A guided tour into language, property and code in networked environments. Hosted by 'A Public Domain' with Linda Hilfling, Aymeric Mansoux, Fredrik Svensk, Goodiepal and Alejandro Duque.
The tour started with the launch of Linda Hilfling’s (DK) network intervention titled A Public Domain/Een Publiek Domein: a public wireless network where words registered as trademarks in the National Trademark Registry are rendered invisible to the users. From there the city of Utrecht was explored through different on-site lectures and presentations. The walk began at Utrecht’s buzzing Central Station and Hoog Catharijne shopping centre, but quickly moved to Theater Kikker, a zone less infiltrated by various networks, where participants were introduced to A Public Domain.
Linda Hilfling questions the ownership of language, especially the dynamics of trademarks. The project consists of a free and open wireless network that anyone with a Linux computer can log-on to. However when browsing through a site it soon becomes apparent that words are missing. Logging on means passing through Hilfling’s computer to access the Internet, and A Public Domain filters out all the trademarked words from any site that is visited.
French Artist Aymeric Mansoux (FR) introduced the paradox of the world of commons that is not at all a common. Standing beside a ‘humming’ book-sorting machine, he proposed producing A Common Dictionary. This small booklet would consist of three phrases that needed defining – Public Domain, Common, and Creative Common – and one question that requires an answer: ‘Is YouTube an Open System and if so why?’ Discussions among the participants made it clear that creating a shared definition was almost impossible.
A short walk from the library, in the city hall, art critic Fredrik Svensk (SE) gave critical commentary on the concept of the commons and public domains. Popping up between a coffee machine and a copy machine, Svensk reacted to ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, an article by Garrett Hardin questioning the fate of the commons, which suits the individual but is less sustainable for larger communities. The utopian idea is that everything is public, but in reality, as A Public Domain shows, even language is owned. In a mission to defend an open society, Svensk attempted to answer the question of how private companies can copyright certain words.
Eccentric and militant teacher Goodiepal aka The Århus Warrior (FO) shared his next act in his ‘Gentleman’s war’ on today’s computer music and media art. Goodiepal has influenced the course of modern music through radical excursions into computer technology and media art. When he left The Royal Academy of Music in Aarhus, Denmark, in 2008, he created a storm of controversy by announcing his Five Steps in a Gentleman's War on the Stupidity of Modern Computer Music and Media-based Art. In a concrete garage in the centre of Utrecht he sped through his objectives with an almost impenetrable logic, whilst sitting in a wheelchair with a broken leg after a cycling accident. He concluded his presentation with a whistling performance.
From these concrete confines, the walk continued along historic canals towards the Sterrenwacht Conservatory. Columbian artist Alejandro Duque introduced satellite spotting as a call to electronic civil disobedience, culture jamming and noise. With a simple homemade antenna, he tried to track an antiquated US military satellite from the 1980s that Brazilian truck drivers still use to communicate with each other. The last frontiers of public space were discussed as the sun set over Utrecht.
Linda Hilfling works with the premises of participation and public space within media structures, with a focus on means of control (codes, organisation and law) and their cultural impact. Her artistic practice takes the form of humorous interventions reflecting upon or revealing hidden gaps in such structures. Her new project A Public Domain is a reflection on and intervention into language as a commons. The project is an open wireless network, also named a public domain, which anybody can log on to access the Internet. All the data that passes through the network will be filtered in such a way that texts that are not in the public domain are substituted by empty spaces, i.e. those words or phrases get replaced that, regardless of their graphical representation, are registered as trademarks in the jurisdictional area in which the network is established. This means that chunks of information are missing and eventually the users have to guess the overall meaning of the content. A Public Domain is a wireless network intervention that simultaneously adopts and amputates the utopian notion of the net as a public space.
Linda Hilfling has a background filmmaking, architecture and urbanism. She also studied Networked Media at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. Her interest in each of these fields is in an attention to the structures they are part of and how practice is inscribed in, and re-forms such structures.
