Herald: So the first speaker for this conference is lizvlx. And she runs
ubermorgen.com and she is really interested in software art, photography
and net art. And if you heard about Vote- Auction that was her. This talk will be
about anti terrorist laws implications on free thinking and art. Thank you very much
liz. *applause*
lizvlx: Well hello, sorry that took a little bit. I'm using the wrong software
apparently, its not Microsoft so I'm really sorry. "Do you think that's funny"
that's the title of this talk because this was a question we got asked quite a few
years ago by a reporter wanting to discuss a project that we did and I thought it was
the stupidest question I have ever been asked and I have loved it ever since
because obviously this shit is not funny at all. So, yeah. Because it's about art-
practice under anti-terror laws. I'm not going to give this theoretical talk now,
so you're fine it's about practice. I'm gonna show you a set of projects and focus on
kind of the implications of anti-terror laws on the project, on the production of
the project most and foremost and also some of the projects obviously have been
produced before all these crazy ass laws have come into effect. So let's just get
started. And of course in the end I'll be doing a Q&A. So a short introduction. So
for us, I mean when I'm talking us means ubermorgen.com so that's me and my partner
Hans. So we started in the 90s and in the 90s it was really great, I really loved it
because there was nothing happening on the net really except for the crazy boring
shit and we all thought it was so cool. It was just really nerdy but nothing else.
Obviously I started working in net-art, in 1995 about. And that was a really great
time because nobody cared what you did on the net, not because there was no audience
there was a huge audience. But there was no question about, because you know the
net was still not a dot com rearm so it was fine, you could just do whatever you
wanted to... There's a little footnote there because we did get, you know, a few
problems but it was nothing major. Also because there was no laws in place it
really had an effect onto like European citizen being kinda hassled by the CIA,
basically local police didn't really want to help out the CIA at the time, so we
were fine at the time. So in the early 2000s dot com had totally run over the net
which is fine obviously but not only and we had to really get used to lots of
people bugging us for doing what we did. But it was just small stuff as you can
see, and especially the lawyers letters. These were always very creative and always
a good basis for a new project I think. But also at the time there were all these
people coming at you for doing projects and its not necessary that you call them
art projects it could be anything really, that is not commercial. Were you just go
like why shouldn't I do it. But all these things that got thrown at you, were always
really valuable pieces of information on how the system works. And you could work
with that. And you could work your way around it, you sometimes may pay a small
legal fine or whatever, but you would be fine. Obviously that was not true for our
Vote-Auction project which cost us enormous amounts of money, but it was
worth it. So in about 2006 to 2008 I kind of noticed, I started doing a project back
then which was called super-enhanced and I very much noticed that I was paying more
and more attention to laws that were in place, not that I was thinking that if I
do this project now I would get into trouble a, b, c and d but it was in the
back of my head. Which is not really helping when you're trying to freely
create a new project or a thinking space, you know? As it is now I feel that all
these anti-terror-laws totally make us come into this kind of cluster where we
start self-censoring ourselves. Most of all, you see that when you're on Facebook.
And don't tell me you're not on Facebook, obviously it's a bullshit platform but
still its really interesting. The same is true for twitter. I mean how many times
will you say fuck on either of them. You're not going to post that one picture
of that naked butt or the bare-breasted lady or whatever, because you're like "ok
I have been using this account for a really long time, I don't want to get
turned off now, because I'm using imagery now that might be not legal in the
Facebook kind of sense". But this self censorship is going on in your head. And
it happens online. But as long as it happens online it would be kind of fine,
you know it's just Facebook. But this creeps into offline life as well. I'm very
sure and I have noticed that with lots of people that the conversations you will
have in real life will mirror the ones you have online. Because you're getting used
to this kind of speak, this Facebook speak or twitter speak. And it just censors out
lots of stuff. Our strategies in working are mostly like affirmative. We're not the
ones that use critical approaches, because most of the time that's very boring. But
we rather use affirmative techniques and the other one, but then we figured we need
to come up with a new strategy. And that's when we started to do secret projects,
because I was just getting really sick of having this thought in my head all the
time of self-censorship and whatever. So we just started developing projects
anonymously. But we can't publish them under our own name which is kind of a bug
but that's the way it is. That's enough for a little theory in the beginning and I
want to show you a little video of a project that we did a few years ago and we
did this project because this is like one more thing i think it is really important.
This is new speak, we all hear it all the time. Like yesterday I read something on
the news, it talked about a dark figure of badgers in the forest. I figured, how can
there be a dark figure of badgers in the forest? Are these illegal badgers? Are
these criminal badgers now? And what I heard also a few years ago, it was
Russian... deep sea... spider crabs that were moving into Finnish you know sea
space? And I figured you know, what they don't have any identity on them or what...
what's the problem? you know this, but this new speak i mean obviously that's a
lot true for you know all the enemy combatant bullshit and so on. But this
newspeak, it's really interesting if you listen to it and it's a real problem if
you just go along with it because it alters your speech it alters your mind. So
we did this project on oil and it's all about this. I hope this is not too loud.
*music starts: Seven Nation Army by The White Stripes**applause* Where's my
presentation? This video was based on a marketing campaign by Diesel, it was
called "Be Stupid". *laughs* I don't want to add to that, but I'm sure some of you
people in here have bought a Diesel product. So be proud of yourself you are
officially stupid. I was asked to also present you know some projects that some
of you might like really know but some of them might not to give you more of a
context of our work. So I'm going to present Vote Auction. Vote Auction was a
project we did in 2000 and we usually produce seals for our projects, not logos
because we're surely not dot com. If we're anything we're an authority, so we need a
seal, right? That gives you authority. And, wait I need that. So it was in 2000,
it was a platform for buying and selling you know votes for the presidential
election in 2000. Gore, yeah Gore against Bush. You know the one that Bush didn't
win but took home anyways. You're laughing it's sad isn't it, but then maybe I mean
so much good came out of it, so we should be happy. It'd be a lot colder probably if
Gore had one, right? He's all into the climate shit and so on. So that was the
website, we originally got it from this American called James Baumgartner who was
an art student in the states, and he started doing this as a thesis project.
But he got you know contacted by the FBI and such pretty early on and he didn't
want to pursue the idea any more. And Art Mark who is now Yesman by now and sucks
real bad now but was really good then um brought him over to us and we took over
and made it a bit bigger I guess. And yeah well basically you could just you know
sign up as a voter and just put your vote on sale and as one would be interested in
buying a vote you'd only be able to buy the votes from a you know from a whole
state to make it more easy. And the prices of votes in different states varied a lot
obviously, we had enormous amounts of subscribers. I don't know precisely
because we had a randomizing engine in the back obviously. And um we got into serious
trouble obviously with this project with any kind of governmental agency. Any OGA
in the states. And always made special little websites for them with, you know
just IP filtering and they get their own websites and *laughter* I remember also
the Germans were in there as well, I remember Karlsruhe always contacted us on
I mean the server on a Wednesday at about 11. And always searched through the same
pages and it was really easy then I just, you could just give them something they
really liked as a website and that's just some DOS software that would download in
the background. And you know stuff like that that really worked fine. I'm gonna
show you a little video again, because we got like this feature on CNN for the
project, this is really bad quality because it's from TV. I'm so sorry.
*TV intro music* TV presenter: In just two weeks the
citizens of the United States will elect their next commander-in-chief. But could
that decision be rerouted over the internet? A website engineered halfway
around the world is offering to literally buy your vote! Today on Burden of Proof:
Bidding for ballots. Democracy on the block.
announcer: This is Burden of Proof. lizvlx: Just need to interrupt here a few
times. So this was on prime time US CNN. This was right in the midst of the
elections and we were really lucky that we got so much news coverage. This was not
because we are so awesome and doing projects, this was because we just touched
a topic that lots of journalists really wanted to talk about, but they didn't have
a specific issue. But if you present them with a specific issue they have something
to talk about. So they did. We got about like I don't know how many people we
reached about like 200 to 400 million people. This was like really all over the
place from, I don't know, you know, they even discussed it in Russia in their
parliament and so on. And we got our you know service hacked, and yeah Chan and
Reno who was then you know somebody was on our... And we got sued by so many people
for either, you know, false promise, consumerism laws, or you know election
fraud. I need to point out that obviously it's perfectly legal to sell American
votes in Europe. *laughter and applause*
But this is also why vote auction is a big case in the - for lawyers all over the
place. This was one of the first cases where people really noticed: Oh internet
and national law is just really bad together, just don't mix, you know. And
you know, they served us court papers onto our Nokia communicators. Like faxes, like
30 pages, which obviously doesn't fit on a communicator. Or on the phone, you know. I
need to serve this to you which is an- it was ridiculous. But still, I mean they
couldn't shut us down because we just had, we obviously we were aware that if we kept
on doing this project we would get you know, people and authority would be
getting more and more interested in us. So we had just this you know- we bought new
domains because it turned up the one domain, so we put in the new domain which
gives you a new news story. So that was fine, in the end we were running on an IP
address but it was all out there so it was fine because we had the CNN coverage so
there was no problem. So we had no terror laws at the time so we were no terrorists,
we're just doing voter fraud, right? So this is, I mean we're obviously not doing
it because we're just providing a platform, I'm not responsible for any
user. That's what dot coms is. You know and you got to bring democracy and
capitalism closer together, that's what we were saying. Yeah wait, there I just see
where is, where's where is he... he yeah that's him. That was one of our first
providers. TV presenter: Which along with voteauction.com was named as a defendant
in a lawsuit in Chicago. In Los Angeles we're joined by internet law professor
Stuart Beagle TV presenter 2: And in Sacramento, California we're joined by...
lizvlx: He is an asshole. TV presenter 2: William Woods, chief
counsel to the California secretary of state, where I'm from. And here in
Washington, Melissa Stratton, constitutional law expert.
lizvlx: That's my favorite picture. I mean look at that, I mean for me that project
is also a very complicated way to produce like a video art. You do this whole
project and then it gets filmed by CNN, right? *laughter and applause* If you want
to see more of the video, pretty much all the videos are available on vimeo. If you
go, you know look for the ubermorgen channel. So because they'll go on for way
too long because it's 45 minutes and we don't have that much time. Do dee do de
doo, more screenshots of the guys. Yeah that's the lawsuits. *laughter* It's a
paper- I started doing paper sculptures then at the time because what are you
supposed to do with it, right? And um, it's very expensive you know. This is from
a show we just did at carol fletcher gallery in you know London. You know,
Oxford Circus, high scale, good shit. But obviously it's not so much fun at the time
sometimes. But because I come from a lawyer's family I cannot be bothered
really. *laughter* Now on to something completely different.
This is EKMRZ trilogy, it obviously means e-commerce. I don't like vowels
apparently. And these are three projects. It's called Google Will Eat Itself, Amazon
Noir, and The Sound of Ebay. Google Will Eat Itself, maybe some of you know. That's
the seal again. Google release itself is just a very easy scheme for, I don't know
a problematic network maybe. It's just, it's all about, we just bought into we
just participated in the google ads program and made money with that, and with
the money we made we bought Google shares. Hence Google Will Eat Itself, right? And
we didn't do it on a huge big scale, because we were not so interested in that
any more after doing stuff like vote auction. So we just did this more as a
conceptual piece. I think at the scale that we did it in uh it would have taken
us like something like 300 million years to buy the whole of Google. But then it
gets, maybe it'll get like real cheap in the meantime. So who knows, yeah? For this
project also still no terror laws, then that it wouldn't really be covered by that
anyways. But of course nasty letters from Google, and we got you know blocked on
Google which is great, you know? I once got disqualified from a conference, that
was awesome. And then you know that one I really like. But if you get a lawyer from
Google, a lawyer's letter from Google that's fine because we all know you can't
talk to google, right? There's no phone number, you know? You can have, you can
know someone who works at google. But officially you can't talk to them. So
there's nothing they can do to you really because they can only send letters, but
not react again because they don't want to be bothered. So that's fine, so you can
just make a new story out of it. But we closed the project. We made about I think
like 400˙000€ and it's still sitting there. It's in a kind of a fund thing and
it's Google to the people. But it's not doing anything, because money shouldn't be
doing anything. The next one was Amazon Noir which was basically just using the
look inside the book function of Amazon to download the whole books. Just search for
lots of terms and then recombine the book. They look quite measly afterwards but it's
all about the content, who cares? And that project got kind of interpreted as if we
were focusing on free books and all that and information for all and we're not
interested in, we're not activists. I'm maybe an actionist but I'm not an
activist. So I don't have a political agenda. I don't say that this is good or
this is bad. I just might find some things interesting. And so we sold the software
to Amazon because they didn't like it obviously. So we sold this software to
Amazon in the end and made some money with that. *laughter and applause*
And last one of that trilogy is called The Sound of Ebay, and I just really wanted to
do a project with teletext imagery because teletext is just so great. And my mom
still uses it and. But then my mom used to be a programmer so that's, I guess that
explains it. So basically it just, this is a lyrical project. It makes the music with
your user data. And I'm not gonna play the music, but I'm gonna show the images
because i love them so much. I mean it's just the best parts of teletext obviously,
I got there's like this, there's one person who won't talk to me anymore after
I've done that because she thinks it's porn. *laughter*
It's really pixels I mean come on. If you see porn in this shit you're sick. I mean
seriously. *laughter and applause*
I'm gonna jump through that because there's not enough time I think. Oh maybe,
no we got... There's another set of projects I... we did. This is actually the
ones I like doing most because this is where I get to do some coding. I love
doing coding in Perl and I will never code in anything else I think. And we don't
need that ruby shit. And basically this is also yeah this is the... from IP-NIC. We
learned, with vote auction we learned how important the seal is, right? Because we
got all these legal letters with lots of seals right? Texas, Internet Attorney, and
shit like that. And so we got our own seal with the Internet Partnership for No
Internet Content. Also sometimes we will get asked by you know, different...
entities, companies and whatever like you know you do fake banners and shit like
that and then wanna. They want you to take it offline and usually when you talk to big
companies and you want them to do something they tell you: Um I'm not sure,
I'm not the right person to talk to. They just send you to someone else and never
get solved. So we just mirrored that. And so whenever someone asks us to take some
information off our servers, I say you know, you need to speak to a different
department. And because that's real complicated I made this form. And it's the
universal content and/or domain removal form. It's very complicated, this was not
what it was in the beginning. And it was you know it's like when you transfer a
domain. It's hard, right? You need to sign all that and fax it and not with all of
them, but some of them. And you just need to put lots of bureaucratic barriers in
there, right? You still got to think you really want to get the shit solved, right?
You do. But there's just so much paperwork that you got to fill out. Not you but the
other people who want to get the stuff offline. And all the departments... The
shit never gets solved. And then I coded it and basically it just works like that
you can just put in any domain and it just creates a legal document and that you it's
fine you know we have so many the wording is just fine. And like a preliminary, you
know injunction or whatever and then you just send it out. We didn't automize it,
because we didn't want to be the ones to blame in the end again. We figured the
user can send it out by themselves, you know? We're not going to be the clowns,
yeah? And take on your own responsibility, right? And you just send it out, and if
you have a legal document where it says you know this domain I don't know i'm so
cool dot com is supposed to be taken offline, because they're engaging in child
pornography. I guess lots of providers will take it offline, in the beginning not
to do anything wrong. So this worked really well and it's... again I think it's
important to use stuff that comes back to you. In form of legal papers in this
context, to make something else out of it. And also it just cuts out the middleman
again. You don't need a lawyer, you don't need a court, you just need your own court
papers and that's fine. The next one I did was the Bank Statement Generator. It's a
weird account statement, and it's a generator that works like that, you just
enter a starting figure and you pretty much and you enter some other shit and
your name and blah and so on. And then you enter how you want to feel when you get
the statement. You know, pretty much everyone has the same deductions right?
You go to H&M and you do some Amazon and so on. And yeah I don't think you can ever
really get high numbers but you know you just from suicidal to total mania that's
what you can kind of decide for yourself, how you want to feel. I got that because
we were really broke at the time and I remember I was sitting at home I got open
letters and one letter from the bank and it said like oh you're in debt. And I felt
really bad. And then I figured why am I feeling bad because of ink on paper? This
is really crazy, and it's um it's so this is always what I say: This is just pixels
on screen and the other one's just ink on paper. Especially because we're not
talking about personal letters, we're talking about letters, they get sent out
by servers that are signed by people. You can't talk to a person about them. So
they're not a letter, that's not what constitutes a letter. This is fucking
newspeak. So if you react to anything that gets sent to you by a server with an
emotional reaction, something's wrong with you, you know?
*applause* So this is, I put this in here because my
daughter really really loves it. It's Clickistan. Clickistan, I put it also, put
it in there because we developed this project for the Whitney Museum of American
Art. And it was a bit of a hassle, it's Clickistan so it's like a Javascript click
game. And I just used lots of stuff that I already had and you know Javascripted it
around, it's all weird and stuff. But we couldn't release it right away because
they were concerned about the wording. And they were concerned about the words. I
couldn't use the words muslim, fundamentalist, and terror. And I had not,
I had not put them in any special you know context, these words. Like, there was this
one screen where it said are you allergic vegan muslim or i don't know whatever. And
you just, and it's clearly not a political project but there was no way they would
release the project with these words in it. So I figured okay I don't... I'm
really bad with getting censored, so that's not cool. So I proposed to them, if
it were okay with them if we just took these words out and instead put in the
word you know variations of the word censor. And they were like oh that's fine.
*laughter* I thought "no not really, but I'll go
ahead." So that's yeah it was fucking crazy. I'll show you the video, it's an
online game but you're not gonna play it now. But you can watch the video.
*repeated mouse clicks* *chiptune music*
*applause* Okay. Well this is like a small project we
did, I don't know it feels like at least 10 years ago. And this is what we call a
web painting. Basically, I mean you can read a bit for yourself.
*laughter and applause* We just took the text and pretty much
everything else from a website called Iris scan obviously. And just, just exchanged
the words, to make the content and the message a bit more clear I guess. We have
not used this in a performative way yet, but if we could ever find a pardon to do
that I would gladly set it up on, you know I don't know, a conference you know? An
airport? And just see you know if people are gonna participate. You know it's just
a small moment. You can go to your own private room if you want to. By the way
that's what you call uh affirmative approach, right? Versus critical... And
Alanohof, the alano ranch. That's... this is this really small project we did a few
years ago. It's just a regular fake site, right? And it's about this fake farm into
role that produces organic meat from these hounds. It's all very well and we just
produced it for this small you know cultural association, a club in Tirol. And
she said can you do something that will you know give us our you know a title page
on our you know tyrolean newspaper? And I mean that's, it's easy it's fun. But it's
really just a fun project, right? We got into so much trouble because of this
project. *applause*
We have you know like we had five different times and you were there right
we had police standing in front of our doors at home right? It's like Sunday
evening, it's Sunday evening I'm by myself because my partner just went to Sofia for
whatever he always does there. And you know, knock on the door and it's these two
police guys they're like oh *mumbles* I like look at them, go like you're not here
for Alano, are you? And they're like: yeah. And I'm like, what the hell? You
know it's been like, four years since we did the project and they're still coming.
I don't know it's because of the dogs you know don't do anything. It's not a cat,
you know? We know don't... *laughter and applause* I don't understand that, don't
say anything mean about cats on the internet, yeah. *laughter* We all bow our
heads to the gods, right? But now basically it was also a newspaper that got
behind it and there was some you know dog hating forum that totally loved the site.
But I mean seriously, I mean they made police people drive to the About address
we put on the on the website. And drive there and there was like this local police
guy who knew up front that there was no farm there. And we read all the card
papers and so on it says like oh i went there and there's no farm and no one
around knows it. We had... but the thing was we had to pay money for that because
there was no imprint on the website in the beginning. And this is actually you
know... this was not a problem early on because basically this means I mean this
is a, it's a fake site, you know? If police contact you and you're like no
we're artists, this is a fake side they're like fine. And the first two police people
that contacted us, they were also okay that's fine yeah. Actually it's
interesting kind of a book and so on. But you know laws change over time. And now,
you know they really made us put an imprint in there, otherwise you know we
could have you know paid as much as 20˙000€. And they were like if you put the
imprint in now, you only pay like 200. And we're like we're not paying 20˙000€ for a
freaking dog, obviously not. For you know we paid more than 20˙000€ for you know
doing the whole vote auction bullshit, but not for a dog, you know? So that's all you
know, judicial stuff you know? See? It's a yeah "Tötung von gesunden Hunden", killing
you know healthy dogs. We should have put up that we're only killing sick dogs.
*laughter* Mea culpa, yeah. So now on to something a lot more serious. This is a
project that's very close to my heart. It's called Superenhanced. And started
doing this in about 2006 to 2008. And actually I want to, this is important for
me for various reasons. Also because of the talk that's going on right now
obviously all the time. We're all being listened to and so on and I don't
understand how anyone could not have known that. I seriously don't. Because we all
know that anything that's technically possible will be done. We know that from
ourselves, even if it's only very often only very little because we're technical
incapable, yeah? But there was something else on the agenda and that was you know
the issues of enhanced interrogation, Torture Taxis, super max prisons in the
states. And I personally don't really understand, I mean I do understand, but I
still don't understand why there's this huge uproar now about you know the NSA
bullshit, but there was never any of that big upper already really got to people
being imprisoned. And this is also you know, this is where real terror laws
started happening, right? And this is and, no nothing. I didn't hear anything and we
did this project. And one part of the project is a this is just image material
from our research. I did like half a year of research on this project. And then I
programmed the Superenhanced generator together with a friend of mine. And it's
basically an interrogation software. Because it's always the problem in
interrogations who's to fucking blame if anything goes wrong? So we did a software,
so the software is to blame, right? So you can only follow your orders, and
everything it's fine. So basically it just runs you through and if you don't answer
properly you get into trouble. So that's not fun, I know, I'm so sorry. We used
this in a few performances, in Palestine I think. Yeah that's right we went to Israel
and went to Palestine and I really gotta say the one, the performance in Israel
didn't work out. Because the people we got as volunteers, they just totally fucking
chickened out. I mean it was really just like you know, what do you do in the
beginning? Like you throw a bit of water into people's faces or whatever? As an
enhancement rate and they're just chickened out. Versus the people in
Ramallah they were fine because they were all really experienced. *laughter* No
seriously there was a hundred percent of all the people that were you know there
for our talk had experience in being detained. I mean really detained, not
just, you know? And about 50% had been more than once. So this is the system
graph of the generator. And more images, sorry to spoil your party. And, wait...
We're looking for a specific image. Oh that's, if you want to read a good book
this is really close to my heart now. Read this book by Murad Kurnaz. Just read it.
It might not be a nice christmas present but use it for easter time somebody got
nailed on a cross there. so that's fine *applause* We worked together with this
guy, Chris Arendt who was a guard in Guantanamo. And he lived with us for two
months. You know, so we could do more research and talk and block. Get the
hands-on approach, that's what we like. And he's kind of okay now. He was in a
really bad state then. But I don't feel bad for him because I feel bad for the
victim not for the perpetrator. I'm sorry Chris, he knows that. That's a set of
photographs we did with our kids. People find it offensive. Billy always laughs
about it, right? Stop laughing Billy. That's her little sister Lola. That's, we
don't need that. That's a grown-up person. And that's a funny thing too. I mean,
these pictures I found on the back up of my iPhone and I had never seen those
pictures before. I had not, I mean I know my research, I had not seen those pictures
before. And when I had to you know sift through my backup I found all these
pictures of Guantanamo courtrooms. I found that really strange, but it was very you
know helpful. So this is, there's more to show obviously, but there's not so much
time. There's just like one thing I want to say before we kind of end this and
it's: If we always talk about these issues now of privacy and so on, please bear in
mind that this is a first world problem. The southern hemisphere does not suffer
from you know being spied on all the time. They suffer from not getting any fucking
attention. So just bear that in mind, that it's kind of a luxury problem that needs
to be discussed obviously. Second forget crypto because crypto is elitist. I'm not
saying don't do it at all obviously, it's something that we all want us to pursue.
But if you try to find a solution for the situation now it's not going to be crypto
because nobody can fucking use it. *inaudible interjection* Okay? And then,
to all these engineers of the internet, all the sysadmins with so much power and
lots of, you know, intelligence very often, lots of brain, but so little
education. So you know, so little amount of books have you ever read. So little
knowledge and so much responsibility. Please, read a book. Read a motherfucking
book. I just *applause* Maybe not the "Allgemeinbildung for dummies" that I just
saw on the train last week, but something like that, okay? We need to close now, I
mean we were running a bit late with starting it, but how much more time do we
have? Yeah so um I'd rather stop now and we have time for some Q&A, what do you
think about that? I'm not going to run a vote on it.
Herald: Okay for any question there is... just cue on the microphones in the room.
Question: Hi...? lizvlx: Hi!
Q: Okay hi, you seem to like confrontation so mine is what's your point?
*applause* lizvlx: You just asked me again, do you
think that's funny? That's the same question again. There's no point in a
confrontation. I'm not the confrontation the fucking terror law is the
confrontation. I'm just mirroring that shit. If you got a problem with that, then
you're not doing anything. And you don't need to do anything i'm not telling you
what to do what, not at all you know. I'm just doing the stuff that I think makes my
life more enjoyable. Herald: Number two.
Q: Hi, I wasn't going to say anything but the last few words provoked me. On behalf
of people that I know who don't live in the first world, surveillance is a
problem. And if you think that it isn't, you're wrong. *sporadic clapping*
lizvlx: Well I spend lots of time in Africa and Near East. Most of all in
Africa. And I know surveillance is not an issue in a slum. It's just not, because
nobody even knows that you're alive. So you cannot be surveilled. No, they really
have issues of visibility. And I know intellectually, of course. And so on, yes
I know where you're coming from. But still, I mean. I don't know how many times
you're in Africa, but last time I checked, not really, no I.
Q: I don't work in Africa, I work in the Americas, but um I think it's a good point
for a discussion but i don't think that it's helpful to state to make a broad
statement like that in this kind of environment where you have this stage. And
we certainly would really like to talk to you more about that. Because it's not good
to say that. It's not like internet surveillance is not necessarily a problem.
But surveillance is a problem. On the street, surveillance is a problem, having
people outside of your house watching you 24 hours a day is a problem.
lizvlx: No we don't want to, that's not what I mean, obviously. Surveillance it's
not a problem it's just ugly bullshit that no one needs. It's just idiotic, you know?
It just makes sense and it no obviously. But there is no street surveillance in
most of Africa, you know? So it's not it's a different world there and I just want
you... Q: Well not the first world is bigger than
Africa as well, you said the southern hemisphere...
lizvlx: Well we yeah we I get to a point, but I was making a different point.
Q: Okay. Herald: Back to one.
Q: Hello? You talked about uh self- censorship.
lizvlx: Yeah. Q: Is there a connection to pure
reflection, and... between self-censorship and reflection so what is reflection to
you, and what is self-censorship? lizvlx: Well, especially when it comes to
Facebook you know, right when you type in your message it already gets recorded.
Even if you delete it, right? So that's right the case of you're just self-
reflecting. But they get it then you self- censor yourself and then still... So it's
because it gets all very fuzzy I think. And I think the fuzziness is kind of an
issue right there. Because if you just censor yourself because you don't want to
say that that's fine. But if you don't want to say it because of some other
implications that will happen that are fucking crazy, then you have a real issue,
I think. Q: Thank you.
lizvlx: welcome Herald: Three now.
Q: Yeah um lizvlx: hi:
Q: I see art as being something on the fringe and I think that's what you're
doing. But I'm interested in what you, what you think will happen when this will
get internalized. I think you see my point. So you know, art is always
something like exploratory, something kind of out there. And eventually it becomes
mainstream. I mean it takes time, but it will become mainstream. So what do you
think will happen when this becomes mainstream?
lizvlx: Well I only know, I mean, I see lots of our work in the context of
Viennese Actionism and you know that was in the 60s when it just smeared each other
up with you know any kind of body fluids and so on. And that's still not really
mainstream in a way. So I can't go back to any historical parallel really.
Q: I don't think there's any historical parallel. I think this is always new.
lizvlx: But I guess it just in a way it becomes more mainstream because it gets
old, you know? It's like an old computer with the old website, for example.
Q: So it never really gets internalized in a certain sense?
lizvlx: It might not, which I really like, yeah.
Q: Weird stuff, thanks. lizvlx: Yeah, you're welcome. good
question! Herald: There is time for one last
question, which is to the guy in the microphone one.
Q: Hi I have a follow-up. lizvlx: hey
Q: The first thing is concerning the surveillance in the first world. I mean if
you're in Africa often too, or often. I mean how many people there have mobile
phones and will have in the next years and what will they do with it. That's actually
my question and i think that's why i don't think this first world third world thing i
don't think that works at all. Because our aim is to make one world, and in this one
world we all will have this problem. And the second question is how does like
animal rights law abuse how does that somehow refer to anti-terrorist laws.
lizvlx: Well okay first question. Lots of people have phones in Africa. Extremely,
an enormous amount. Because they use it for payment. They don't use it for
internet surfing. Because that's not possible. So it's a totally different
usage. So surveillance comes in from a totally different aspect. So you can't
make these people profiles out of their behavior. It's just a really different
world. If you want to make it one world that's great, but it's not there yet. So
it doesn't make sense I think to impose our first world scenarios onto theirs.
Because it's not the situation yet, you know? But at least that's also what i get
from you know talking to people from Africa. That's one thing and the second
one, how does that correlate with antiterrorist? Because it doesn't matter
to them any more. Because if they want to take your website offline or whatever
you're doing they want to stop it, they will find some kind of aspect in any kind
of law business, they'll find and then they'll get at you. And also I mean
obviously when it comes to animal rights, you're quite quickly in a terrorist scheme
because it's like the anti-organized crime. There was quite a bunch of
activists incarcerated in Austria because of animal rights activism. So actually
that's really close together. What you wouldn't think but it actually is by now.
Um we have yeah if you can we have a 30 seconds question from the Signal guy up
there. Signal Angel: That's fine so we had a lot
of questions on IRC on why did you put your daughter on stage? *laughter*
lizvlx: Why is my daughter on stage? Because she likes being with me. Yeah it's
very easy. It's a family business situation. I asked her if she wanted to be
in the audience or up on stage with me she's opted for the stage version.