Microsoft word - lilly_controls_forigin.doc

UBERMORGEN.COM (lizvlx/Hans Bernhard)
Lilly controls my Foriginals
For their first Italian personal exhibition, the Austrian artist duo UBERMORGEN.COM (lizvlx/Hans
Bernhard) is showing a synthesis of their recent work -- a subtle membrane connecting the digital
and the biological: a mix that UBERMORGEN.COM, an identity that lives and works on the Net,
experienced on their own bodies. One of the best-known exponents of the net.art scene,
UBERMORGEN.COM are the theorists of digital actionism, a radical practice of artistic action which
experiments on the market of attention and takes place in mass media. The most astonishing result of
this kind of practice so far has been Vote-Auction (2000), a web site that, during the American
presidential elections 2000, helped people sell their vote in an auction. The legal prosecution against
UBERMORGEN.COM, and the media hysteria it produced, are an integral part of the whole project.
During this mass-media-performance, UBERMORGEN.COM were interviewed up to 30 times per
day. CNN produced a 30 minutes show on the project in their legal format Burden of Proof. In this
feature, UBERMORGEN.COM never comment on whether the project was a real threat to the
integrity of the U.S. election or wheter it was a political satire.
In the mass media storm, the digital actionist works with her whole body, as well as part and victim ofthe network around her. “We are children of the 1980s, We are the first internet-pop-generation.
Hans Bernhard is loaded with 10 years of internet & tech [digital cocaine], mass media hacking,underground techno, hardcore [illegal] drugs, rock&roll lifestyle and net.art jet set.”. Hans Bernhard`sneuronal networks are connected to the global network, and his mental illness – the bipolar affectivedisorder that in March 2002 sent him to a mental hospital – is the network's illness. The video calledPsych|OS (2005) sums up that experience, in which those two levels – digital and real, bio & tech,nervous system and operative system – merge.
This nervous system, infected by the hi-tech, needs a treatment, and the hi-tech society prescribes itsremedies, “bio-chemical 'agents' which control the internal information flow”. Olanzapine, anantipsychotic drug produced by the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly as Zyprexa®, is one of theseagents. In the digital prints Zyprexa “Lilly 1112” and Zyprexa “Lilly 4117” (2006), UBERMORGE.COMpaints the drug molecular structure, but during this translation process the molecule discovers to bemade by bits. “Just pixels on a screen, just ink on paper”, like Foriginals (forged originals), theconceptual device UBERMORGEN.COM uses to change legal documents into legal art.
The title of the show – a declaration of poetics that seems to be a declaration of love – derives fromthis process. “Lilly controls my Foriginals” means “Lilly controls my artistic work”, where Lilly justseems to be a woman’s name, is in fact the name of a pharmaceutical company. Lilly “controls”,inspires as well as oversees, supervises the contact between my brain and my hard drive.
UBERMORGEN.COM’s focus on “the pixel as the molecule” and technology as a hidden demonrelates to the technology industries newest gadgets -- RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) chips areone of the leading technologies of the future: an identification system that can collect diverseinformation about the products it is attached to as well as the person that has made purchase of theproduct. From a formal point of view, RFID chips reveal an organic structure, surprisingly similar to acellular structure. With the ART FID (2005) series, UBERMORGEN.COM uses the visual impact of asuprematist painting, and tells us about this mix between biotechnologies and digital technologies,this neverending overlapping of two contiguous levels that is shaping our identity.
fabioparisartgalleryvia Alessandro Monti 13 - 25121 Brescia - tel. 030 3756139 - skype: fabioparisbswww.fabioparisartgallery.com from february 25 to april 8 2006OPENING saturday, february 25, 18.00

Source: http://www.ubermorgen.com/publications/FabioParis2006/Lilly_controls_Foriginal.pdf