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Carmen: Hi. We're Mediengruppe Bitnik, this is Doma, my name is Carmen. We're
really happy to be here; thanks for having us. And we'd like to show you a series of
works. We don't quite know how many; we've been kind of changing the slides, so we'll
have to see what fits. I think... just 2 words about Mediengruppe Bitnik: We're
from Zurich originally. We're based in Berlin now... have been based for 1 and a
half years and we work on the digital, but usually our works also affect physical
spaces, as you'll see in a minute. And we'd like to talk about recent works
around bots remote code glitch. So, the first work is called "random darknet
shopper". We produced this work in 2014 together with Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen.
This was after the Snowden revelations in 2013, where we kind of felt that, as
artists, we needed to re-assess our cultural "heimat", the internet. As a kind
of it was this mass surveillance thing and we kind of felt we couldn't work there
anymore or that many of our works were too naive and so together with Kunst Halle
Sankt Gallen, which is an art space in Switzerland, we put together a show around
darknet, because we felt that by looking at internet subculture, we could kind of
question ideas around anonymity, intimacy, identity, trust... And in this show we had
12 works by various artists around these topics and our work was "random darknet
shopper". Doma: So, basically the random darknet
shopper is a piece of software... is a small bot, which we started in autumn
2014. We started with the interest in the question of trust: "How do you gain trust
in encrypted networks, where you don't know to whom you're speaking to?", "How
does those trust mechanism work when everything is kind of obfuscated and
encrypted?" And we wanted to challenge this question, basically, on the darknet
markets, which were kind of a big topic, a controversial topic, after the Silk Road
raid. And we thought that it might be good to evaluate these questions with a bot,
questioning also "How does trust-building work when you have goods, which are
shipped from all over the world to the buyers?" and so we wrote this part which
was called the "random darknet shopper", which had $100 weekly budget, based in
bitcoins, and the idea was that the bot would log in to the deep webs and go to
the biggest dark net market at that time, it was called agora I think, and randomly
select an item and then buy it and directly send it to the exhibition space,
without our interference. So the idea was that in the exhibition, we had 12 of those
vitrines -- they were empty -- basically waited to be filled over 12 weeks of the
duration of the exhibition. Carmen: So we basically connected the very
dark markets of the darknet with the very visible space of the art gallery.
Doma: Technically it was pretty simple: It was basically a small python script which
remote-controlled a Firefox and basically logged in to the darknet markets through
Tor and then just clicked around to choose a random category, get all the items below
$100, randomly choose one, hit the buy button, send an encrypted message to the
seller to send it directly to the exhibition space, and pay the fee or the
things in bitcoins. Carmen: So, over time we wanted to have a
whole landscape of goods from the darknets. There was also a lot of talk in
the media at the time -- well, there still is -- about the darknets and what you can
buy there and we didn't believe what they were telling us; we really wanted to see
what we would randomly get from the darknet. And the first item was called
"fire brigade masterkey set", which the seller said was a set of keys usually
owned by the fire brigade in the UK to open storage...
Doma: ...public gates in public spaces, stuff they need access to, so...
Carmen: We have no idea whether it's true or not.
Doma: But we still really like that object, because it has that potential of
opening doors in the UK. *laughter*
Carmen: The second item was cigarettes from the Ukraine. So basically, in very
good darknet fashion, circumventing the taxation on tobacco in the European Union.
Doma:I think, it was about $35 at that time.
Carmen: Yeah. Doma: Third week, we had this Louis
Vuitton Trevi handbag for $95. And actually, if we speak about trust, this
was the only item which wasn't delivered, but the seller was kind enough to send the
bitcoins back, because he knew he couldn't deliver. So, also here, it kind of worked.
Carmen: Then, we received the Lord of the Rings collection by JRR Tolkien in PDF
format, which, for $1, which we printed . Doma: It's several thousand pages. Then,
the first or ... second super-digital item: It was called Visa.
Carmen: Visa Platinum top card, sent from Torland for $35. Apparently this was a
Visa prepaid. We received a visa, so the visa number, the expiry date, the name and
the little number you have on the back. Doma: And we didn't dare to use it.
Carmen: Then, sixth week the random darknet shopper selected 10 yellow ecstasy
pills with a Twitter logo on them... *giggling in the audience*
Carmen: ... sent from Germany for $48 to Switzerland; they actually arrived. We
took them as a title for the talk also, because we really liked the description.
We displayed them like the rest. Doma: They came in this stealth packaging,
pretending to be a DVD in this alufoil and then vacuumed again.
Carmen: Yes and around about this time, also the press started picking up on the
work, because they kind of felt that this random darknet shopper was questioning or
posing questions around who's responsible if a bot commits something illegal. So,
"What happens when a software box goes on the darknet shopping spree?", the Guardian
asked. Who is responsible when a bot randomly shops for ecstasy in the darknet?
Is it the person who programmed it, is it the person who executes it, can a robot or
a piece of software be jailed if it commits a crime?
*giggling in the audience* Doma: And also what happens if the code is
open source and written by many people, like if you have an algorithm which goes
wild? Carmen: But the random darknet shopper
just continued shopping and it bought some Nike Air Yeezy 2 limited edition trainers
for $75. Doma: If you convert the bitcoins into
nowadays' value, it would be around $3000. *laughter*
Doma: It costed $75 at the time. Carmen: Then, we received a cap with a
built-in camera that little... that's where the camera is, from the US for $99.
Doma: Then a thing I really liked, it's called the decoy first class letter. So,
it's basically a plain letter you receive, like a service and it came from Australia,
addressed to our exhibition space in Switzerland. It's basically an empty
letter, just to basically traceroute your postal system, to check if the system is
ok, if you can receive mails... *giggling in the audience*
Doma: ...if it's... maybe somebody opens it. So, the idea by buying stuff in the
deep webs is basically also to anonymize somehow your postal box and to test that
you can basically send yourself a letter and see if something happens. It's also
good tactics, basically, if you want to introduce a new address somewhere, start
sending letters there and the post office, the post person, the delivery person, will
get used to it and basically... Carmen: Yeah. The next item was a Sprite
stash can. You probably know this, this is an empty soda can, constructed to weigh
the same as a full one and you can screw the top on, so you can place whatever you
want inside and it's hidden away Doma: Then, the next one: These Diesel man
jeans replica from Hong Kong for $79. Carmen: And the last item we received was
a high quality scan of a Hungarian passport for online verification. So, here
you see, this is basically how we displayed the items and this all went
really well, until we took down the exhibition in January 2015 and the day
after the exhibition closed, the public prosecutor of St. Gallen in Switzerland
basically seized the whole work and we were a bit confused.
*laughter* *applause*
Carmen: So, we were a bit confused in the first moment, because of the timing. So,
after the exhibition closed, they seized the whole work, but it turned out, that
for them it was mostly about the drugs the random darknet shopper had bought. We were
kind of worried about the passport and the visa card as well, which they felt was
totally okay. *laughter*
Doma: And in the first moment, the question also by the public prosecutor was
raised, it was about responsibility: Who is responsible in this specific moment? Is
it the artists who wrote the code? Is it the museum who basically hosts the show?
Is it the curator? Is it the people who work there? Because me and Carmen, we have
never touched those drugs; we have not, basically... it was all done somehow
automatically. Or is it the bot himself who is somehow its own legal entity and
could be punished? So, in order to somehow also protect the staff of the museum and
to also to get our items back, we thought "The stuff is ours; we want the things
back.", we raised our hands and said "No; I think, if you want to charge somebody,
you should charge us." Carmen: And we were summoned for an
interrogation, which was really interesting. There we learned that the
drugs actually contained MDMA, so the police had tested them and confirmed that
they did. Doma: I mean, we knew through the ratings
on the drugs on the darknet markets, that this stuff was good.
*laughter* Carmen: But then we kind of had to
discuss. We tried to explain what we were... that we were trying to raise these
questions in public through publicly accessible art piece, because we felt it
very important that we talk about these things. Nevertheless, the public
prosecutor decided to destroy the drugs, which was very unfortunate. We, of cause,
claimed they were an art piece. Doma: So, you're destroying an art piece
here and our lawyer was also referencing all other artworks which involved drug
from the whole history. Carmen: Yeah, but we did receive the whole
work back in the end, except for the drugs, and all charges were dropped
against us and the public prosecutor wrote a very nice letter, saying that we
actually were allowed to break certain laws to raise certain questions within
society. Without specifically naming freedom of art.
Doma: So, our understanding of why they seized the whole thing, is that they were
afraid what the next artist would do. So, the first one buys it, the second one
takes it as a performative act and the third one gives it to the audience and
it's kind of clear that they need to draw a line. So, the question about
responsibility was not solved. Carmen: No, we still have it. We then
continued with this question of bots and the mechanical gaze... Oh, okay. You're
jumping, sorry, wrong introduction... The same year, we were asked to do a public
art piece, which is always the case in Switzerland when public buildings are
built, part of the money has to go into an art piece and usually that art piece is
sculptural: It can be a sculpture in the lobby o...
Doma: ... a sculpture in public space. It should... there're different kind of
things you need to address; the public art piece should work for 30 years, should be
sustainable, so it's mostly made out of stone.
Carmen: So, for us as digital artists, this was a very interesting question, also
because the building is the house for Electronic Arts in Basel, also
Switzerland. So, for us the question was "How can we talk about digital topics, but
not using digital media?" Doma: And we asked ourself "Is there a way
of... I mean we thought a lot about architecture and software and how
basically the software you use is also infecting the architecture which is built
and since this is all software, what we have never seen is a software error. So,
we ask ourself "Is it possible to build or is it funny to build a software error into
stone?" and... Carmen: We kind of had to try that.
Doma: We had to try that, so we took a picture of the place, of this house, and
basically glitched it through a small script and told them to rebuild it and
this is how it looks now. Carmen: This is what the building looks
like today. So, they... You can see it. They...
*applause* Carmen: And when you stand there it kind
of gives you a surreal feeling: There's a square in front of this facade and you
you're not sure, whether your eyes are wrong or the building is wrong, and then,
when you come closer, you then, of course, see.
Doma: And also here, the glitch reveals stuff, like... People came to us and asked
"How does the piping system work?" *giggling*
Doma: "Is it still here?" And this is something which we like about software
glitches. That you sometimes you get an understanding how a system works only of
breaking it or by forcing it to throw errors.
Carmen: Then we... *the 2 lecturers discuss something,
whispering* Carmen: Sorry.
Doma: We need to discuss what we are speaking about.
*laughter* Doma Okay, so we'll skip another project,
because we are running out of the time. Carmen: I think the last piece we'd like
to just quickly show you is very recent. We're still kind of amazed at this. So,
this year, we were asked to do a book on our work and we felt... This was really
difficult for us, because usually we do websites and you can change websites and
then you do a book and you kind of... it's printed and then it's there and that
really... it was very hard for us, but once we decided to do this, we kept
thinking about "How can we break this very static print format of the book?" and
together with the 2 designers of the book, Konrad Renner (???) and Christoph Knurz
(???), we thought about... we said "Well, the title should be code, because maybe
through the title, you could inject code into various websites, because books,
they're online, you can buy them online. And we decided to go
for as its title.
Dona: JavaScript, which normally, like YAML, you can't write JavaScript into a
commentary field on Facebook, because these things is parsed out and so the
browser does not execute that code, so they check it, but we thought "Maybe if
it's so deep in the databases, like the ISBN databases, the national
bibliographies and whatever, it might pop up somewhere."
*laughter* *applause*
Carmen:And the book came out in September and then in October we realized that on
Walther Kรถnig, which is a big art bookseller with a big online website, it
worked, so when you search for "!Mediangruppe Bitnik" on the website...
Hope this works... And you go to the catalog...
*laughter* *applause*
Doma: So, this one this one is pretty okay. I mean, normally if you... on other
website it breaks the "buy" button, which is not in our interest, but...
*laughter* Doma: So, you can still buy it on
Buchhandlung Walther Kรถnig. Just click "okay" and then it's okay. So, here's just
a small collection of 10, 12, which are popping up. It's like... everyday we get
more. And we can show you a small video of 2, 3 pieces.
Carmen: Don't know what we're going to see now. I think eBay.
Doma: I don't know. Carmen: Okay. This is eBay.
Doma: So, ebay.co.uk. *smartphone notification sound*
Doma: BAM! And this only worked on or... they already fixed it, so somebody made a
bug report. I like this one. *smartphone notification sound*
*laughter* *smartphone notification sound*
*laughter* *different smartphone notification sound*
*laughter* Doma: So, thank you!
Carmen: Thanks. *applause*
*herald speaks, but it is unintelligible due to technical problems*
Herald: We have 5 minutes for a very short Q&A if there are already people lying out
(???). Please, number 2. M2: Very cool talk, thanks. I'm from
Switzerland, so I wonder, you were lucky that you got dropped off the charges. How
much would it got for the charges if you would not drop them? Do you know?
Doma: I don't you know. I mean, it was basically or here it was about drug
possession and 10 ecstasy pills and we were totally okay to take this fine. We
don't know it, but it was kind of... Carmen: It would have been fine, because
in Switzerland, according to our lawyer, it would have been for personal use. I
mean, this is not the amount you carry around, apparently, if you're selling, so
we would have gotten away with a fine. M2: So and I... Thanks very much that you
said that actually writing the code and then the program buys it makes you
actually responsible, right? So, would you... At the end you said, it was your...
"I would take the charge", because you were writing the code...
Carmen: Yes, the problem was that usually, at least in Swiss law, possession of drugs
needs to mean that the drugs were either found on your person or in a space that
can be... that definitely belongs to you. And the problem was that it was clear from
the process that we hadn't touched the drugs and we didn't want somebody else to
get fined for drug possession ; that would have made no sense. We wanted to also
publicly discuss this... having to step up and say "No, it was us."
M2: Thanks. Herald: Okay, final one.
Microphone x: Hi. Sorry... thanks for the talk. I have to ask: Does the plumbing
work? Carmen: Yeah. It works, because... so the
pillars were... I'll try to explain briefly. So, architecturally this building
was a storage for dry goods and the pillars used to support the building, but
when they turned it into a museum, they actually filled the space between the
pillars with insulation, so the pillars were gone. And then the architects didn't
like it. They thought, the pillars should be there, because the building didn't look
good, so they actually put fake pillars onto the facade again and so we could just
take the empty pillars and cut them up and put the plumbing inside. So, now the
visible plumbing is fake, but the real plumbing is inside the pillars; that's how
it works. *applause*
Herald: Amazing work. One final, big round of applause for Mediengruppe Bitnik and
thanks for being here! Carmen: Thank you; thanks.
Doma: Thank you. *applause*
[Music]
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