Copy or discard: La obsolescencia programada en el Net.art

Abstract

This document is part of a wider investigation that I am currently developing under the tutorship of Dr. and Specialist Lourdes Cilleruelo Gutiérrez in the Art and Technology Department of the Fine Arts Faculty at the University of the Basque Country, called Copy or discard: Between Memetics and Net.Art which is based on the idea that copying is natural to the human specie and that it is a tool that a human being uses to continue surviving. In this sense, when he copies, his brain grows bigger and therefore this action allows him to confront the environment, allows him to evolve. Taking this idea as starting point, we moved to the Net, we assumed the attitude of artists-ethnographers and supported by the Memes theory proposed by Richard Dawkins, we displaced the memes concept from Net.Art to Art and shared a reflexivity model in which the copy stops being an stigmatized term to value it as an act of evolution, an act of survival, a synonym of success and adaptability inside the body of Internet. We want to talk about an art form in which the orders have been inverted in favour of survival. A living body conditioned by the constant update process that the Net is suffering nowadays and whose display depends on computerized devices polluted with planned obsolescence.