Go to the File menu, select Print, then close this window Network artists - Matt Fuller interviews Rachel Baker and Heath Bunting of Irational Audio interview transcript (2000) Rachel Baker works as a web developer, artist and engineer in Internet and radio, specialising in techniques used in contemporary marketing to gather and distribute data for the purposes of manipulation and propaganda. She is currently on a residency with Hull Time Based Arts and Humberside College of Art, working on building a webcasting infrastructure for local groups in Hull. Heath Bunting emerged from the 1980s committed to building open/democratic communication systems and social contexts. He came from the street up, passing through and often revisiting graffiti, performance, intervention, pirate radio, fax/mail art and BBS systems to become an active participant in the explosion of the Internet. Fuller: Who's actually involved in Irational, and what are the key projects that are the focuses of work? Baker: Currently Irational members are Minerva Cuevas who's based in Mexico City. Daniel Garc?a And˝jar who's based in Valencia, Southern Spain. Myself, Rachel Baker. I'm based in London. And Heath, who's very nomadic. And then there's a member who goes under the name of Sic, who's based in Bristol. Fuller: What, for instance, is the main focus of Daniel's work? Baker: Technologies To The People (www.irational.org/tttp/) is an ongoing project of Daniel's, where he incorporates his design skills - because he works as a commercial designer - and his interest in Internet technologies and video technologies, and his main premise I guess is expanding access to these technologies and techniques, to groups that wouldn't ordinarily come into contact with them. So homeless people and gypsies are groups that he's interested in. And he's also interested in surveillance technologies and puts them into play. Really what he does is he uses the corporate and technological language and rehearses that language to reflect on the way that these groups can intervene. Fuller: What particular proposal... you say he works with homeless people or gypsies. Baker: An example of one of his projects would be the street access machine. So this was basically a prototype design that doesn't actually exist; it's manifestation is in a series of posters and on the website. And he promotes it as a portable credit card machine for beggars on the street. So it's designed for people on the street to accept money: if you're begging you can accept credit cards rather than cash. Fuller: So it's a handheld machine that people can just swipe their credit cards through to make a donation? Baker: Yes. But he promotes it in a very corporate commercial way; but it's promoted as a machine for homeless people. Fuller: Why does he choose the corporate tone of voice to talk about it? Baker: I suppose it's taking on board that language and using it to represent groups that aren't normally represented by that language. Fuller: So he sees that as the respectable tone of voice for speaking in contemporary Spanish society? Baker: I don't think he sees that as respectable, it's just a question of confusing the boundaries. It's a question of assuming that language as part of a group that wouldn't normally be part of that language. Fuller: So the language normally associated with the rights of homeless people, for instance, he sees as no longer usable? Baker: Well you'd have to ask him that. No, I wouldn't imagine that he thinks it's no longer usable. But one result of that project was that he showed it in a show in Hamburg, and as a consequence of that he was approached by Apple, apparently, who were interested in this portable credit card machine. So you had this big corporate company interested in this machine. And it's interesting as to whether they actually understood it's real intention. So it's that level of confusion that he was interested in. Fuller: The Mejor Vida Corp. as well? Baker: Yeah. Again it's a similar tactic in that it's a sort of corporate pose. A pseudo-corporate site. Mejor Vida Corp. (www.irational.org/mvc/) means 'better life corporation'. So Minerva has this website, and on it you can find products and services that she gives away for free; She'll make student ID cards which people will apply for. So you'll send her a scanned image of yourself in the post or online, and then she'll send you a student ID card. Fuller: With the idea that you can get what? Baker: Discounted travel. I found it very useful. Fuller: Also she does performance work? Baker: Yeah, she does things like she'll go to the subways in Mexico City and do various actions like she'll start cleaning them. Or she'll leave stamped envelopes lying around that people can use, and she has various things like 'safety pills', playing on the idea that the underground is dangerous. So you take these pills with you, so you can be safe. A whole wide range of services and products. Fuller: It's interesting you mention services and products. It seems that a lot of the things that people involved in Irational do is use this... you talk about Daniel using corporate language, Minerva using trashy things like give-away student cards, flyers. Heath, for instance, using chalk graffiti. This almost invisible level of trash literature or even corporate brochures that you specialise in adopting and mobilising for other ends. Why have you taken that on? Baker: There's this relationship that's quite obvious how, on the one hand you get corporate and business culture assuming and stealing from underground, street and subversive culture. So this is the reverse tactic, I guess. It's methods of taking business and organisational strategies and incorporating them into techniques that are targeted at and for non-corporate groups. Fuller: But this also says something about the subconscious, almost. Walter Benjamin calls this area of literature paraliterature, and says it's very revealing of the subconscious of capitalism. These stray desires and these stray forms of literature that merge together to create odd things like pamphlets or brochures describing new technologies or whatever. These fantastic screeds of technical power coupled with visions of a better life. So it's interesting that you've taken these paraliterature forms on as a mode of distribution. Why, for instance, do you use a website as the main focus? Baker: Because we're a disparate group and the server is the home for this disparate group. And the server acts as the nucleus for our different ends. It's an organisational tool for us and it's a production and distributional tool for us, and it just provides a locus for us, as I said, as a disparate group. It's a home. Fuller: But it's also a home that is public? Baker: Yeah. To a certain extent, yeah, it's public. We're actually in a process now of making a lot of the tools that we found useful as a group, such as the World Service Scheduler (www.irational.org/radio/world_service/), which is an audio stream manager but it can manage all sorts of different types of media. The Courier project which is a database that logs people's journeys and allows people to declare that they're willing to take objects around from one country to another. Fuller: One of the most popular things on the site is the pirate radio (www.irational.org/sic/radio), or information about how to construct radio transmitters, TV transmitters and so on. Why have you included that? Baker: That's one of the most popular sites on Irational. It's a very powerful thing to be able to construct your own radio station. And TV station, although that's obviously harder. And there is a tremendous demand amongst small groups and individuals around the world to create their own modes of production and media distribution. So to not have to depend on established institutional structures, it's a strategy to create your own media. Fuller: Moving on to your work in particular, one of the things that maybe is interesting to look at is the project done around supermarket loyalty cards. Baker: Again it was one of these corporate marketing techniques which seemed to me genius. The starting point was, 'how can I hack into this?' Not technically hacking, more social hacking. So I wanted to use that marketing technique in a completely different way. And what struck me was that the Tesco club card was selling itself as a way of creating a club, but when you actually look at this Tesco club it's not really a club. It denotes a relationship between you as a consumer, and the brand. You don't really get to have any involvement with other consumers, although you're sitting in a database, because you've given over your personal details in order to have the club card. So you're sitting on a database with millions of other club card holders but you never actually get to have any contact with them. Fuller: So in terms of network structure it's actually a completely centralised network? Every node reported to the hub, and there's no connection between the nodes. Baker: So the idea was to create an actual club using the club card loyalty thing, and to play with this relationship with the brand, and to play with these technologies like the card itself and the database. And to see what would happen, because it is a very brilliant networking tool, and it was my introduction to the idea of networks, and the structure of networks, and the power of networks. So what I was doing was going around Tesco - this was in '97 - collecting the club cards, and then redistributing them through this website. And the website I designed as a pseudo Tesco site, although a very primitive version. Fuller: In what way do you mean? Baker: Well I'd used Tesco slogans and some of the images from their website, ostensibly the club card logo. It was a GIF that was sitting on the Tesco site, and to get these images on the pseudo site I would point at these GIFs. Fuller: So they weren't actually on your site, you just had a tag pointing to it? Baker: Yeah, and the pseudo site would invite you to fill in a form which was similar to the form you'd get at the supermarkets, where you fill in your personal data. But the form I created was more exaggerated in terms of what kind of personal data I was asking for. So it would be questions like, as well as 'name and address', it would be 'do you prefer shopping or sex?'; 'are you organised or disorganised?'. Just going through personal details in a much more exaggerated way, to underline the fact that you were giving away personal details about yourself. And also to reveal the fact that it was a spoof. So people would fill in the form and request a club card, and I would send it to them in the post. And all these cards have unique numbers on them, PIN numbers, and this meant that once you had your card you could register your visit to sites that were displaying this GIF. So parallel to that I was asking people to display this card on their websites. So for example Alexi Shulgin and Vuc Cosik and Re-lab (www.re-lab.net) were displaying this card on their sites. So these sites had nothing to do with Tesco, they were just displaying the GIF as part of the project, and anybody that was requesting a card were invited to do the same if they had a website, to display the logo. So I was growing this network of websites that were displaying the logo, and the incentive would be the more times you hit on these sites the more points you accumulate. I could register all the visits because the cards had unique PIN numbers and I had this database that I was growing, so I could list all the points that people were receiving. And it was growing steadily. Fuller: So basically you added another network on top of Tesco's network? Baker: Yeah, it was an alternative club network. The more points people would get, I would send them junk mail which is what Tesco does to it's customers: they send them targeted junk mail according to what products they're buying. Because they can tell what people are buying because of their cards. So that was the basis of the project; to grow this alternative club off the back of Tesco's loyalty card strategy, and I had the slogan and points when you surf. And now, three years on, there are actually commercial companies that use this strategy, these I-points or whatever. You do actually get points which you can trade in for stuff. Fuller: In what way do you mean? Baker: Well I'd used Tesco slogans and some of the images from their website, ostensibly the club card logo. It was a GIF that was sitting on the Tesco site, and to get these images on the pseudo site I would point at these GIFs. Fuller: For watching banner adverts, basically.. Baker: Yeah. So that was going for two or three months and then Tesco's solicitors sent a letter telling us to cease and desist, otherwise they would sue. Fuller: On what grounds? Baker: On the grounds of trademark infringement, copyright infringement and passing off, which means pretending to be somebody that you're not. Fuller: And did you feel the letter adequately summarised what you were doing? Baker: The letter was beautiful because they'd taken screenshots of the whole project and taken screenshots of the actual Tesco site, and it was brilliant documentation actually. I didn't have to do any documentation! That was good. However, in a sense they subverted the project because it was still in it's infancy, and it hadn't really grown into full effect. On their part they succeeded in stopping it short. But what we then did was incorporate the letter as part of the work. Fuller: So you had this expanded sense of the actual work, which includes documentation, includes legal notices and so on. Baker: Yeah. And we then entered into dialogue with the solicitors, and on the site you can see emails being chucked back and forth between Irational and the Tesco solicitors. A lot of interesting things happened, like there was one character from Tesco, John Higgins at tesco.co.uk, his email would come up regularly. Or we could spot him in our Irational statistics, could spot this character trawling through the website again and again and again. And we sent him an email with loads and loads of club card points. 'You've been visiting Tesco's website so you're eligible for 50 points!' And really playing around and being quite silly. Fuller: I think one of the things with this project and others like it is that, for instance if you look at previous waves of art using appropriation, or if you look at Pop Art, in that you walk to a gallery, you enter the space of a gallery, it's so coded with art gallery behaviour that when you see the Campbell's soup can screen printed you know that it's art. It's actually sanctified by the context. Or appropriation art in, say, Barbara Kruger's work, for instance, which appropriates stereotyped '50s photographs and then applies slogans to them, which located them in an '80s feminist art practise. But this seems basically to strip away any of those frames of reference which makes the work safe, in a way. So I wondered if that was one of the areas of the work you were interested in? Baker: Definitely. What was interesting was that the sort of people who were requesting club cards, because there were people who had done searches for Tesco, and this is housewives and kids and the sort of people who want to have a look at Tesco, would find my site - because we'd fiddled around with the search engines and got it to the top of the search engines. So people would find the site and would send off for club cards, and I would send them junk mail. And they would be entered into this bizarre realm that they hadn't anticipated. Some of them really enjoyed it: I would get emails saying 'wow, this is great and surprising', and they enjoyed getting the junk mail. Others were pissed off. So that was an interesting consequence of the project. I guess it's indicative of the time, round about '97, when people were still novices and the Internet hadn't the same usability. Fuller: One of the key things about the appeal of the Internet is that a small group, and individual, or a small company, or a small company, or an NGO can have the same Web presence as a multinational company. That's one of the things that seemed to be democratising the world wide web. Do you think that's still possible? Baker: Well that was an appeal. That was certainly an appeal at the time, to me. That was interesting: the fact that you could somehow operate on a similar level, a similar playing field, through the Internet, to these big brands and corporations. This whole idea of presence through branding and networking was definitely very much on my mind. In retrospect I'd say that was kind of naive, but still worth entering in to. Fuller: In what way? Baker: Because these people have huge budgets and they have the whole art of marketing which has been around for decades and decades. And they obviously have much more power. But I guess the Internet represented a bit of a schism in that power, so it was definitely worth pushing and finding a few gaps and widening them. Fuller: So what do you think the difference is in the context of this kind of work between now and then? Baker: Well now I would say that this whole thing of spoofing corporate sites is a weaker tactic, unless done in a very specific and targeted way. Unless there's a real case for it, it should be avoided. Fuller: Can you think of particular examples of this kind of site that works well in the present day? Baker: I think Artmark did that 'World Trade Organisation' website (www.wto.org) around the time of the Seattle actions, so the timing was good and the target was good and it worked. But generally I wouldn't use it as a tactic now. Fuller: But that's probably because the World Trade Organisation has a different sense of themselves as a brand than a supermarket does, and they therefore probably don't hire people to check out their web presence and so on. One thing that interests me with the Irational is that one of the ways you've described you work is to specify that it focuses on representation and property. What do you mean by those two things. Baker: Well I guess in the case of talking about something like club cards you're talking about images and languages being owned in terms of trademarking. A classic example would be, as part of the project early on I had this little jumble sale of my clothes. And as part of the pseudo Tesco website I advertised this jumble sale, called it Baker's finest, Baker being my last name. If you look at the documentation on the solicitor's letter from Tesco, they pick up on this, the fact that I'm trading under Baker's Finest, albeit my second hand clothes. And they trade, or they did then, in breads and cakes under trademark 'Baker's Finest'. Daniel also has this approach. He has this website which lists lots of phrases and words which have been trademarked and are owned, by law, by various different companies. That proprietorising of language was something that I was interested in at that point, and seeing how you could break that down a little bit. Property and representation were kind of the issues that Heath had formulated as key areas for Irational members to be working with, but I would say that's more his concept that anyone else's. In terms of representation there's already been a critique of art and representation, and when I was a student we were already being challenged about notions of representational art as opposed to interactive art which was supposed to engage the user, rather than have the user passively assess the image or the sound, or whatever it was in the installation. Even without the Irational approach there was already a discourse, a rant, representational art, an audio critique about that type of art. So Irational and it's networking strategies and process-orientated art is an extension of that. We're not so interested in making art you just consume. We're more interested in making structures that you use, whether pragmatically or whatever. Then it becomes difficult to classify as art. It becomes more functional, more pragmatic and more about empowering groups and individuals. Fuller: So what does the actual practise of operating within an art sphere of reference offer for you when you're doing this kind of operation? What does operating as artists offer you that you couldn't do otherwise? Baker: We all have individual concerns and individual agendas. For my part I guess the art context allows a certain degree of manoeuvrability and it's one of those terms where there are so many different activities that it incorporates and represents, that you can get away with more. It's one of those sliding scales. So it gives you that leeway to operate. And it's not even something that, although I come from an art background, I slid into these categories almost by virtue of the fact that these artists or art institutions or art contexts were inviting me to operate within these structures. It was not something that I really actively pursued, so you're almost there by default or by accident. Fuller: And is that a good thing or a bad thing? Baker: It can be tricky because obviously making work which is political, tactical in that sense can be weakened by being positioned within an art context. That is the problem with the art context. If your work ends up in a gallery it just becomes something that's too defined and too quantifiable. Fuller: So what you were trying to strip away from, in terms of appropriation art, to strip the art context away to give the work power, the reverse can happen when you use it, to get leeway, to get license... Baker: Superweed (www.irational.org/cta/superweed), which was one of Heath's projects, got shown in a couple of galleries, and there was some debate about how that became weakened, because it was actually designed to be part of an activist network, i.e. the anti GM movement. It was designed for that, but it ended up being discussed and talked about and shown in art galleries. Fuller: But that doesn't necessarily preclude it operating in other spheres. Baker: No it doesn't. And then you've got to be quite flexible about it, and you end up realising that the art gallery is just an extension of everything else. And if you can position yourself in different contexts, that'd quite clever. It doesn't necessarily work but if you can it's a good skill to have. Fuller: But also I think that works in terms of that is the condition of life - you operate in several different compartments, several different spheres... Baker: You have to be quite skilful, actually. It's a skill, and artists more than most have to learn that skill. Fuller: I think also there's a particular set of work in Irational that is about mixing communications as well. For instance, your global CCTV project, also the directory of phone boxes you did and some of the projects you did for Tokyo particularly, which are about taking very small intersections or creating very precise intersections between two or more communication systems, and two or more habits or social norms of representation of communication. Bunting: And also different levels of reality, perhaps, taking an international communications network like the Internet, and applying it or mixing it with the street: a very local and physical situation. I think my favourite work that I still get pleasure from and look at regularly is Project X, which was a graffiti project that was a URL that I still write or chalk in various places. It's just www.irational.org/x. And so if people are interested they'll come to that URL and then they're asked where they saw it, why they thought it was done and who by. You might write it in a toilet. The last one I got was from Gatwick airport, which I did six weeks ago, and then a couple of weeks later you get someone who's seen it. And then it's like, why do you think they did it? And it's just some bored businessman or something, constipated. I think that's a good example of very very local and it doesn't seem like a network; you're just sitting in a toilet looking at the graffiti or walking down the street and you see some graffiti that looks a bit different to the others, and then that's mixed with obviously the Internet. So you're not really sure what it is and you come to the net and then you realise that there's a whole network or potential network of people who have seen these things and have expressed an interest all around the world. Fuller: Perhaps you could describe the global CCTV project? Bunting: Well, with the CCTV (www.irational.org/heath/cctv) system, it was several things. One was to enable people to bypass the police in some way. Normally it's the authorities that watch the street via CCTV, and with my version it would enable any net user to watch various locations in the world and watch for crimes, but also enlist the help of the local police forces. Fuller: The global CCTV project, how does this actually work? Bunting: With CCTV, when you visit you're given the choice to watch various street locations in the world. There's one currently in Leicester Square, so you can site anywhere on a network and watch a live image feed from Leicester Square. Fuller: How do you actually do that? You've linked to existing webcams? Bunting: Yeah, or taken images straight from other websites. Actually, with the Leicester Square one they complained, and they said they were going to charge us or sue us, this was quite recent. What's that term that Jodi used for the Webby awards? Baker: Oh, what their five-word phrase? Bunting: I sent them that back - 'corporate sons of bitches', or something like that. Baker: 'Greedy corporate sons of bitches'. Yeah. And just said that this project's been around before the Net was commercialised, and have a bit of respect please. But anyway, you can sit and watch these images, and watch for crimes. So basically taking policing back to the populous instead of having specialised professional forces. So you're encouraged to watch for crimes, and if you see anything suspect you can fill in a little form and click the button that's for 'proceed', and that information gets faxed to that local police station so they can actually deal with it. The project really should have gone further and created local militias connecting people together so they can patrol, but for the moment it's local police stations in Leicester Square. They can get the information that somebody's loitering or a dog has shat on the pavement. Fuller: But in fact it's a completely impossible system because the information you get from the CCTV cameras is so cretinously low-resolution. Bunting: Well, if you watched in and developed an eye for it, like you do a taste for olives or something, you could probably detect... Fuller: Detect traces of crime! In 30-second webcam updates. Are there any other particular projects you think need drawing attention to that are hosted on Irational? That crystallise a particular strand of the practice? Bunting: Well we've kind of shifted recently from representational projects, or anti-representational projects, for instance like fake websites or whatever, into things that actually do things. So turning the site inside out so basically users generate the website. An example of that would be the World Service, which is just useless without the people who use it. Baker: Or Courier. Bunting: Yeah, Courier's another one. Fuller: So what are these two projects? Bunting: The World Service is net.radio groupware. Essentially there's no content on that project, and it's a way of scheduling other people's content. There's basically thousands of streams on the net, but a lot of it's not that interesting to certain people. So, for instance, if there's a stream coming out of Switzerland and there was a specific programme that you liked on at two o'clock on Tuesdays, you could put that into your own personal schedule. And then if there was another one at another time, after a while you'd build up a whole weekly schedule: things that you really liked or wanted, or a community liked and wanted to listen to. So, for instance, that software runs a radio station in Canada, 24 hours a day... Fuller: So what happens when you build up a schedule? Bunting: You can either listen to it online - you just go to the page and say 'listen to such-and-such schedule', and then the live feed is redirected to you, and also it's very easy to then pump that into a transmitter, so you've got yourself a fully-operational radio station, run and programmed by a community of people that listen to it online, or on their radios. Baker: That's a good example of combining the Internet with radio: two different mediums. Bunting: Very street things. People will listen in their cars, they listen on their tellys now. Baker: But also the reason I like these schedules - it's not just Irational's schedule, there's others - is because they go some way to creating habits around listening. They go some way to looking at the behaviour of listening online, or watching online, instead of just randomly. Bunting: It's regular listening. Baker: Yeah. Regular listening. Some people don't like that. Bunting: And a regular audience. Fuller: And what effect does that have for the streamers? Bunting: It will create a context. For instance, if you, as someone who maybe first is a listener, and then is encouraged to become a creator, it enables you to have a ready-made audience. So a group like DFM in Amsterdam, they're part of the Radio 90 schedule, and at first they were only doing three hours a week. And to promote that yourself and to try and find listeners is pretty difficult, but if you know that people are listening in on such-and-such a schedule or on their radios, it's easier in a way to be part of that community. Irational Courier (www.irational.org/cgi-bin/courier/courier.pl) was developed for Reclaim The Streets. They had a problem that they had lots of paper propaganda that needed distributing around Europe, and it struck me that there are lots of people travelling already that could take those things. You just have to match the two groups up. Courier is a database of people who are prepared to take things on their travels, and what their travels are. So they register what their travels are and when they're going, and if people want things taken they can contact them directly. Fuller: Both of these two projects seem to create hubs between two separate networks or two separate types of activity. And it also seems to feed back to other projects that were involved in creating physical hubs such as the Anti with E project (www.irational.org/cybercafe/backspace), Digital Chaos (www.irational.org/cybercafe/chaos), arranged around actual meetings of people. Do you think you've moved more away from meetings of people to meetings of data circulation systems? Bunting: No, not really. For instance, I said that I'm a volunteer at the Cube cinema in Bristol (http://www.cubecinema.com/), and it's good: people can go and watch bizarre films or music events or whatever; have activist meetings. But really it's not what the content is, it's the fact that it's an open space so people can come and do what they want. Baker: Cube cinema is now hosted on Irational. Bunting: Yeah. We have our own server now, as opposed to just a virtual server, so we can host our own virtual server on other people's. And the Cube is one of those groups. So yeah, it's just a pleasant environment to be with other people in a non-private space. Fuller: Can you say what the difference between a server and a virtual server is? Bunting: A server generally indicates a physical object, like a computer connected to the Internet which can then have various services on it or even other servers. By that term I mean like a physical server. And a virtual server is basically a virtual computer which can be shifted around. It's not dependent on hardware; it's dependent on network services. Fuller: One of the things that seems interesting about Irational is it combines these quite nurturing, open community-building aspects of the work with another kind of current which is about identifying or provoking trauma in information structures, in systems of representations, in property systems. I wonder how you see the two as being connected. What draws the two together? Bunting: I have a way of seeing things as internal or external. There'd be a strict boundary between people that you want to be with as friends and family, and then outsiders that are potential enemies. So the best work is one that your collaborators understand immediately and find funny or supportive, and the external agents find totally confusing or aggressive. Quite often you can't do that and you have to split it into two modes of work. Rachel's club card is a good example of that: it totally offended and upset and wasted time for Tesco, but also brought people together who enjoyed it and understood the reasons exactly and gained something from that. Fuller: But it's these acts of coming together, these acts of creating a community around particular objects, particular circuits of information that actually creates trauma for particular ways of operating, such as corporations. Bunting: These organisations all basically work on separation and mediation, so if you can somehow break through that they become very threatened. You bring people directly together, they start standing around on street corners and sitting on park benches or they have a party, and all of a sudden riot police are there. It seems like an extreme reaction, but it is actually very subversive to directly associate with other people. And corporations and states used to derive a lot of power from intervening in people's relationships. So Irational is against that, and for people to have free association and relationships. Some of the projects we run, for instance even within our own scene there were mailing lists for virtual communities like Nettime which are exclusive: we were actually excluded from that and our response was to set up another list called 7-11 (www.irational.org/7-11/) with some other people who had been excluded. And that was totally free: anyone could do what they wanted. Fuller: I think there's different types of exclusion or inclusion that you're talking about, which are more to do with developing focuses of attention, I think in particular in the constituency of mailing lists and the subjects covered by them changes over time. As a system it's something that changes organically as more people move in. The focus of things changes and generates a kind of drift. I think the use of terms such as exclusion is actually inaccurate in terms of the way that it's something that works on a far less formal basis than an act of exclusion. Bunting: I would term it exclusive or inclusive, not exclusion. But we're now just talking about words. Fuller: I'm referring back to what you were talking about when you say the people who are the inside, who you see as the primary context for Irational, and those that are outside, who you said you see as being potential enemies. That seems to be quite a harsh line to be drawn, and I would say is a more melodramatic way of phrasing it that your actual way of operating would show evidence for. Baker: We don't have any enemies. Everybody loves us! Bunting: Well, I wouldn't say that, when companies try to take your server down... Fuller: But I think there is a vast grey area - or kind of more pink area - between those who are your primary context, your immediate working partners, and the very small number of people who are trying to take things down. There is a large differentiated area. Bunting: Well we are working in a heroic narrative, aren't we? So we are performance, and part of that struggle - whether it's written or not - is to have an enemy. And maybe even create one, which we've done before now, I should imagine. Fictitious ones. Fuller: Possibly you might find that, in the case of say the Tesco cards, you do actually create your enemies, in the fact that you create job descriptions for these people who never existed before. There must now be a job for someone to protect Tesco against... Baker: Yeah, well actually this last conflict we had was with the Brand Corporation, and that is entirely there to protect corporate brands. Rachel had used their branding system against them. So you're entirely right: there are people who spend all their time on the net looking for copyright and trademark infringements. But, for instance, CTA is a fictitious stance. Cultural Terrorist Agency, it was constructed not as something that I or other people would believe is correct, but something that's provocative. And also they, in collaboration with CTA was Natural Reality, which was a genetics group, environmental group, and again that is not something I would necessarily agree with personally. But I believe it was the right thing to do to provoke a reaction at that time, to generate debate about genetically modified food. Natural Reality is like a crypto-fascist eco group, which I wouldn't support! Fuller: In the context of the network, it seems very easy to adopt fabricated identities, so long as they don't impinge upon brand names. But there's this constant sense of throwing up new fronts, new fake organisations, new names which are exactly where the work exists. This is precisely the locus of the work on representation. Baker: Are you talking generally? Fuller: Within the work of Irational. Bunting: Well we have to subvert ourselves, because as an organisation we've become quite well known. And also, for me, I became an averagely well known artist. Because I conform to 'young male working class rebel artist' and you have to always be on the move to try and... Basically I'm in opposition to that, to heroic individuals that end up selling their work, proprietorising and professionalising themselves. So you basically disable and disassemble that identity, and so you're always using different tactics even on yourself. Those enemies are not necessarily other people. Baker: It is definitely very precarious to set up this dichotomy between the corporate and the anti- corporate. And it's such a well-worn recognisable theme and it can wear out very easily. Bunting: Well, the thing for me is it's a state of insurrection. That's the thing you should always be fighting. You should always be questioning, always be pulling apart. But also always be creating things to replace them. So it's not like, 'OK, we won, we want every field to be full of organic veg', even the environmental projects are being honest, they're being anti-environmentalist. It's like, 'Destroy all strong positions of thought'. Baker: We're at a situation now where it is very difficult to create subversive work, simply because the target's you're trying to subvert will love it. And the business community or corporate community are already taking on board subversive tactics. Fuller: What was the job agency that you created? Baker: I was in a situation where I was temping a lot, and considering the idea of using the workplace as a resource for work: artwork or activist work. And initially I wanted to create an agency which was basically a network for temporary workers or people that were working in jobs for money to fund other activities, and just to create a network. I had this idea of the temporary office worker network online, where you could meet in chat rooms. Bunting: It would run itself basically, wouldn't it? Baker: You could upload illicit material from the client machine you were working on, to the directory on Irational. Bunting: But again it would be the users that created the site and the value and would own that. It was an open database, wasn't it? Baker: That was the initial idea. But then the ICA came along and offered a commission for a show called Crash!, so I decided to use that initial idea to create a temporary business. It was around about the time of the big dotcom euphoria, which was last year. So I thought I'd create a temporary dotcom called art-of-work.com (www.art-of-work.com). The idea then shifted: it was focused on being at the ICA and the whole notion of the ICA being part of the government's cultural capital mission. And artists as cultural capital. So I thought I'll create an agency where artists are very blatantly cultural capital, and send them jobs in corporate companies and get companies to come and consider artists as something valuable in the workplace. To come and subvert the workplace. 'Come and subvert us! Come and enrich the value of our management.' It was trying to take on board all these new management theories and all these gaps that are opening up in New Britain and New Labour and new management where the workplace becomes this holistic environment which caters for your creative and spiritual... everything! You don't need to go home ever again. You don't have to separate your lives. It's all there in the workplace. So I was sort of exploiting that. But it was a circular exploitation experiment, so the idea was to exploit the ICA and this art show, which was called Crash!, and try to run a business in the gallery. Which was sort of removed from the initial idea, actually. But then I wanted to create this online service where databases of employers and databases of employees, i.e. artists, could find each other. But that hasn't really worked. Fuller: There's something that keeps coming up in what Heath was saying, that's a continual current through a lot of the interviews, is about this idea of particular forms of activity which are seen to be open or inventive or innovative in certain ways that create new modes of communication, or are seen to be what is understood to be subversive but that somehow get used up. The category known as 'art' is a useful place for storing as an archive and using as a place to return to for research, for storing information about previous tactics. I wonder whether it's actually true that anything is ever used up. There seems to be always a case for reinventing things that have already been done, returning to old things. There's never a sense of progress; I don't think there's a sense that there is a point when something has ever been used up. Baker: Theartofwork project is directly related to the Artist Placement Group that was around in the late '70s. Was it John Latham? Bunting: Yeah. Fuller: And Barbara Stevini. Baker: So these tactics and techniques do get rehearsed. Bunting: I think it's important to be relevant and current, but I think a lot of artists that I've come across in my time are doing things that are just confined to their studio. And I think there are critical fronts and different moments in history. For instance, a few years ago the critical front was access information systems, but now I'd say that it's critical front, one of the main ones, is either the environment or specifically genetically modified organisms. A lot of the things we learned with issues of information access can be directly or slightly modified to this new front. I think things can be used and methods are still relevant but there are things that are more relevant, I would say: areas that are moving very fast, and social groups can lose out very quickly unless they have a quick response. Links Irational homepage www.irational.org The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.