etoy
hek.history.etoy.com

hek.history.etoy.com is an archive of all the projects and performances conducted by the artistic group etoy since its founding in 1994. It takes the form of an interactive stock exchange. Since 2006, etoy.CORPORATION SA has been listed in the commercial register as a public company, whose shares are the only product that can be purchased. In this way, etoy participates in the art market but without selling its works. The changing employees, the so-called etoy.AGENTS, also organize themselves like a company. The organizational charts of the free-market economy are misappropriated in order to realize net-based art projects in a participatory manner. The focus of etoy is to search for the WWW’s and hence the virtual world’s potential to actually increase our understanding of the mechanisms of real coexistence. 

One example of this is the large-scale project Mission Eternity. As an infallible memory and limitless archive, the WWW is used to halt the process of forgetting that accompanies the death of a human being, as an alternative to the uncontrollable and usually unrelated scraps of information that are collected by authorities and corporations about all those who surf the Internet. In order to create updatable and networkable time capsules that include all the data about a deceased person, etoy developed, among other things, the ANGEL APP, which, like all etoy projects, is structured in a participatory way. To preserve the capsules, a community of ANGELS makes available private storage capacities as, in etoy’s words, a “peer to peer social storage infrastructure.”

(Text: Bettina Back)