 2003) and Lola Mae (born 2007). Once they joined the family, Billie and Lola took often part in UBERMORGEN's projects, to the
point that one can consider them as a legitimate part of the UBERMORGEN's crew. Furthermore, their working life had and still has a huge influence on their private life, and this relationship is often mirrored in their work. In 2002, due to a frantic lifestyle, excessive drug abuse and a manic episode, Hans Bernhard was hospitalized and diagnosed bipolar: the Psych|OS series, made along the following years, is a take on the impact that “leaving reality behind” (as another etoy slogan read) had on these developments. Relationships that are built in the carrying out of a specific project often turn into personal relationships, with an impact on the UBERMORGEN family life. In 2008, during the development of the Superenhanced project about torture, UBERMORGEN hosted Chris Arendt, a former Guantanamo Bay prison guard, for two months. Strongly influenced by Viennese Actionism, Hans Bernhard and lizvlx don't see any separation between their life and their art, and Command-Shift-4 is the best portrait of UBERMORGEN as an “hybrid gesamtkunstwerk” I have ever 357 seen. Enjoy.
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1 Cornelia Sollfrank, “The Genius of Ubermorgen”, in A. Ludovico (Ed), UBERMORGEN.COM Media Hacking vs Conceptual Art, Christoph Merian Verlag, Basel 2009. 2 Personal communication, September 2015. 3 Personal communication, September 2015. 230
UBERMORGEN.COM Command-Shift-4 Screenshots 2001–2014 Publisher: LINK Editions 2015 www.linkartcenter.eu Curation & Navigation: Diane Hillebrand This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. Printed and distributed by: Lulu.com www.lulu.com
LINK Editions http://editions.linkartcenter.eu/
Clouds Domenico Quaranta, In Your Computer, 2011 Valentina Tanni, Random, 2011 Gene McHugh, Post Internet, 2011 Brad Troemel, Peer Pressure, 2011 Kevin Bewersdorf, Spirit Surfing, 2012 Mathias Jansson, Everything I shoot Is Art, 2012 Domenico Quaranta, Beyond New Media Art, 2013 Curt Cloninger, One Per Year, 2014
In My Computer #1 Miltos Manetas, In My Computer #1, 2011 #2 Chris Coy, After Brad Troemel, 2013 #3 Martin Howse, Diff in June, 2013 #4 Damiano Nava, Let the Right One In, 2013 #5 Evan Roth, Since You Were Born, 2014 #6 Addie Wagenknecht, Technological Selection of Fate, 2014 #7 Roberto Fassone & Giovanna Manzotti, If Art Were to Disappear..., 2014 #8 UBERMORGEN, Command-Shift-4. Screenshots 20012014, 2015
Catalogues Collect the WWWorld. The Artist as Archivist in the Internet Age, 2011 Exhibition Catalogue
Edited by Domenico Quaranta, with texts by Josephine Bosma, Gene McHugh, Joanne McNeil, Domenico Quaranta Gazira Babeli, 2011. Exhibition catalogue Edited by Domenico Quaranta, with texts by Mario Gerosa, Patrick Lichty, D. Quaranta, Alan Sondheim Holy Fire. Art of the Digital Age, 2011 Exhibition catalogue Edited by Yves Bernard, Domenico Quaranta Ryan’s Web 1.0. A Lossless Fall, 2012 By Ryan Trecartin RE:akt! Reconstruction, Re-enactment, Re-reporting, 2014 Exhibition Catalogue Edited by Antonio Caronia, Janez Janša, Domenico Quaranta, with texts by Jennifer Allen, Jan Verwoert, Rod Dickinson Born Digital, 2014. Exhibition Catalogue Edited by Link Art Center UBERMORGEN.COM, 2015 Catalogue Edited by Domenico Quaranta with texts by Inke Arns, JODI.ORG
Open Best of Rhizome 2012, 2013 Edited by Joanne McNeil Co-produced with Rhizome, New York (USA) The F.A.T. Manual, 2013 Edited by Geraldine JuĂĄrez and Domenico Quaranta Co-produced with MU, Eindhoven (NL) Troika, 2013 Edited by Domenico Quaranta Co-produced with Aksioma - Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana (SLO) Eternal September, 2014 Various Authors Co-produced with Aksioma - Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana (SLO) Torque # 1. Mind, Language and Technology, 2014 Edited by Nathan Jones and Sam Skinner Co-produced with Torque Editions (UK) CyPosium - The Book, 2014 Edited by Annie Abrahams, Helen Varley Jamieson Co-produced with La PanacĂŠe, Centre de Culture Contemporaine, Montpellier U+29DC aka Documento Continuo, 2014 Enrico Boccioletti Co-produced with Viafarini, Milan
LINK Editions is a publishing initiative of the LINK Center for the Arts of the Information Age. LINK Editions uses the print on demand approach to create an accessible, dynamic series of essays and pamphlets, but also tutorials, study notes and conference proceedings connected to its educational activities. A keen advocate of the idea that information wants to be free, LINK Editions releases its contents free of charge in .pdf format, and on paper at a price accessible to all. Link Editions is a not-for-profit initiative and all its contents are circulated under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BYNC-SA 3.0) license.