Script of the performance played at Halle für Kunst, Lüneburg (Germany)
about "
Amazon Noir". 2007.
Hi, I'm a member of a bad, dangerous gang roaming the digital highway.
I'm here in order to tell you a story of crime, corruption and betrayal. A story in which an incredible treasure and a beautiful woman become wrapped up in illicit trafficking and a conflict of interests.
Basically we are thieves, scam artists and fraudsters. We love to steal and we cannot help being the bad guys.
We would take everything without permission, and we have always failed because of perverted and pessimistic thoughts.
So, our most recent plan was to rob Amazon.com. It's actually the biggest bank on the internet. It is the main stock of culture and has thousands of books - objects that hold infinite value for human beings ... the resources they contain and the knowledge they provide ...that means pure Power.
Amazon.com is one of the richest corporations on the internet. It is the symbol of e-commerce, the winner of the net-economy. Without Amazon.com, our whole notion of the internet would be different.
It represents the successful economy, the best web-marketing... it is The Giant.
Millions of people place their trust in Amazon.com. It is like a god - everybody knows of its efficient services... of course it is good.
But it also provokes us with an excess of arrogant pretension of being perfect and powerful like a good god and we can only be blasphemers.
In fact, Amazon.com generated extreme nervousness and restlessness when it began its "Search Inside the Book" service.
Imagine a peep-show - you get to see only a glimpse of your deepest fantasy and are unable to touch it. Imagine you have a big pile of treasures - all the gold of this fucking world, a few centimetres away from your hands, and you are unable to touch it.
What do you do?
We have a sick soul and we want to touch. We would take it away.
There is also a woman, an amazing woman. Amazon.com, the good god, loves this woman; we love this woman, everyone loves her and her wonderful beauty entraps everyone.
She is the global mass media.
Of course, we are the bad gang and we fell in love with the mass media. She was part of our fight with Amazon.com.
We and Amazon shout out with continuous press releases, curious facts, and everything else that could seduce the mass media.
Mass media, ...our love, ...the real purpose of our life. The only woman who makes sense to us. She is the real object of our desire; she is the femme fatale with erotic and beautiful forms. She is the aim in our quest for satisfaction.
So, two competitors: the good-god team and the bad-devil gangsters - between them a big treasure of books of infinite value and a beautiful woman who represents the global mass media.
And of course, between them, there are rules - the law that tries to make order.
This law is the law of copyright, the code that protects Amazon.com's business. This code is our main argument in reaching out for the mass media.
The law has always been created by the good gods... In fact, the law belongs to big corporations, like Amazon.com, who write and change the law for their own interests.
We have rejected the legitimacy of those laws. We have taken the copyrighted content.
So our action, our robbery... the plan starts...
I eluded the copyright protection with software robots that used the front door of "Search Inside" service. I gave away complete volumes of books and reassembled them into .pdf format. Hundreds of books were downloaded from Amazon.com between April and October 2006.
In short, we have stolen books from Amazon.com. At the same time, we sent out press releases and interviews to the mass media. And thus, the fight over copyright started.
At one point of the action, a member of our gang betrayed the others of the group, cowardly telling the femme fatale about the robbery. As result, our rival in love (Amazon.com) told journalists that our action had not occurred - simply that it did not exist. Although after a short while Amazon.com spotted what I was doing and closed all the back doors available to its treasures.
At this point of the story, we were lost in troubles.
Our gang split because each member wanted to be in the media spotlight as the author of the action. There was a struggle over fame. Any of us would have liked to seduce the amazing woman and we all hunted for the treasure: the books. Finally, we split up by fighting among ourselves. The books have been thrown away in the P2P networks, which means we gave them away for free.
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