constantdull: the possibility of an army

preroll music

Herald: And welcome to this beautiful evening

The next talk is very interesting talk.

It's actually.. will go to.. tackle some more..

quality.. quantity, the army.

Actually using an army to have some balance

in a way.

Not...

Yeah, I can actually just say:
What can an army do if the army

was effectively (?) put into action,
let's say.

So.

Mr. Constant Dullaart will introduce
the talk for us today.

And please welcome him
with a warm applause.

applause

constantdull: First of all, thank you very much
for joining.

It's a great privilege

and an honour to speak in this context
of the great CCC.

I'm generally more nervous than
I would normally be.

So, anyway, forgive me if I stutter
or something, but hopefully I'm not,

because I drank some beer.

So, also.. so, I built an army.

This much is true.

And it's nice because we're talking
about Crypto Wars and about losing the war,

and we're talking about all those other
kinds of stuff.

We have all these war analogies,
so I thought it's also kind of fitting

to present an army to you.

But I will actually explain to you

how I got there.

So some people might know me
from works like these,

which is.. which doesn't have sound.

Ahm.. laughing

I think it did originally.

But anyway, this is the Revolving Internet.

I made it in 2010.

So, making jokes of pre-existing web content,
which is a company called Google,

that a lot of people seem to
keep talking about.

I twisted it around.

So I made the internet revolve,

just like the world rotates,
I guess.

And then I made this other thing,
which is called the death of the URL,

because the URLs died,
and this is one of the first things

where it's actually a XXX domain name,
which was the first attempt to organize

all the URLs so it would be easier to block
on porn content.

But then I just.. yeah, you see what happens,
you know, that's happening.

So I basically changed the title.

Normally the referrer is..

The referrer is actually in the title bar
as a URL, but now

the title is actually in the page,
and ah.. yeah, you get it.

Yeah, so that's.. or I would like an
encrypted treasure map

and this treasure map is actually
weirdly enough sold

for like a lot of money in New York
in an auction house just because

it points to another treasure island,
where the fictive or maybe real treasure

of Lima is buried and now there is an
actual exhibition buried.

But.. and also I started a company
recently, DullTech,

because I want technology to be more dull.

laughing

Because I think technology is perceived
to be exciting while it's not,

so it should just be dull as fuck
as it is.

Yeah.

So..

This is actually a..

I also retrieved the very first image
that was ever photoshopped,

which I was quite happy about finding.

And then I decided to write an..
oh, actually I didn't put a timer.

So anyway, I'll see notes.. ahm.

So this is..

I wrote a letter to her,
to the protagonist in this picture, Jennifer,

and I'll read you the letter right now.

Dear Jennifer, sometime in 1988,
through a sitting-in on the beach

in Bora-Bora looking at to Opua island,
enjoying your holiday

with a very serious boyfriend.

The serious boyfriend, John,

took a photograph of you sitting
on the beach not wearing your bikini top.

John later became your husband
and father to your children

Sara, Lisa, Alex and Jane.

John, if you're watching this, hi.

This photograph of a beautiful moment
in your personal history

has also become a part of my history
and that of many other people.

It has even shaped our outlooks
on the world at large.

John's image of you became the very first
photograph to be publicly altered

by the most influential image
manipulation program ever.

Of course, this is why I know the names
of your children and this is also

why I know you're trying to do cool things
trying to get a .green toplevel domain name.

Anyway, personally I believe that the importance
of the domain name has been reduced

to a nostalgic poetic value,
but that doesn't matter now.

I still wonder if you felt the world
changed there on that beach,

the fact that reality would be more moldable,
that normal people could change their history,

brighten up their past and put
twirl effects on their faces.

That holiday image became the very first
photograph publicly manipulated

in Photoshop,
and your intimate beach moment

became the reality for several
potential clients to play with.

2 Jennifers, no Jennifer, less clouds etc.

And in essence it was the
very first Photoshop meme.

But now the image is nowhere
to be found online.

Did John ask you if he could use
this particular image?

Did you enjoy seeing yourself
on a screen as much as he did?

Did you ever think you would be the muse
that would inspire so much contemporary

image making?

Did you ever print out the image yourself?

Would you be willing to share
the image with me, and, if so,

with the other people to whom it took
on such an unexpected significance?

Shouldn't the Smithsonian or any other
large institution have the negative

of that image, not to mention digital
backups of its endless variations?

All these questions have made me decide
to redistribute the image, 'Jennifer in Paradise',

as well as I can, somewhat as an artist,
somewhat as a digital archaeologist,

restoring what few traces
of it I could find,

restoring the image from what was available
to everyone in the somewhat public space

of the internet.

It was sad to realize this blurry screengrab
was the closest I could get to the image,

but beautiful at the same time.

How often do you find an important
image that is not online

in several different sizes already?

This beautiful artifact
of software development

has become an artwork in this way,
in which you, or at least your depiction

play a central part in a body of work
that has become very dear to me,

a faint blurry pixelated focal point,

a work that celebrates a time when
you were young and the world was young

as it still naively believed in the
authenticity of the photograph.

Sometimes, when I'm anxious about
the future of our surveilled

computer-mediated world,

when I worry about cultural imperialism
and the politics behind software design,

I imagine myself travelling back in
time, just like the Terminator,

to that important moment in technological
world history,

there on that beach in Bora-Bora,
and just sit there with you,

watching the tide roll away.

Sincerly, Constant Dullaart.

So, Jennifer never responded.

Thank you.

laughingapplause

So, Jennifer never responded,
but the cool thing was..

So this was basically an anecdote
in Adobe's history, right,

so there was some talk about this
picture, but I couldn't find it online,

and it was in a video which
I'll briefly show later.

So, I restored it and I redistributed it
with this letter as an open letter.

But of course I'm..

I put a payload
in the jpg.

I stuck in and graphically encrypted
some messages in different versions

of this jpg because I also wanted
to discuss that a jpg, of course,

isn't only a way to distribute images,
but it's also the container

of the jpg, and especially if you
stuck in a graphically.. inject content,

it actually becomes a unique container
discussing the thereoality (?) of

digital photography besides, like..

I mean, a lot of me.. as an artist,

like I still have to do with a lot of people
discussing paper and discussing prints,

and like discussing the value of a file,
if you can copy it and this kind of bullshit,

and in the end, I needed to emphasize
the fact that like, this image also wasn't

mine,

I just redistributed it.

So actually, the only thing that's for sale
as an artwork, as this, is the password

to actually access the content
I injected into it.

And then of course you get these questions
of institutions, like, how do we show this

in a space?

So this is, like, working predominantly online,

this is the question I get most of the time.

Constant, how do we show this
in your exhibition?

So.. mostly I just take really stupid
analogies, and they work.

So, here of course I used UV paint,
and I just, ah, the text,

which is.. well.. maybe it's an image,
but the text that was encrypted

in that Jennifer in Paradise image
is now painted with UV paint on there,

and I would read it as a performance.

And then, of course, because I
wanted to sell the passwords,

I wanted the access to be the commodity,
right, so if you're.. like,

within art you're always thinking about
a commodity, people wanna own something,

they wanna have a cultural gesture,
which they can..

yeah, which they can own, basically.

And then, as an artist you're
entitled to do dramatic gestures.

Or at least, I feel like I was entitled
to do dramatic gestures.

laughing

And to close down the access
to the encrypted contents

I had to destroy..
laughing

.. anyway, I don't advise
you doing that at home

because apparently it's
poisonous or whatever..

laughingapplause

So this basically meant that the people..
shouting from the audience, laughs

so this basically meant that the people
that wanted access to that content

needed to, or buy new UV lights, or they
needed to buy the password to the file.

The cool thing is that John,
after a while, did respond,

because it was.. the Wall Street Journal
started to write about it,

and the Wall Street Journal he did find
worthy to reply, not my, of course,

my skanky little emails writing
the big developer.

But anyway, he did reply,
and he was actually super-generous,

and he was actually.. he was saying like,
you should have asked me,

but he gave a lot of info, like
on which scanner he scanned

that first image on, and
like he went to.. app,

but he also said, like,
that he distributed it

to other people under a strict
non-disclosure agreement,

which I'll prove to you later that it's..
that that's.. not true.

Anyway, but..

I pointed out what is funny,
which is.. it says it's one of the first images

to be photoshopped.

I guess that is a word now.

So, I'm really happy that I actually have
an email to prove the moment

when the guy that made up 'photoshop'
figures out that 'photoshopping'

had become a verb.

laughing

Anyway.. and also, like, he used
a 24-bits colour image.

So, I don't know, any of you ever
using 24-bits colour images?

I don't, but.. maybe you do.

But the cool thing also that he
needed to transport the image

on separate floppy disks to save
the red, green and blue channels,

which I also thought was
quite remarkable.

Anyway, of course.. like, this image
is really important because it was

one of the first digital images
at that time for people to use

manipulating in Photoshop,
because it's 1988,

so there's no web, there's no
digital images distribution

or wide availability of it,
no digital cameras,

so they needed to find that
as a source.

So this is the demo,actually,
where I got it from.

John: So I start with it and open up..
constantdull: This is John

John: an image of .. This is a tourist picture
I took of my wife when we were on a vacation

in Tahiti.

This is from Bora-Bora.

I used this image for doing
a lot of the demonstrations

including the first demonstrations
that I did at Adobe Systems.

So I have opened a 24-bit image.

We're looking at it on an 8-bit display,

but you can still manipulate
the 24-bit image.

So I'm gonna start by cloning Jennifer,
so I'm gonna start by just...

constantdull: Okay, I'm just gonna mute
John out for a bit,

because it's super interesting,
but you can watch the video later.

The thing is that of course he's
cloning his wife,

he asked her to marry her
the very next day after this picture.

I'm just saying he's confirming
a very age-old cultural stigma

of a man objectifying
the female body,

and I thought that this was really..
laughing

.. I mean the fact that he is
cloning his wife, and showing that

as a tool to his potential customers..
laughing

..seriously, what the fuck,
why didn't he use a bike,

or a turtle or something.

laughing

John: Copy.. paste.

applause

John: And now I have a clone.

constantdull: Anyway, so..

I've been using
that image now because I felt

like I'd made, you know,
a new perception of that copy,

and I've been using that into
different works

where I'm just rotating it through
all the different photoshop filters

that are available.

So you get these kind of images,
and you get like these.. little presentations

where I like liquefy Jennifer
all over the place,

like LitraAlt ?
You know, and there's all these

like, images, because of course
I'm turning this image into

a ubiquitous kind of image
that's everywhere.

So I want to take it out of the idea
that it's not visible everywhere.

But the cool thing is that finally then
John actually responded again,

and that was in the Guardian,
and the cool thing is

that, where before it was under
a so-called non-disclosure agreement,

which actually my lawyer told me
that it's an implicit license he gave

because he gave it to other people.

Anyway, but the cool thing is that he
gave actually the real image

to the Guardian.

So now everybody has access

to that first actual image.

So I found like I still pride myself

in kind of tricking him into
releasing that first image,

where it was first like
a personal image,

and now actually justified
to him that the world had

a right to see that very first image
and to read that very first image

as an important image in
photographic world history.

So I'm kinda happy that this is
now available for everyone

to fuck with.

So, this is Jennifer now,
or about 3 years ago.

She's.. yeah.

This is her.

I don't have anything to
say about this.

laughing

And also the nice thing is.. nonono,
also, I did want to like ask them..

augh, 15 minutes, thank you.

I also wanted to.. this means
I have to hurry up.

I actually wanted to take them back
to Bora-Bora on like a holiday

and retake that picture, right,
so.. and then they perceived it

weirdly enough as an indecent proposal.

They said, like, oh, nonono, that's not ok.

And then I thought, like, maybe
they are prudes because she's like

half naked in the picture and she thought
I would wanna see her naked again,

which I never.. like, I thought of later.

Anyway, but now, if you google her,
you get like the first response are..

like, the first result is my letter to her,
which is still very nice,

so I hope she read it by now.

laughing

But to be honest I only
conversed with her husband

and she never replied which I
also think is a bit weird.

Yeah, so.. laughing that.

As an artist, I think I'm in the business
of turning this into like a more

intricate version of this
and then calling it art.

So, I was invited to do an
exhibition about clowns

and I gave this press image,
and this is actually a..

an artist, Marina Abramovic, that maybe
somebody would know,

and it's Klaus Biesenbach, who is
like some kind of curator.

And here is them with more curators.

And here is Ai Weiwei
with naked children, which is awkward.

Now, it's not.. it's not.. it's
a joke, it's a joke, sorry.

So.. ok, I just have to
catch my breath.

So, this is weird, right,
like now on Instagram,

like, Instagram is actually
starting to influence

how the artworld works.

So you would see an artist,
you'd see the amount of followers.

This is a collector, for example,
and you would see or be

the circle of relevance (?).
Like, if they have a certain amounts

of followers, you would think, like,
ok, that kind of quantitative validation,

or like, this quantified social validation
might suggest the kind of access

to like a social capital, s
that they're more

relevant as a collector or as an artist.

And like you'd get these collectors
that are posing in front of their artworks

to generate more relevance
for their artworks.

And in the end I was thinking,
if that relevance actually starts ..

if that social capital, that quantification
of social capital actually starts

to represent actual capital,
like in the art world,

but in a lot of other places,
then why not buy that capital.

And of course like, if you just do
a simple search online

you can buy Facebook followers,
Instagram followers, everywhere.

So... and then, I started to research
these followers,

and these followers were all automated,
right, like, this was their content,

this were the pictures they're posting.

So you would get these like kinda
automated pictures where it says..

this has the hashtag 'instadroid',
but weirdly cropped-off heads

in the image.

This also..
reminiscence with weirdly cropped-off heads

in the image.

And of course, this means
it's just an automatically cropped image

because of the at that time dominant-square
format of instagram pictures.

So, the tag is 'relax' with another few
heads missing.

'Marathon'..

I never knew you could do
a marathon with a snowboard,

but, whatever.

So.. laughing
this is all, like, generated, right,

and then you even have the bios,
the bios are ripped from other people

and then manipulated.

So maybe a lot of you people
would know this already,

but I thought it was really, like,
genuinely awesome poetry,

or found poetry, where..
this is Jonalan, and Jonalan says

":) I'll prove to the world that I would ecome
somehin imporant to they ned someday."

So I think thats..
and Darsed says "I love so much asteniber."

laughing

And.. anyway, I'll skip this, or..
"simple n pretty n paid"

This is also weird.

Gondar is
"mchanical engineer 29 years old, raduated

from ITM in 2007"

I think the original bio reads MIT,
but I'm not sure.

And this is one of my favourites,
where it says:

"Myna isRoxi, I like it be fancy."

laughing

"phot, vieo hort poems blogger,
web edditing"

Anyway, so this is another artist,
maybe you know him, Jeff Koons,

he was also fresh on Instagram,
and you know what I did,

I thought like if I can buy these followers,
you know, if I can find Jeff Koons,

why not actually inject some capital
into these people and inject

some social capital, and I decided to buy
2.5 million instagram followers.

laughing

Because I had a budget from some
institution and I donated these.. laughing

I donated these followers to
all these artists, right,

because if these artists wanna
kind of compare length of their dicks,

to like follower numbers, then why not
make them all as equal?

laughing So..
applause

Thank you.

So Jeff Koons had 100,000 followers.

Jerry Saltz who is a critic
also got 100,000 followers.

Klaus Biesenbach got 100,000 followers.

Richard Prince got 100,000 followers.

This Murakami got 100,000 followers.

Jonas Lund, a friend of mine,
got 100,000 followers.

All these people got 100,000 followers
exactly, so they were equal to each other.

laughingwhoopingclapping

So basically I became the Lenin
of social media, right?

laughing

Injecting capital making people
equal is what I do.

So.. this is.. but the weird thing was
that the New York Times called me

and I'm like, holy fuck, NYT is calling me,
it's on the phone, on this shitty little

freephone, or fairphone, like on..
audience: Yeah!

Heh, exactly, fairphone.. laughing
there's the New York Times, right.

So I'm thinking, this is relevant.

And she keeps asking me

- I'm hurrying up -, like,
she's asking me, like, yeah, but like,

do you know other people that are
selling artworks for Instagram,

and like, did you make money
for Instagram, and I'm like,

that's.. like, what I'm criticizing, like,
this is not what the work is about, like,

I'm not actually telling you like
maybe somebody won't spot

a work of mine through Instagram,
but that's, like, I'm saying, like this..

validation system of you thinking
an artwork is important is corrupt.

It's vulnerable.

It's a system that's
fucked, and it's a commercial system

that we're buying into and you
shouldn't believe it.

So the funny thing was that
in this article she quoted Simon de Pury

as an auctioneer and she quoted
his follower number to mention

how important he was.

laughing

But I bought that guy..

I bought that motherfucker,
like, how many followers?

laughing
25,000 followers, so why the fuck

did the New York Times quote, you know,
that actual number to inject..

like, to mention some kind of
relevance for that auctioneer.

The same with Ai Weiwei, they also quoted
like how many followers they had,

like, I own these followers.

laughing

Anyway, so we're in a world..
we're in a world that these kind of images,

this is the most-liked image,
that this is gonna be our culture.

That this is gonna be the most relevant
image, because this is the most liked.

And that's a shitty place to be.

You know.

We need to have

other tools to talk about the value
of images, to talk about our culture,

and not get trapped into these stigmas.

So as an artist we need other tools
to just make, you know, reversed thumbs,

we need another way to reflect
on that landscape.

So then you have..

I'm not gonna explain
technically, but you..

laughing

So, Friend Bomber, Mass Planner,
all these little things, and I got information

because I was asked for the..

I was asked for Schirn, Kunsthalle Frankfurt,

to do another project, and they gave
me some money, and Schirn Frankfurt

is based in Hessen.

And Hessen delivered the soldiers to
fight the first American revolution.

So I thought it would be more than
fitting to bring them back to life

and fight this American revolution.

So I took all the names from

the actual Hessian soldiers that fought
in the United States, were paid by the British,

and actually with that money the very first
contemporary art museum was funded,

the Fridericianum.

Anyway, 1780,
all these names I got through

the wonderful Landesgeschichte
information system, but also the professor

that helped me.

So, these are all the accounts
that I made active.

laughing

But the weird thing was that all these accounts,
like, a lot of these were created in Pakistan,

also, they were actually manually crafted,
also, I had like automated ones,

but also tried.. this guy.. have manually
crafted ones.

And then these pictures showed up,
and I actually had to explain them,

like, the Hessian soldiers were white,
and like I shouldn't have like non-white.

like, passport pictures on there.

And then, when.. but then actually,

when I was typing this in Skype,
weirdly enough all these people

use Skype, which I thought was very weird,
knowing what we know,

but anyway, it felt so weird to ask that
and say, like, could you please

use white images, that
I'd stopped asking that.

So, if somebody talks to me
about, like, the conceptual error,

why the artificial army isn't all white,
it's because I don't give a fuck anymore,

and I don't wanna ask somebody in Pakistan
to only use white images, cause it's fucked.

applause

Anyway, so of course because it's..
thank you.

Because it's also of course like,
it's very weird that we're using this

kind of like system where it's like...
a lot of this kind of artificial capital,

of this artificial social capital is crafted
in lower wage countries,

and we're actually supporting a system
by buying these followers

and buying this kind of black hat SEO shit,
with like having a very large groups of people

crafting this kind of.. these kind of accounts,
and.. anyway, I think there's ..

a kind of messy thing, but the nice thing
about like using army as an analogy

is that it brought me onto BBC News.

And this is also really funny,
because I think this is again

like the value of..

I could've said, like, I make a..

like a large collection of
phone verified accounts,

but I think by saying I made
a fake army, or I made an army,

got me on the news and then
the funny thing is that actually

although it's been on the news
and in the Guardian again,

the nice thing is over half of
the army is still alive.

So they're still out there, I'm still
distributing likes,

I'm still using that.

If you would want to help me,

please give me.. if you have like
spare Facebook accounts,

which I hope you don't,
if you do, fuck Facebook,

get the fuck out of there,
but also, if you do have them,

give them to me and please accept
the friends of like another 1000 soldiers

and the next few thousand soldiers
that I'm gonna make,

and let's create some social noise.

Let's create some social noise
of like.. and fight this kind of

weird artificial system of like
quality validation through..

through this kind of artificial social
measurement system.

So yeah, like.. fuck Facebook.

Anyway, I'll just play with a short piece
of.. is that a zero or do I have like

a few more minutes left?

Ok.

So I'll play a short.. a brief part

of my video would like..
my call to war, let's say.

phone ringing
This is not a part of the video.

laughing

[voice] Hi and welcome to our tutorial.

[voice] In this video, we will show you how
to create identities through the quick star

wizard.

trumpet playing, yelling

energetic brass instrumental music

applause

constantdull: Yeah, thank you very much.

applause

So, yeah, if there's questions, I would just
like to say, at the end of the project

I'll also release like a..
of course, like the

cool little graphs that you see

when you hit the BBC how many profiles
were deleted by Facebook, and how,

and like.. and you'll see like how many
little like attacks sparked which..

how many deletions,
and these kind of things.

But, again, if you could help me
have these fake identities

infiltrate the real world with the
real identities and let them

mash up together, I would be
very grateful for this project.

Herald: I would also like to boost up
my Instagram, my Twitter, my Facebook too.

constantdull: Oh, you want more followers?
Herald: Yeah!

constantdull: Oh yeah, ok.
Herald: Please.

10,000..

constantdull: I get that a lot.

Herald: Are we not friends?
100.000

audience laughing

laughs Thank you so much
for the super-interesting talk.

We.. I think we time for 2 questions,
or even 1 question from..

constantdull: Oh, but there's a big..
there's a big no on that.

constantdull: I'm..
Herald: No.

No.

So.. yeah, actually..
if there's any questions then I think

we can do that outside of the talk right now.

Thank you very much!

constantdull: Thank you!
applause

postroll music

subtitles created by c3subtitles.de
Join, and help us!