"Singen. Welches?" is the title of an on-line project I realized in the context of the international public art exhibition "Hier, Da und Dort", held in the German city of Singen between April and November 2000.
As art is called upon to play an increasingly crucial role in complex aestheticization processes - many of which involve urban space - and art events such as "Hier, Da und Dort" are devised to fuel the city's symbolic economy, I took the rather unorthodox decision of allocating my budget to an act of electronic disturbance aimed at altering geographic information and sabotaging the use of art for place promotion - the international art show in question was meant to underpin Singen's aspiration to feature on the art world map, revamp its image, and gloss over an embarrassing past.
By adding five spoof promotional websites to the existing one run by the municipality of Singen, I not only intended to raise awareness of how easily people can be duped into the falsehood of "everyday cybernetics", I also contributed to subvert Singen's strategy of place-marketing on the web.
Though the five virtual Singen I designed have no counterparts in the lifeworld, in the hyper-real (and often surreal) world of the web, where simulation has played havoc with our inherited epistemologies, the distinction between a "virtual real" city and a merely "virtual" city is suspended.
The official website of the "real" Singen is itself an example of place simulation. The city is described as being "situated by the lake of Konstanz", when in fact it is separated from the lake by a 5 mile-long industrial sprawl; the website provides a very partial account of the city's civic history, silently passing over the infamous forced labour camps that during WW II attracted investment from the rest of Germany and Switzerland; moreover, it fails to mention the presence of a very large immigrant population, and yet the so-called "guest workers" amount to one third of the overall population and contribute to Singen's economic wealth, social fabric and cultural life.
One of the distinctive features of the information age is the proliferation of data whose meaning becomes obscure. As information increases, meaning decreases, and with it our ability to make sense and distinguish between information, misinformation and disinformation. Now, how many Internet users have time to stop, think, compare and probe the mass of data intertextually and interactively in order to spot possible discrepancies? Not only has the Internet altered how we look at and explore geographic information, here the boundaries between image and reality, fact and fiction, are becoming increasingly blurred and often erased altogether.
Taking my cue from Guy Debord, who in "Comments on the Society of the Spectacle" hinted at a potentially subversive use of disinformation, a sort of homeopathic remedy that could counter the power of the integrated spectacle and foster incredulity towards its narratives, and appropriating another Situationist practice, that of détournement, theorized by Raoul Vaneigem, a parodic destabilization of the spectacle which involves taking elements from a given system to turn them against it, I initiated a proliferation of Singen homonyms on the Web. After registering the following domain names: singen.at (for Austria), singen.it (for Italy), singen-heidiland.ch (for Switzerland), singen.cz (for the Czech Republic), and singen.dk (for Denmark), I put on line five websites that would make the task of differentiating between a website which dissimulates something and websites which dissimulate that there is nothing almost impossible.
The choice of countries such as Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Denmark and the Czech Republic was determined by the conscious attempt to produce what Roland Barthes described as a "reality effect": not only do these countries share borders with Germany, they also host German-speaking minorities, making the presence of the German toponym "Singen" highly plausible.
The websites I designed look similar to those run by many municipalities: they feature a historical profile of the city, tourist attractions and landmarks, a calendar of cultural or sport events, maps, transport information, and links to businesses such as hotels and restaurants.
These virtual Singen have very little "artistic added value"; they are decidedly different from artists' creations of utopian or dystopian environments, aesthetico-technical ideal cities, Simcities, 3-D representations of literary loci and so on. Instead, I chose to operate below the threshold of artistic visibility, so that my critical intervention could not be safely recuperated under the category of "art".
Though it is hard to assess the impact that the proliferation of Singen in cyberspace is having on the economy of the "real" Singen, it is now clear that the presence of six towns bearing the same name and located within a relatively small radius has proved baffling to some. I received hundreds of angry messages posted by those who drove for hours trying to locate one of these virtual Singen, while two municipalities (Vipiteno in Italy and Achen in Austria) claim that singen.it and singen.at provide misleading information to tourists visiting their regions and have started legal proceedings against the host of my sites.
PS. One year later I had to obscure these sites because neither I nor the webhost could afford the cost of a legal battle in court.
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