Coming Up Next
Uber Me!
words by Ben Thomas
photo by Nhat Nguyen
Will you please verify that you are indeed my friend and we have known each other since all of thirty seconds ago? Do you like my blog? I’m creative, you know, and my Internet content is gaining validity. Because of it, my online presence is growing stronger day by day. Thank you MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, Bebo, Classmates.com, and AdultFriendFinder (especially you AFF ). But I have this nagging feeling that my main page is a little tired and homely and looks like everyone else’s. I’m pretty sure that Photoshop can’t fix this problem. Sure I have more hits per day than the average virtual turd, but I want my primary website, wherever that may be, to look great and I want it to be different. I don’t need a social networking service anymore; I need something cutting edge to take me to the next artistic level. And I need it to be named after some hip, Germanic buzzword whose colloquial etymology is rooted in gaming jargon that roughly translates to ‘super’. Uber me.
Uber.com, sans umlaut, is an artistic response - a visual and conceptual artist’s social experiement, part digital masterpiece and partly a response to the litany of social websites that promise hordes of friends via digital networking, but offered no visually unique or creative way to do so. Glenn Kaino is known in the gallery world for his socially provocative pieces and perhaps his dubious manner of creating landscapes that yearn to inspire change and force viewers to question the status quo or come up with new philosophies. Sure, sounds bold, right? As I interviewed Kaino, I learn quickly that he gets bolder….
Like many of our era’s agents of culture-molders, Kaino honed his talent at a young age. “I got bored with a lot of the toys I had as a kid, so my friends and I came up with the idea of ‘kit bashing’, where we broke up model parts, action figures and other solid toys to create the toy we wanted,” recalls Kaino. Apart from making his own toys better (he was the pedological version of 3M), Kaino eventually parlayed his MFA from UCSB into a technoguru career. Fresh out of college, he saw the World Wide Web’s potential for creating, showcasing, and networking his own and his contemporaries’ art way back when the Internet really was just a labyrinth of tubes underneath our sidewalks (wasn’t it)? It was those first delicious moments with the Internet that the idea for Uber was hatched, but he didn’t realize that yet.
Kaino got his web cherry popped in the mid 90’s with his now defunct site Favela.org, where he and his guerrilla art disseminator buddies began designing websites under one umbrella for visual artists who had no concept of the Internet and its power. As they slowly starting categorizing their artists, they networked and double-clicked their way to becoming a formidable presence by linking the online art world across cultures. Favela even helped create content for, among others, a fledgling (at the time, only a few nerds in a cubicle somewhere on the Stanford Campus) information-gathering site called Yahoo! Kaino laughs about it, “They were actually emailing us asking if we had some more Native American sculpture and paintings, ‘Send us the link!’”
But as many artists suffer from the ravages of too much talent and being pulled in too many directions, Favela slowly succumbed to more profitable websites, and Kaino focused on his alter-career as a web designer and visual artist. He made websites look pretty for Mars Inc., Uncle Ben’s, the Disney Channel, and Fox.com and still had time to push boundaries in galleries on both coasts with his own physical art. His online acumen eventually led him to revamping the Napster interface after its legal restructuring, but his shows in the Whitney Art Museum, REDCAT, The Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, and others took center stage and he left Napster in 2006.
As luck would have it, talent, or perhaps drive, runs in the family: Kaino’s cousin Scott Sassa, the former President of NBC Entertainment, was fresh off the helm as the CEO of Friendster when they chatted at a family gathering during the holidays. That’s where Kaino’s Uber.com concept grabbed some familial interest - “Scott, being the older cousin that you don’t see very often, didn’t really know that I was actually doing some pretty cool stuff online.” Before long, the muse of a cultural experiment in the back of his head was a reality, melding his concepts of visual art, Favela.org, and web design.
So here comes the philosophical underscoring for this project. Uber.com, as Kaino puts it, is not just another social networking site for those a little more artistically inclined. “It’s quite simply a medium to level the playing field for all of the creative folks in the world who don’t have a record label, television network or multi-media group to design their digital footprint,” explains Kaino. If we delve a little deeper, Uber uses the voice, or collected works, of the little guy to essentially unite others on the same pallet to challenge the greater hegemony of mass media that exists today. And think of that media behemoth (we shall call it Medioth) as an amalgamation of Time Warner, Viacom, Fox, and a couple of big baddies that control 90% of what we see and hear. Now you may say that the Internet is where we get alternatives to this Kraken with LCD screens for eyes, but really, where do Drudge, Yahoo, MSN and others get their content from? The same filters that funnel into the beast. So where lies the path to enlightenment?
Well, as Kaino points out while referencing the late Italian philosopher and uber socialist Antonio Gramsci, “gaining freedom from the oppressors of a dominant state requires the long struggle or Gramsci’s ‘war of position’”. That is to say, in our current case study, the common person, or artist, with all of their unique and individual views, can unite or ‘position’ himself or herself under one banner (see: Uber.com) to usurp the hegemonic state (i.e. Medioth and its minions). It’s not really that serious though. We all just want to be sexy, right?
Kaino, along with his co-founding cousin Sassa, hope that on a base level, Uber does inspire users to express themselves a little differently than a typical Facebook or MySpace user would, and they can – easily. The whole site is set up like an online DIY publishing platform, where users ( artists, musicians, writers, photographers, fashion designers, and porridge makers), can upload any graphics they want, scale and layer them, add videos, photos, text and use a complete toolset to make their site look unique and if they so desire, absolutely amazing. Kaino describes the process “like a video game experience, in that using the site is easy to learn but difficult to master.”
Like any digital medium that’s been around for a spell (Uber launched about a year and a half ago), it does have its share of masters. Bona fide celebrities like Gnarls Barkley and the Jonas Brothers grace its servers, but the steady stream of up-and-coming artists that hold space on Uber are knocking at fame’s door. Of course it helps when you have the president backing you up. Kaino has launched a new exhibit at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh called Uberstars. He has juxtaposed original photos of Warhol Factory Superstars (those club kids that got 15 minutes back in the day) taken with Andy’s Big Shot Poloroid in the late 60’s and 70’s alongside his fresh crop of Uber darlings using the same photographic medium. These digital misfits have utilized Uber to its potential, publishing gorgeous pages that showcase provocative work, and they’ve networked and shopped it to the masses. So why not give them some kudos in this first stage of Kaino’s social experiment? Kaino compares eras, “Andy had to validate his stars with his photos, but Uber self-validates. These artists did it themselves.” (Kaino’s hoping these folks get about 17 minutes of fame, so the show will run until the end of August.)
Now it’s your turn to be a part of Version 2.0 - the commercial phase! Join the cause for an aesthetically pleasing digital visage, sell some of your creations, slay the hegemonic Medioth, find out if Chancellor Merkel is upset about the domain name being taken and in the process, become a (super) Uberstar.
To find out more about all of Glenn Kaino’s creations, visit gkaino.uber.com
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