“Authorship fades but data lasts forever”
NetVVorth offers counterfeit works by and of legit netartists.
A few days ago I found this image of the ReadingClub session with Curt Cloninger, Alan Sondheim, Helen Varley Jamieson, Lucille Calmel and Pascale Gustin based on a text by Mez as a part of a new work called transCRyPTion [alan-turing-has-a-posse] done by Daniel Temkin and Mez in the online net art show NetVVorth.
If you pay some bitcoins you can get access to a transCRYPTion CODEpoem engine. But I don’t posess bitcoins so I had to be content with the free and impotent TRANScryPTION prototype.pdf, which tells you how the machine works and where you also find 9 (beautiful) bigger screencaptures of the same ReadingClub session. Finally at the end there are credits and some links. One goes to the Reading Club session (pffft) and another to what I recognize as Curt Cloningers website and now immediately I become aware it is indeed his voice and his videos that are used in TRANScryPTION. He must be the counterfeiter. And when he promotes the same work in an email on the netbehaviour mailing list I decide to ask him for some explanations.
The funny thing is, my “forgery” of Mez’s writing isn’t even a “true forgery.” It is more like a remix of a collaborative rewriting of one of Mez’s pieces, some of the text of which I “myself” did “originally” and “actually” write. You can see the “authentic authorship” disintegrating and being pulverized.
The whole thing is basically a lie. It’s just two videos I made, an animated gif I made, and some lines I drew connecting them. Then there is a link to a downloadable pdf explaining a bunch of complicated and confusing instructions that don’t work. Even the bitcoin version doesn’t work. So the whole piece is supposed to be a machine that causes the viewer to question the “truth” of code, language, authorship, and art markets.
Filed under: Exhibition, Net art, Curt Cloninger, Daniel Temkin, Mez, NetVVorth, Reading Club, ReadingClub
net art, video, performance 
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