Ein interessanter Mailverkehr auf der Bricolabs Liste hat mich zu einer Stellungnahme provoziert:

Many     bricolabbers     might     already    have     read     about www.pirates-of-the-amazon.com. The  website provided a  Firefox add-on that changed the experience of  browsing Amazon.com by putting a slick "Download 4 Free"  button on top of every product -  whether a CD, DVD or book - also listed as  a bittorrent on The Pirate Bay. Clicking the button on the Amazon.com product page for, say, Madonna's latest album would  yield a  background search  on The  Pirate Bay  and start  up a bittorrent client to download a corresponding torrent.

After being published  this Monday, the project made  headline news on digg.com and     has     been      covered     among     others     by   CNET,  the Washington Post and currently more than 1000 blog entries worldwide.

Via  its provider, the  project received  a take  down request  by the lawyers  of Amazon.com  yesterday. In  our  point of  view, the  legal grounds  for that  are contestable  since  the add-on  itself did  not download anything. It only provided  a user interface link between the web sites Amazon.com  and thepiratebay.org. Nevertheless, the creators complied to the request, taking  both the add-on and original web site offline.

What is  perhaps more disturbing  however, are the openly  hostile and aggressive Internet user comments in  blogs and on digg.com. Unlike in a comparable  situation only  a couple of  years ago, the  majority of commentators failed  to see the highly parodistic  and artistic nature of "Pirates of  the Amazon".  The project was  created by two students at  the Media  Design  M.A.  department of  the  Piet Zwart  Institute Rotterdam, one of them being a  student in the course, the other being an  exchange student  from the  New Media  programme of  Merz Akademie Stuttgart.  The work was  part of  a regular  trimester project.  We - jaromil, the project tutor, and Florian Cramer, the head of the course - - were  the  academic  supervisors  of  this work.  We  supported  and encouraged it from its early  beginnings.  What's more, we're proud to have  such  students and  such  interesting  work  coming out  of  our teaching.

Apart  from  its  humorous   value  and  cleverness,  the  project  is interesting  on many levels  and layers:  For example,  not just  as a funny artistic  hack of Amazon.com and  The Pirate Bay, but  also as a critique  of  mainstream media  consumer  culture  creating the  great "content" overlap between  the two sites. We clearly  see this project as a practical media experiment and artistic design investigation into the  status of  media creation,  distribution and  consumption  on the Internet.

With  the take  down notice  from Amazon.com,  our students  have been scared  away from  pursuing their  art, research  and learning  in our institute.  We  do  not want  a  culture  in  which students  have  to preemptively censor  their study because their  work confronts culture with controversial and challenging issues.

We would like  to gather statements in support of  the "Pirates of the Amazon". The students are turning their web sites into a documentation of their project and the reactions  it triggered. If you would like to support them  and contribute  a short statement,  please get  in touch with us.

Florian Cramer & jaromil

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Ich antwortete:

Very interesting experiment. In a way its disturbing because there is no clear way any more that one could separate art, a different kind of scientific social experiment, practical intervention in society, political statement, concrete utopian construction based on the amazing power of digital media and business attac.

In 1999 the Austrian Ministery of Science did a Greenbook on the Austrian research strategy and I demanded in a notion that we need a constitutional ammendment for the freedom of science as we have allready in the freedom of arts. Freedom of arts is differently defined as the freedom of science, but this is changing. By manipulating digital information there is direct intervention into the sociual sphere. The solution of this dilemma has to do with realisation and voluntary agreements based on consensuality.

Maybe therefore the only major weakness of the project was that it did not construct a "protective place" in the first place, but went on with pure funcrionality. One could have shown what is possible in a framed demo. Or the framed demo could have been shown in a concept video.

Unleashing pure functionality is in a way not taking serious the enormous and transforming potential of digital creativity that I described here in 2002:

http://unsichtbareintelligenz.mixxt.at/networks/wiki/index.Franz_Nahrada_-_Digital_Creativity

We must learn to think stratecically in what we do. We are not doing pure art any more.

Franz Nahrada