Storytellers of the Information Age - On the Role of Narrative In Ubermorgen.com’s Work

Since the second half of the 90s, storytelling has become a central strategy in hacktivism and media art, whereas before, actions and performances aimed at creating disturbance, boycotts and resistance. To Inke Arns – theorist of media art and artistic director of Hartware MedienKunstVerein in Dortmund – media artists and performers such as Yes Men, Christoph Schlingensief, RTMark, Laibach and Ubermorgen have chosen the strategy of “over identification”, which uses narrative and storytelling, in many of their works. In the projects Voteauction (2000), Psych|OS (2002), EKMRZ-Trilogy (2005–2008), through narratives and counter-narratives, the artist duo Ubermorgen.com enable the audience to understand the complex structures that underlie the functioning of society. By releasing made-up stories into the mass media, they succeed from time to time in launching a certain topic and its reaching a global audience. Potentially mobilizing it.