(((Somebody's gotta pay serious attention to stuff like this, and I guess it might as well be me.)))
The text below will be published in "The Hartware Guide to irational", edited by Susanne Ackers, Inke Arns, Francis Hunger, Jacob Lillemose (Frankfurt am Main: Revolver - Archiv fuer aktuelle Kunst 2006, ISBN: 3-86588-299-4 [German/English]).
The publication is forthcoming in November 2006 and contains contributions and articles by Matthew Fuller, Jacob Lillemose, Inke Arns, Francis Hunger, Susanne Ackers and Darija Simunovic.
It can be ordered via www.hmkv.de and www.revolver-books.de
The exhibition "The Wonderful World of irational.org. Tools, Techniques and Events 1996-2006" is running until Sunday, October 29, 2006. Drop by if you can!
Many greetings, IA
* * *
Irational's Finest, or The Art of Movement Through Space
Inke Arns
Hardly a day goes by without some news item about the discovery of a carefully concealed crop of genetically modified maize, about liquid explosives in airplanes and bombs inside suitcases on trains, about calls for blanket video surveillance, about the global spread of avian 'flu. We wonder when the virus will reach our own part of the world, have long begun to feel the pinch of economic cutbacks in Germany, to notice the effects of climate change, and cannot help but think: Life's harder than it used to be.
That was something which irational, founded in the post-Thatcher Britain of 1996, knew ten years ago already. Unerringly ever since, the group has formulated themes and proposed idiosyncratic solutions. These are now presented, for the first time comprehensively, in the exhibition The Wonderful World of irational.org.
The irational platform includes companies pressing for access to new technologies to be defined as a human right (Technologies To The People) or pleading for a "better life" with a "human interface" (Mejor Vida Corporation). Alongside mailing lists such as American Express and 7-11, irational houses the Cultural Terrorist Agency, which infiltrates contemporary forms of performative ideology and rhetoric by creating a new London borough and declaring a by-election there, or by marketing a "genetically modified anti-Capitalist superweed" whose built-in resistance to the broad-spectrum herbicides of Monsanto represents a threat to the profitable deployment of GM grain types.
As well as criticizing the irresponsible dissemination of genetically manipulated organisms, irational also considers specific action to be taken in the case of a global influenza pandemic. Increasingly precarious conditions of employment were countered with slogans like "Temps of the World Unite - Turning Shit into Gold" (even if, seven years back, the word "precariat" had not yet been coined), or with proposals for the free usage of public transport or universal access to student ID cards. Altogether, movement - irationalists overcome fences and walls with the simplest of means (home-made nets, for instance) and scaling techniques, cross borders without going through the official channels. It is invariably a matter of experiencing space differently: for instance, while engaged in communal tree climbing during the annual International Tree Climbing Day held under the motto "Liberate the Horizontal", or in the three-contestant World Downhill Skate Championships staged in Bristol, UK.
It was not least in this capacity of travel enterprise of a different kind that irational adopted the logo of the International Air Transport Association IATA (1) (founded in Havana in 1945): a stylized winged globe symbolizing global communication and global traffic. The appendage "irational" turns the logo into a seal of quality for a special art of movement through space.
Six international net and media artists are loosely grouped around the irational.org server founded by the British net artist Heath Bunting in 1996. Many of the participants importantly influenced the early net art of the mid-1990s: Daniel Garcia Andújar/Technologies To The People (Valencia/E), Rachel Baker (London/GB), Kayle Brandon (Bristol/GB), Heath Bunting (Bristol/GB), Minerva Cuevas/Mejor Vidas Corporation (Mexico City/MEX), and Marcus Valentine (Bristol/GB).
With dry humour and minimalist aesthetics, irational commentated the internet hype emergent as of the mid-1990s, and launched its own pseudo start-ups to match the burgeoning New Market euphoria that set in around 1996/97. Art on the net was direct, without the need for - or safety of - a mediating space or instance.
This immediacy was reflected during that period by frequent skirmishes with unsmiling patent attorneys threatening irational with legal action for using company names like 7-ELEVEN, American Express, Sainsburys and Tesco. Documented in detail in the exhibition, these disputes were only a prelude to the present-day litigation surrounding copyright, intellectual property, and trademarks (most recently, FIFA's jealous protection of the World Cup™ trademark in 2006).
The world's first net artist to announce his "retirement", Heath Bunting stopped working exclusively with the net in 1997. His activities increasingly returned to public space (of which the internet, of course, is now a vital component). If in the "net phase" irational activities were devoted to questioning virtual borders, today the members experiment with questioning and overcoming the borders - economic, political, social - defined in real space, which they make more porous in often highly entertaining fashion.
The output of irational in the period 1996-2006 covers a broad spectrum of pertinent sociopolitical issues. From an early date, the group negotiated themes like the growing sense of in/security in an increasingly technology-based world, questions of surveillance and data collection (via "irational" questionnaires, for instance, or re-purposed customer cards), branding and trademark protection, workplace insecurity, as well as DIY cultures, media, and economies.
With the shift of focus from the net to physical space, moreover, the work of irational immediately, singularly and paradigmatically displayed something that is now increasingly evident in contemporary media art: an interest not so much in the actual media and technologies as in current spaces complexly interconnected by these technologies and shot through with media-based networks.
(....)
Notes
1 The International Air Transport Association, http://www.iata.de/
2 un-frieden. sabotage von wirklichkeiten - discord.sabotage of realities, Kunstverein and Kunsthaus Hamburg, 1996, curated by Inke Arns and Ute Vorkoeper, see http://www.projects.v2.nl/~arns/Archiv/Discord/. In regard to the participation of Technologies To The People, see also Inke Arns: Technologies to the People® - Our Sponsor, or: How we got the attention of both Apple (TM) and the left German art critique. In: Technologies to the People®. Annual Report 2000 [i.e. Daniel Garcia Andujar], Alicante 2001, http://www.projects.v2.nl/~arns/Texts/tp.html
3 Heath Bunting was featured with the Vunerability project, which is also presented in The Wonderful World of irational.org.
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Dr. Inke Arns
Künstlerische Leiterin / Artistic Director
Hartware MedienKunstVerein
Güntherstrasse 65 * D-44143 Dortmund
T ++49 (0) 231 - 823 106
F ++49 (0) 231 - 882 02 40
[email protected] www.inkearns.de
THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF IRATIONAL.ORG
PHOENIX Halle Dortmund, Aug 30 - Oct 29, 2006
www.hmkv.de
WHAT IS MODERN ART? (GROUP SHOW)
Kuenstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Sep 29 - Oct 29, 2006
www.whatismodernart.de
