EZPELETA
This Cannot Be Erased
Miltos Manetas
Curated by Jérôme Sans
Miltos Manetas
Born in Athens in 1964. Lives and works between Bogota, Colombia and Roma, Italy.
Miltos Manetas is an internationally celebrated Greek painter, artist and theorist whose work is known for being pioneering in the exploration of digital culture. His approach, often collaborative, reflects the fluidity of virtual and physical spaces and the construction of the Internet as a real place. In the same logic as the proliferation of the web, he simulates all manner of digital tools —laptops, cables, etc. – which has become his iconographic system. If the Internet has disrupted our perception of reality, suspended between digital consumerism and the overconsumption, Manetas also reconnects the Internet to the ideal of a communitarian society in his analogical representations of the metaverse.
Since 1998, he has been questioning the behavioral and social shifts associated with the rise of the Internet, with his first online works on Active Worlds, later transplanted on Second Life. A pioneer in this field, he initiated NEEN ART (2000), self-proclaimed “the first art movement of the 21st century” and the first Internet Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2009) which challenge with a spirit of total openness our real presence in a computational and globalized world. Today, Manetas continues the Pavilion until these days, representing every two years, “The Internets” as our new common country where everything is to be reinvented.
Miltos Manetas and Julian Assange
His work and interests naturally led him to work with and about Julian Assange, one of the most important figures of the internet. Journalist, Hacktivist and Founder of the NGO WikiLeaks in 2006 that came to international attention in 2010 when it published a series of sensitive information about how the United States and their allies were leading the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Sometimes a spy or an enemy of the state, sometimes a hero or a vigilante, the Assange case divides opinion. For Manetas, there is no question of this judgment being applied to traditional nations. It is a creation force. Silencing Julian Assange is Silencing the Internet. Assange is the Internet; the Internet is Assange.
In 2020, finding himself locked down in Colombia, Manetas decided to paint Assange, who had already been locked down himself in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for 7 years before the British put him in prison where he remains. Like a daily clock counting the days internet was imprisoned, Manetas painted and donated on social media every portrait he did to those who asked for it, therefore becoming themselves extensions of the #AssangePower action. This action turned into a project that used the internet's broadcasting structure.
The action turned in 2020 into the Assange’s Condition show at Rome’s Palazzo delle Esposizioni, exhibiting the first 40 paintings the artist donated. The show wasn’t accessible to the eyesight of the viewers unless Assange was released even though one could pick inside like in prison or watch it online. A second show followed at IKOB Museum in Belgium called Assange Situation – Emergency (2021) where the visitors were welcome to bring the portraits home with them, leaving progressively the exhibition empty. Manetas also launched other actions around the figure of Assange including BYOB (Bring your Own Beamer) events, projecting the portraits all around the city of Rome and extending globally with those taking part in the project. The portraits were also exhibited at the houses of the public and the artist organized visits through ZOOM.
Internet is our new country: Padiglione Internet
Welcoming all internet users who would be keen on adopting the poetic idea of internet as a new country, now also connected to each other through the now merged destiny of the Assange/Internet, Manetas embraces the inner contradictions that may comes with the invention of this new country that isn’t attached to a piece of land but global and digital : new rules of citizenship, new types of bodies, new idea of freedom etc.
As a country is diverse, Manetas states that building such a country should be open to any person and ideologies, therefore inventing ways to discuss common fields of togetherness.
If Internet is a country, it should have its Pavilion in Venice. After a commission by the Venice Biennale in 2009, Miltos Manetas created the first « PadiglioneInternet », when Daniel Birnbaum, Director of the 53th Venice Biennial, through curator Jan Aman invited him to propose a project for his Biennial. For its first edition in 2009, Manetas and Aman invited a number of people involved with the activist website THEPIRATEBAY.ORG to come in Venice and inaugurate the “Embassy of Piracy”, including the artist Howie B who designed the music and collaborated several times with the artist since.
The “Cannot Be Erased” NFT
Last May, “AIIA – Assange is Internet Internet is Assange”, opened its doors during the 59th International Venice Biennale, an exhibition hosted by Mara Sartore together with LightBox. Manetas painted 222 new portraits to donate- one for each day of the Biennale. The Gervasuti Foundation invited the Internet Pavilion to use its vast prison-like spaces, perfect to represent “Assange in Prison”. In 2022, The collectors of #AssangePower therefore becomes the “Trustees” of “AIIA” -Assange is Internet Internet is Assange, for the 7th Internet Pavilion. With NFT quickly finding its place as the new currency of such a country, Manetas decides to start tokenizing the image of the portraits by animating them to finance its beauty and independence. The day for the opening is fixed on June 11th.
By developing the Assange project with NFT, Manetas looks back but mostly pushes further his long-term exchanges, individual practices and mirroring practices with the figure, the myth, the image, the new country Assange is.
The NFT lasts for a minute where we see the face of Assange first quite cancelled rapidly coming back together, never to disappear. Iconic British Composer and Producer Howie B who was the producer for the first Internet Pavilion also wrote a musical theme, an “Assange-minute” track in different variations to accompany each NFT in the most idoneous way.
Howie B
Born in Glasgow in 1963. Lives and work in the south of France.
The producer’s producer, Howie B is one of pioneers of the underground UK electronic, breakbeat and trip hop scenes that have since bled through to influence mainstream sound. Working with fusion of soul, hip-hop, house, jazz, and funk, Howie was part of the wave of 90’s indie record labels. He launched his own label, Pussyfoot Records in 1994. Since then Howie has worked with artists such as U2, Bjork, Tricky or Brian Eno, and composed soundtracks for a number of Chinese feature films, alongside the end title music for Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf Of Wall Street. His music has appeared in adverts for industry giants Maserati, Lloyds and Range Rover amongst others.
Passionate about inspiring the next wave of musicians outside of the western music scene, Howie created a charity called Intermission. Now in 2022 Howie is focussing on diversifying his output even further. He will be launching his new record label, Dog Tooth Records, later this year. The first release will be from French solo artist Tristan Bres, and will be followed by Howie’s 14th album release in November this year, a follow up from 2014s Down With The Dawn.
INTERVIEW
Can you explain this expression : « Internet is our new country » ?
We live today in more than one place : where we are physically but also connected online. We are therefore citizens of more than one place : the physical country and Internet. That makes Internet our new country.
What is it like to be back in Venice for the new Internet Pavillon ?
I will always be back in Venice because that’s where countries are represented when it comes to culture. I feel that I am a citizen of the internet. I want to see the most relevant art that is happening there and bring it through the Internet Pavillion at the Venice Biennale. I am not gonna be expecting from other countries to send me an artist to Venice. I could but it is more important for me to represent my real country, which is the Internet.
From the « Embassy of Piracy » in 2009 to « AIIA - Assange is Internet, Internet is Assange » today, from supporting the pirates as internet’s margins to one of them embodying its essence how has internet and your perception of it evolved ?
What we did start in 2009 with the Embassy of Piracy, we are continuing today. It is the same discourse. I didn’t really pick it, it picked me because there was the historical necessity of working with such themes. Now things become more urgent with Assange. Who knows what will come tomorrow ? That’s why we are building our own DAO. The Internet Pavillon can become stronger, it can go beyond my personal opinions. We can make this now by really bringing as many people together.
From the early net.artists using the internet as a medium to today’s contamination of every level of artistic practices (cultural influences, ways to look at images, broadcasting, etc), how do you perceive what you call “intelligent information” beyond the screen ?
The Internet starts actually with data that is offline. Venice is full of that kind of data. When it comes to art you have all the paintings in churches or other places, paintings from the past. These paintings from Tintoretto, Tiziano, Tiepolo, are like programs. They are not the same now as they were when they were painted and we don’t see them the way people saw them at the time they were painted. Now that they are also inhabiting the screen of our computers, they become active in a whole new way so for me this is the base of intelligent information. On top of that we have what net.art did, what all of us from the second generation did online until and now with NFT. It’s layered on top of a much more powerful layer. That is also the reason why I try to connect this space here and there to reference that old painting. It is not old, it just started earlier before the internet.
Can you describe this new project?
People in organizations are trying to erase Julian Assange. But by erasing him they also want to show that they can do it. In a democratic society, erase him with undemocratic ways. With this NFT we want to work exactly on the idea that IT CANNOT BE ERASED. Once we have seen it and painted it, it cannot be erased anymore. Exactly because we can turn it into an NFT which lives forever on the blockchain and creates a community that it surrounds itself with.
We start from my paintings and first you see them erased on the NFT but actually it goes reversed, the eyes of Assange appear, at the end his whole face appears. There is music written by Howie B creating the drama of this situation. It is one minute of erasure. Then it goes back to presence and between us, cannot be erased.
You stated : « I dedicate this 7th Pavilion to Julian Assange because thanks to NFT he cannot be erased, because Blockchain exists and everything that happens can be written there - and can’t be erased- shutting the mouth of Julian Assange. […] ». From the oil portraits of machines to the floating studio, your work is about traces and disparitions, how is NFT different than any online object ?
Blockchain is a kind of operating system. The whole art works as an operating system but blockchain works as one of the latest operating systems of information. Whenever you paint something today, you are also programming it when you put it on this platform of NFT. It is also a collective effort, it’s not like you are alone and then history kind of programmes you. This is what happened with earlier western art. The artist would do something, history would come and re-programme this thing. Today, there is a collective effort and we can see the results of why we are still alive or even little later that we did something. It’s a lot more immediate. We don’t really know what development things will take so NFT is the new unpredictable thing, its destiny. We don’t know what will happen to it and at the same time it becomes this coin with a whole new story. A whole new discussion that meets capitalism on exactly the point where capitalism creates capital. I can’t really answer this question, it would be answered through our experience.
Just a few hours after the press-statement of Padiglione Internet was released, the administration of the Venice Biennial began receiving calls from the Berlusconi Government ordering them to cancel the invitation of ThePirateBay. Is NFT the new threat for what you call State Terrorism and Total North ?
This is the question for which I have absolutely no answer because NFT is the new face of capitalism where there are private people that are making something that at this moment translates into money but then maybe tomorrow it’s gonna be money without a specific value. We don’t really know what will happen. What I call State Terrorism also relates with corporate efforts which sometimes are produced by people that are also the victims of such State Terrorism. We don’t know what will happen in the next round. That’s why it’s important to be united and yet to have at least conversation all together so the internet Pavillon also works as a platform for such conversation. We can bring these things on the table and see how they feel. I really don’t have a clear answer on all of that, i don’t know if NFT is an ennemy of state terrorism. I definitely feel that people around NFT observe that something is going wrong the way technology is collaborating with the state and we want it to be free from there the most possible.
What do you think the figure of Julian Assange represents in our society? Is he a figure that arouses questions of free expression, or to pay attention to the disintegration of the public debate?
For me Julian Assange is important as an existential figure because he is somebody that is experimenting with the limits of how free you can go with information. From one side he does exactly that, he raises questions of where we are going with information, how public debate is involved in that. The response against Julian Assange is exactly the type of response that you expect when raising these kinds of information. He is kind of a social programmer. In this moment, him staying in prison, his prison is his computer and people like myself and the other activists are doing for Assange work, are somehow animated by him, this moment the setup is the prison, yesterday it was the embassy, the self-confinement, tomorrow we don’t know what it will be. Definitely is a new thing because he’s not dead. If it was the old world, he would have been simply killed. Which makes me think that from their side, from the side of the other industries that are concealing or hiding information, he is an experiment. I personally look at him as a painter. I look at his image, the way it is illuminated by the events on the different setups and that’s what I try to reflect with this exhibition. Just to convey different sides of the view of Julian Assange.
Is “AIIA” an aphorism that doesn’t even care about taking sides on a political level but stands for an ideal of freedom that the internet carries from within? Isn’t it already too corrupted to be saved?
I believe the internet is not yet to corrupt, it’s to be saved. Still we can reinvent the Internet, it's not something fixed. We are in a state of it, what we call the internet is a state of the internet. Another one is coming soon when we will be able to produce it without servers and will have it really decentralized.
Assange is Internet in terms that Assange is kind of a radical standpoint towards the internet. Assange is already with a step in the next internet somehow and we want him to be free and to operate because then we want to go towards that direction. There are also people that don’t and try to suppress it and grab it and keep it. In that sense it’s very essential that Assange is free today. We have a dream of what is Assange like on the internet to go towards freedom and not towards repression and normalization.
How isn’t NFT just a new form of PostCapitalism?
NFT is definitely a new form of postcapitalism. Everything we do is definitely a new form of it. There is no way to get out of Post-Capitalism. Capitalism is the most intelligent operating system or machine or artificial intelligence that humanity ever built for itself. At least in the (western) world as far as we understand it. Maybe other civilizations or people, Indian people in the Amazonas for example, have other operating systems that do something that we don’t understand fully and will actually overcome Capitalism but the way we know ourselves, our culture, it is the most intelligent. Post Capitalism already precludes everything. Everything we do is already inside its big fat body and this is a problem.
Art somehow gives you from time to time some glimpses a little bit outside of this postcapitalism and this is the greatness of art and that’s why I bother doing it. Because it sometimes gives me some kind of intuition that I don’t always fully understand but provides a certain pleasure. The pleasure that we extract from art is exactly the pleasure where it meets something that goes beyond capitalism.