NETLAB

last friday mr. bunting from london and elsewhere gave a
lecture at Wolliner Str. 12. Mitte organzed by luxus-cont &
netlab-berlin, a semi-private place with around 50 visitors.

later heath was asked "what do you do against
'commodification'?" he answered with a description of one of
his projects which is running a personal e-mail-postoffice.
With one push button and a well designed list of
targetgroups he directly markets projects which invert
'corporate culture' on different levels.

What once took a whole day of printing, and stamping now is
done by a cc:-field and the once military info-magic of
tcp/ip routing. You certainly heard that e-mail subverts
hierarchies in companies, you can often directly adress
marketing people, bosses and multiplicators by remaining
relativly anonymous and out-of-reach without loosing a cent.
Many companies pay teams of 'e-mail-butlers' which sort
incoming mail to sustain an active presence in the
multinodal speed of e-mail-traffic. These 'doors of
perception' in the firewalls of the growing infranets are
sensitive points for human noise.

Groupware geeks say that it becomes easier to programm
social behavior then investing in the algorithmic
hermeneutics of digital doorkeeping. It is not only a
reintroduction of mail art into the circulatory logic of
capitalism but it's often its direct invertation. 'Spamming
is not by nature a bad thing, if you spam back companies..'

One of his last projects in this direction was the 'Internet
Beggar', which is part of the 'root96', Hull Time Based Art
Festival this month, where he simply uses e-guest-books to
beg for creditcard transactions. (www.irational.org/skint/)
Anotherone is more a part of a bigger corpus of projects
dealing with 'presence' and the electronic erotic: With
German and Japanese businessmen as targets, it will once
become an 'inversive business' to start vague erotic
contacts with the net-savy middle-men and travelling
salespeople, which seek for some 'human contact' on their
lonely path through the deserts of the corporate digital.
Using the metaphor of the 'hostess' which serves with a
range of small conversation to full sex, the young artist-
entrepreneur succeeds with a semiautomatic e-mail flirt-bot
targeting on compuserve, prodigy and GE-services, passing
all touring tests due to the logics of libidinal thought.

An early investment in this market has the potential to hit
the sensitive points of abstract financial communication:
The scarcity of intensive human interaction, the thrill of
love seduction, enhanced by vague flirt bots which re-add
the friction which was lost during gaining efficiency.

Bif, if you're tired with the false promises of Wired and
the jerky cynicism of suck.com or the hangovers of a false
porno-memory get yourself loose with some 'cyberintimacy'.
But be careful on the internet you never know if someone is
a pimp or artist. Such net.art is not defined by the
representational glance of a piece of great work, a
mysterious inner value of interfacing machinic otherness or
the infantile joy of on/off but the reintroduction of the
'disgusting own', into the allday life as an alien.

pit schultz