Document:Q11239

A collaborative platform for viewer participation, MTAA’s [email protected] (the 3mb annexation) (2000) blurs the space between public and private space online. The work is represented as an extension of Star 67 Gallery’s exhibition space “by the amount of 3 megabytes of disk space on the servers of yahoo.com.” Accessed through a website plastered with the Yahoo! Mail logo and flashing Campbell’s Soup cans (a nod to the work’s Warholian ties), an e-mail address and its password are provided for anyone to access. Free to manipulate, the account is a digital catalogue of user-generated content––the choice of what to send both to and from the e-mail is surrendered to the public. The artists encourage the viewer to fill the account with e-mails of texts and graphics, each message to be thought of as an iteration of “public corporate art.” The work thus highlights the uneasy coexistence of users and corporations on the internet; dissonances reverb in the formal exchange of one’s most private correspondences to the most public of companies, especially in the unregulated, nearly utopian expanse of the web. By transforming the typically personal space of an e-mail account into an interpersonal one, MTAA here subverts and bypasses artificial boundaries established online. In tandem with project’s like Raqs Media Collective’s Opus or 0100101110101101.ORG’s Life Sharing, all created within the first years of the new millennium, [email protected] (the 3mb annexation) follows an open-source model of sharing art and information, annexing a defined public space amid the increasingly privatized internet.