On the Contemporaneity of Media Arts
by Inke Arns (published in: Nam June Paik Award 2006, Frankfurt am Main 2006)
Almost ten years ago with Language (property), Spanish media artist Daniel Garcia Andujar, better known under his company name Technologies to the People, developed a work which addressed the increasing privatisation and commodification of language. On a simple HTML page he listed phrases which have been registered as trademarks, and with that, had become the property of their respective owners, for example, “Where do you want to go today?TM” (Microsoft), “A better return on informationTM” (SAP), “Moving at the speed of businessTM” (UPS), “What you never thought possibleTM” (Motorola). By entitling this project “Remember, language is not freeTM” Andujar anticipated the disputes concerning “intellectual property”, which emerged in the following years (visible as early as the second half of the 1990s in the fierce battles for the allocation of domain names on the world wide web).
