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pdfkeywords={ubermorgen.com, humorism, actionism},
pdfauthor={Florian Cramer},
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\begin{document}


\title{Action Melancholia}

\author{Florian Cramer}

\date{Sept. 2006}

\maketitle

From Katherine S. Dreier's and Marcel Duchamp's ``Soci\'et\'e Anonyme''
to Res Ingold's ``Ingold Airlines,'' many artists have posed as
corporations; since Kurt Schwitters' ``Merzreklame,'' artists have
worked as P.R. agencies, and since Johannes Baader's Dadaist
interventions in the Weimar Reichstag parliament and Berlin Dome church
in 1918 and 1919, artists have physically, and subversively, intervened
into the public sphere. Contrary to initial expectations, the rise of
the Internet as a mass medium and of Internet art in the 1990s did not
yield an aesthetics of ``virtual'' disembodiment, but quite to the
contrary help to escalate and radicalize artistic interventionism.

Through official-looking web sites and domain names, groups like the Yes
Men could believably pose as the World Trade Organization and instigate
communicative processes that allowed them to be invited as WTO
representatives and pull off critical pranks at highbrow economic
conventions. Similarly, the mass availability of software design tools
and skills equalized the means of corporate identity production between
artists and companies. Thanks to professional-grade graphics and web
design, the ``Nike Ground'' project of the artist collective
0100101110101101.org was a believable simulation of Nike's corporate
identity. The alleged renaming of Vienna's Heldenplatz into ``Nike
Ground'' managed to confuse both a common audience -- which took the
project literally -- and gullible leftist critics who failed to get the
ambivalence of the project, as something that simultaneously subverted
and reinforced the Nike brand. 

In the 1990s, there was much talk in Internet art-related discussion
forums and conferences about ``tactical media,'' a concept that is not
quite clear in its mere words. It took artists to go from actionist
performance into the Internet and, eventually, from the Internet
back into the non-electronic public sphere to give the concept a
meaning: as communication technology being cleverly used as a 
door-opener to otherwise inaccessible social spheres. In comparison to
Res Ingold's awkward pretension of an airline through a series of dinner
party receptions, the Yes Men's fake WTO and 0100101110101101.org's fake
Nike websites tactically used advantages of the Internet for more
elegant and thus more efficacious simulations, realizing at the same
time that the simulacrum isn't powerful unless it leaves the
realm of the symbolic and affects face-to-face social situations. This
approach to ``interactive art'' is squarely opposed to the
mainstream ``media art'' notion of the same term as cybernetic feedback 
devices, or, in other words, the pseudo-interactivity of Pavlovian
stimulus-and-response systems forcing the audience to act within the
constraints of programmed machine logic.

The Yes Men, 0100101110101101.org and the -- tactically no less
proficient -- Viennese Monochrom collective form closely linked nodes of
the artistic and personal network of ubermorgen.com. The development of
artistic approaches is similar, too, from an early embracement of the
Internet in the corporate over-affirmation of etoy.com to its dystopian
tactical use as ubermorgen.com. From a realm that was open to be
appropriated by self-designed corporations, the Internet ended up being
artistically perceived as corporately controlled territory. This
change of perception proved to be productive and, as the comparison
between Etoy's (ongoing low-brow) work and ubermorgen's reveals,
a leap in artistic quality.

Unlike the WTO web site fake of the Yes Men, ubermorgen's Internet is
thoroughly dystopian. It is not even a corporate space that can be
hijacked for a morally good cause, but the hijacking is no less dark and
abysmal than its object; there is no way out the system. Unlike the Yes
Men's subverted WTO, no parodistic or utopian device exists that
disrobes corporate logic like the emperor's new clothes. Instead, a
project like ``Google Will Eat Itself'' (GWEI) just lets it run amok.

Beyond that, ubermorgen.com's dark humorism has a side that transcends
corporate identities and ostensible impersonality. ``Psych.OS'', a
series of video and images subconsciouly recorded as an audiovisual
``écriture automatique'' inside a psychiatric hospital, at first doesn't
seem to be related to projects like GWEI or www.vote-auction.com at all
except that it was created by the same artist. The correspondence
between the former's highly subjective and the latter's highly corporate
art consists of more than the former depicting the individual inside
yet another controlling institution and the latter injecting imaginative
hackerdom into a corporate cosmos.  In 2006, ubermorgen.com was part of
the ``Smile Machines'' exhibition during the transmediale festival in
Berlin, a show on humor in contemporary and computer-based art.
Ubermorgen's piece ``G3-Bureaucrazy'' consisted, among others, of a
web-based psycho drug recipe generator. After filling out a multiple
choice questionnaire of psychotic symptoms, users would receive a
hardcopy of an officially looking prescription for strong psycho drugs,
complete with a fake doctor's signature. Combining the psychotic and
the corporate and turning it into a business, this piece bridged the gap
between GWEI and PSYCH.OS, precarious machine logic and precarious
subjectivity. It is the most concise present-day update to reflections
of psychoses in modern art, bare of all the romanticizing that marked
surrealism from Breton to Artaud, and bare of the bourgeois ``art brut''
aesthetization of undrugged psychotic expression. 

The contemporary artist no longer works on the grounds of deliberately
unrestrained and self-fashioned `craziness,' but, having turned into a
marketing director and self-managing freelancer in the art world, on
Prozac or Effexor. But ubermorgen's piece is not just a satirical
reflection of a contemporary world where you find, such as in L.A.,
billboards for ``South California's favorite antidepressant.'' It also
is a very personal piece that evokes abysses of one's individual
condition, precisely by depicting it not as an unpredictable psychotic,
but as impersonal software automatism.

What in Renaissance art and philosophy was known as melancholia first
transformed in early 20th century modernism, from Surrealism to the
Vienna actionists, into violent psychosis and finally into
self-controlled conditioning and chemical self-normalization in our
time. Nevertheless, ubermorgen.com's art remains actionism even in such
a formal piece as the recipe generator. First of all, the recipe printed
from the web site can actually be used to alter one's condition, just
like the Yes Men's WTO site has been tactically used to intervene into
business congresses; and finally, the work has a more profound personal
dimension. ubermorgen's humor is existential, unlike the lighter-weight
humorism of, for example, Kurt Schwitters or Robert Filliou. It also
transcends the mere pose and postmodern play with signs that still
seemed characteristic for etoy.com.  In combination, humorism and
existentialism create a powerful mixture in ubermorgen's art. It is
simultaneously reflexive and actionist, introverted and extroverted,
melancholy put into action: an ``Action Melancholia,'' performed at high
personal risk in its conflict with lawyers and courts and in the danger
of personal burn-out.  Unlike academic artists who call themselves
``critical,'' but shout foul once they actually get in trouble, there is
a silent melancholic feedback loop in ubermorgen's actionism between
troublemaking, being troubled and getting into trouble. 

In Renaissance emblems, the melancholicus was depicted as someone with a
gagged mouth sitting near a river and reading in a book. In ubermorgen's
art, he sits in front of a computer near Internet data streams and wears
a corporate mask.

\end{document}
