a-clip 2003: Burn Hollywood Burn

The discovery that information can be hidden in images and the subsequent development of secure encoding procedures made the Austrian actress Hedy Lamarr famous, in scientific circles as well. Pursuing this idea further, one arrives at the fact that in these data sets, which literature, images, film, and conversations have turned into, other data sets, whose encoded contents should not be passed on, can also be hidden.

Sebastian Lütgert, who became criminalized by publishing two texts by Adorno and was thus a focal point in the ever more heated debates surrounding the rights on cultural products, encodes and decodes text. He incorporates meaningful data sets in other meaningful data sets and in turn produces films, images or programmes out of these. He is their author, even if they are the carrier material for the texts, images or films which he requires to produce or conceive his own work. Except that he may only publicise his own – not the actual originals, because they are protected by agencies exploiting third-party rights.

Sebastian Lütgert's films and images created with the help of these data sets are in turn cultural products that he could protect. They thus visualise the simple method that anyone applies who writes a text and has read a book beforehand.

Sebastian Lütgert – Robert Luxemburg – born in 1972, lives in Berlin. He conducts research, does programming, and publicises on the theme of intellectual property and works on the visual implementation of this theme in exhibitions and on the Internet.