Jury's statements on Hans Bernhard's Psychotropic Drug Karaoke
Domenico Quaranta.
Psychotropic Drug Karaoke is the adaptation to the aims and terms of the contest of one of the latest works by UBERMORGEN.COM, hansbernardblog, bounded itself to that conceptual kernel base of the series Psych|OS: a reflection on the bindings between networks and neural networks, individual and network psychology.
Hans Bernhard creates a minimal blog in which he daily posts the medicines he must assume after his nervous breakdown which has forced his recovery in a psychiatric hospital, in his opinion strictly connected to his Net activity.
By "literally" adopting the blog format ("web blog", the Net onboard diary), Bernhard subverts it from the inside and gives rise to a psychological diary whose content is not the report of his mental state, but of the psychotropic drugs he swallows to keep it under control.
Those psychotropic drugs are themselves a sophisticated product of the over-informed society which originates the same diseases it pretends to heal: a society in which, as UBERMORGEN.COM observes, there is not a different left between the pixel and the molecule.
In all, the Psych|OS project reveals itself a convincing portrait of a reality – the actual reality – in which technologies are not a simple mean anymore, an external prosthesis of the human body, but act in perfect continuity with its psychic and organic processes and have a direct influence on them.
The project is completed by an mp3 file in which an interpreter sings the contents of the post as if it was a black metal song.
By including this file in the project, Bernhard sets up an ironic cross-reference game with another project, Abe & Mo Sing The Blogs by Abe Linkoln and Marisa Olson, recently included in the Gate pages of the Artport section of the Whitney Museum in New York: a blog once again, in which the authors shower from other blogs frequented by themselves some contents accompanied at the same time with a personal singing interpretation, enjoyable in mp3 format.
While Hans Bernhard plays with one most typical characteristics of the blog world – the information redundancy – reducing its own blog to minimal terms, Abe & Mo accept to recycle the information but they introduce a new variable which sends it back to us full of completely new meanings.
In the case of Psychotropic Drug Karaoke, the singing interpretation of the medical prescription is given credit for returning that expressive value which seemed to be lost in the black and white page of Bernhard's blog and for letting us revise the daily action of his author, who sits down in front of the computer every morning to share with us the medicines he has just assumed, for what it is: an outburst, a redeeming action.
The project is presented as a Site Specific work in the most literal and complete sense of the term, living in the Net, for the Net and with elements taken from the Net, interpreting in a creative way one of the most interesting phenomena of the recent Internet: the blog.
For all these reasons, I have retained to assign him the top grade.
Tatiana Bazzichelli.
The project is included in the more general Psych|OS, dimostrating how today the artist’s role changes: from an object creator he becomes a processes realizator.
In the Bernhard case, the work partecipating to the IndexPage Competition2006 is to be interpreted considering all the different other projects of the Psych|OS serie, a serie of conceptual actions that gives interest to the project in its entire consideration, seen as a dowel of many others that cannot be perceived separately.
In this sense, his work is a perfect Site Specific’s "preview", that remainds us how the Net is to be used as a tool for creating processes and for originating fluid paths of networks utilizing different supports.
Bernhard’s work becomes in this sense a concrete " intermedia " (borrowing a Fluxus term), combining images, sounds and different medias, if linked to the other Psych|OS works (and among them the hansbernhardblog).
To me, Psychotropic Drug Karaoke deserves to win for the creative interpretation of the entry call of the Competition, by presenting a work that is part of a contemporary feeling and index of an experimental process on the Net.
Corrado Mora.
What particularly impressed me about Psychotropic Drug Karaoke is the way the style undergoes a very deep change with respect to the other actions by UBERMORGEN.COM for which were given the label "digital action":
opposite to a war action, the intimity of the "victim counting" appear sensitive.
A psychophysic defeat in front of the network, demonstrated by the chemical menu described in the artwork and updated day by day in hansbernhardblog.
While UBERMORGEN.COM's research (and, before that, etoy.CORP's one) is directed toward the individuation and incidence on the system's weak areas, in Psychotropic Drug Karaoke Hans Bernhard seems to admit that, during the battle, the system has found his weaks areas and hit them hard the same.
It is an autobiographic moment (whose intimity has been made public day by day through hansbernardblog), parallel to the usual artistic strategy of UBERMORGEN.COM, but connected and caused by that.
Psychotropic Drug Karaoke and, before, hansbernhardblog and Psych|OS (2005, video and software generating diagnosis of psychic alterations and relative drug prescription) are artworks directly connected with the Hans Bernhard's past.
They have, on the other side, the aspect of a collective wit.
The Internet connection has many negative sides: a frenetic rythm, the illusion of being able to substitute the social interrelationships with chats and blogs, the frequent losenesses of control, privacy and safaty which happen day by day nearly imperceptibly.
These aspects are already generating victims because of their maximum intensity together with the personal psychic weaknesses, as the hikikomoris (guys whos lock their room door and live of their computer and some food).
And Hans Bernhard.
I believe that Psychotropic Drug Karaoke deserves the first prize not only for the emotional characteristics of the artwork itself, but also because it is a tipical site-specific artwork, which takes motivations and elements from the frenetic life of the Net and comes back to it.
