monographic room: Hans Bernhard (UBERMORGEN.COM)
Hans Bernhard (A/CH/USA, *1973) is a Vienna and St. Moritz based artist working in the fields of digital and fine art.
Using technology, computers and the internet as a medium since 1994, he exhibited and performed in venues like the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (Japan), the Ars Electronica (Austria), the Konsthall Malmoe (Sweden) or the SFMOMA (USA).
He is a founding member of the legendary etoy.CORPORATION and of UBERMORGEN.COM.
He studied visual communication, digital art, art history and aesthetics in Vienna, San Diego, Pasadena and Wuppertal.
Hans is a professional artist and creative thinker, working on art projects, researching digital networks, exhibiting and travelling the world lecturing at conferences and Universities.
UBERMORGEN.COM [A/Ch/USA, *1999] is an artist duo created in Vienna, Austria, by Lizvlx and Hans Bernhard, a founder of etoy.
Behind UBERMORGEN.COM we can find one of the most unmatchable identities - controversial and iconoclast - of the contemporary European techno-fine-art avant-garde.
Their open circuit of conceptual art, drawing, software art, pixel-painting, computer installations, net.art, sculpture and digital activism (media hacking) transforms their brand into a hybrid Gesamtkunstwerk.
UBERMORGEN.COM's work is unique not because of what they do but because how, when, where and why they do it.
The computer and the network are (ab)used to create art and combine its multiple forms.
The permanent amalgamation of fact and fiction points toward an extremely expanded concept of one's working materials, that for Ubermorgen.com also include (international) rights, democracy and global communication (input-feedback loops).
The "ubermorgen" is the German word both for "the day after tomorrow" or "super-tomorrow".
Projects:
2006 Psych|OS-Generator - http://www.ipnic.org/psychos
2006 BANKSTATEMENTGENERATOR - http://www.ipnic.org/BANKSTATEMENTGENERATOR
2006 UBERMORGEN.COM CATALOGUE - http://www.ubermorgen.com/CATALOGUE
2005 GWEI - Google Will Eat Itself - http://www.gwei.org
2005 Psych|OS - http://www.ubermorgen.com/psychos
2005 Hansbernhardblog - http://www.ubermorgen.com/hansbernhardblog
2004 SellTheVote - http://sellthevote.com/
2003 etoy.holding - http://www.ubermorgen.com/2006/pdfs/etoy.pdf
2002 THE*AGENCY* for manual election recount - http://www.ubermorgen.com/*THE*AGENCY*/
2002 INJUNCTION GENERATOR - http://www.ipnic.org
2001 NAZI~LINE - http://www.ubermorgen.com/NAZI~LINE
2000 [V|OTE-AUCTION - http://www.vote-auction.net
1999 Toywar - etoy vs. eToys - s. amazon.com, search: "leaving reality behind"
1998 etoy.TANK-17
1997 etoy.SHARES
1996 THE DIGITAL HIJACK* - http://www.hijack.org
1994 THE etoy.TANK-SYSTEM* [1994-1997] - http://fanclub.etoy.c3.hu/tanksystem/
UBERMORGEN.COM websites:
www.ubermorgen.com/2005
www.ubermorgen.com/2003
www.ubermorgen.com/2001
www.ubermorgen.com/2000
www.ubermorgen.com/1999
He won the Site Specific's IndexPage Competition 2006 with Psychotropic Drug Karaoke
INTERVIEW WITH THE JURY:
Domenico Quaranta. What is a blog when the stream of consciousness can be affected by the stream of bits?
Hans Bernhard. I don`t know... copy & paste? History has thousands of examples of how one little voice...
DQ. What I like so much in hansbernhardblog (and in the Psychotropic Drug Karaoke) is that it is cold and sober like a conceptual work, but it has the strenght of - and it is in fact - a private confession. You simply post the scientific names of the drugs you take, but you talk about anxiety and paranoia. What is, at last, hansbernhardblog? And is it useful for you, in a therapeutical way?
HB. No, it is not useful in a private way, it only affects the public, public opinion and perception of UBERMORGEN.COM and of myself. The user does the rest, the simplicity is very useful in generating vast white spaces.
Corrado Mora. Related to Domenico's question: could the Psychotropic Drug Karaoke be useful, in your intention, to the collectivity? To someone else beside Hans Bernhard?
HB. Maybe for the other 25% of the population taking legal drugs on a daily basis. For me, direct action is prefereable to hidden and secret existence. The list represents this in a essentialized form, reduced, it's sort of the result of the madness.. instead of writing a book about Net.Art of the 1990s i represent it in a different way, and because i dont paint particularly well, i do it that way.. The mixing of the digital and the physical - or the digital representation of the physical drug, this is the imaginary and driving force.
DQ. In Abe & Mo Sing The Blogs, Abe Linkoln & Marisa Olson sing some posts from blogs they like: isn't it another kind of techno-mental-illness, or a symptom of blog-addiction? And what happens when you mix their song with the interface of your blog?
HB. I guess it`s a brilliant contemporary form of generating lyrics, mixing the not-so-new japanese phenomenom of karaoke with the pretty-new global phenomenom of Blogs. Sometimes funny things turn into a global menace.
CM. In Pshycotropic Drug Karaoke you act as an individual, disconnected from the usual collective dimension. An illness is – physically – individual. How do you usually conciliate your individual identity when operating in a group, facing collective facts? Is a "collective illness" (like lacks of democracy and transparency – objects of UBERMORGEN.COM's artistical research) and the collective work that UBERMORGEN.COM does something that overwhelms individual identity?
HB. Usually we tackle basic research by simply doing things, laying out settings and beeing patient waiting for new things popping up. With the hansbernhardblog the same applies, it is not a specific topic i am interested in but the basic setting of the publication of personal, abstract data – and nobody can judge wheter it is ficticious or factitious. Now the karaoke was a thing that found me, thats why i love this kind of research. It is not time consuming, you dont have to watch it every day, there is no need to protocol it and there is no obligation to reach such and such results. It is purely conceptual, and by throwing it back into the face of the user and into the vast sea of data it will return, one day...
CM. Your sickness was caused even by technology abuse. How do you consider the inter-relation between human and technological?
HB. It is a mystery to me, it is about fractals and sizes, different dimensions of organisms. Early (ab)use of drugs and technology can affect your identity, it actually rerouts existential data in your brain by giving you a new set of identity parameters. You can decode yourself and hope that the recombination is successful. In my case, energy management was fucked up and i obtained too much direct control.
