Archive for the ‘identity’ tag
Identity Permutations. The Art of 0100101110101101.ORG
Vaticano.org
“Jesus, strength and wisdom of God, awaken in us the love of the Holy Scriptures,
where resounds the Father’s voice, that illuminates and blares up, that feeds and comforts.”
Pope John Paul II, Prayer for the preparation of the Grand Jubilee 2000
When the collective 0100101110101101.ORG burst onto the scene between 1999 and 2000, it was like a firework exploding in the intricate mesh of the net, or as if a dozen snipers had suddenly started firing at the same target from different positions. It was difficult to establish their identity, but one thing for sure was that behind that codename there was a team, a fast-acting, extremely talented team. Their statements and interviews always featured different names. They inhabited the web like a natural element. It was evident that they had been in training for a long time, before firing the first shot. They knew what to aim for and they always hit their target. They bombarded mailing lists and got the media in a flap, like the Gauls among the Capitoline geese. They began with a series of thefts, and claimed responsibility for two colossal hoaxes, one attacking the art system, the other the Vatican. Their links with Luther Blissett, their accents and the geographic location of the Darko Maver project placed them in Italy, in Bologna to be precise, but their roots were as mobile as their cultural references, which ranged from the American pranksters to the Balcanic avantgarde Neue Slowenische Kunst. In time the aura of mystery gradually lifted, not least thanks to the total transparency of later works, Life_Sharing (2000 – 2003) and Vopos (2002). Then they themselves decided to clear up the identity question once and for all, or rather, flesh out two of their many fictitious identities, presenting themselves as Eva and Franco Mattes.
Gaz me two times, baby (Gaz me twice today)
Gaz me two times, baby (Gaz me twice today)
Published in: Domenico Quaranta (ed), Gazira Babeli, FPEditions, Brescia, March 2008, pp. 88, € 20.00, ISBN 978-88-903308-2-7 [italian edition] 978-88-903308-3-4 [english edition]. With texts by Patrick Lichty, Alan Sondheim and Mario Gerosa.
Babeli. On 31 March 2006, when Gazira chose her surname from the options on the Second Life registration page, she must have guessed that language was going to be crucial aspect of her life as an avatar. She would have seen it from the fact that an avatar, even before it has a body, gets a name. What she couldn’t have known then is that she would be responsible for a body of work that, starting from language itself, would turn Second Life on its head. And she certainly could never have guessed that she was set to become a household name among its residents [1]…
Gaz /gaz/ verb (gaz-zing; past: gaz-zed; past part. gaz-zed) 1 [trans.] deform; submerge under a shower of pop icons; hurl someone from hundreds of meters, dashing his or her polygons onto the graphics card; shut someone into a can of Campbell’s soup; transform a respectable avatar into a crazed maniac running every animation in its inventory in random order… 2 [fig.] Remove an avatar from its self-imposed state of immaturity, by showing it that the consensual hallucination it inhabits is not real, or a poor imitation of a mistaken idea of reality, but an imperfect mishmash of code, textures and polygons, in which Gaz too lives and works. [Derivatives] Gazhat; Gazwork…
Interview with Eva and Franco Mattes
“The most radical action you can do is to subvert yourself”
Interview with Eva and Franco Mattes (a.k.a. 0100101110101101.ORG)
Domenico Quaranta
[Published in: Domenico Quaranta (ed), Portraits. Book printed on occasion of the exhibition "EVA E FRANCO MATTES (0100101110101101.ORG) LOL", Fabio Paris Art Gallery, Brescia, January 2007. Text released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 License. To see the licence: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/]
Your previous projects attracted attention for their radical nature. Portraits has attracted some criticism due to its apparent banality. What is at the heart of the project?
Out of all our previous works Portraits is obviously the most radical one. The most radical action you can do is to subvert yourself.
What is the meaning of making a portrait of an avatar?
We see Avatars as “self-portraits”. Unlike most portraits, though, they are not based on the way you “are”, but rather on the way you “want to be”. Actually, our works are not portraits, but rather “pictures of self-portraits”.
