UCOG-144

"Urban Colonisation and Orientation Gear - 144 (1996), was an experiment overlapping psychogeography and communications technology, consisting of a number of group members wandering the streets of Ljubljana carrying home-made versions of the US military's GPS - global positioning system - used together with wireless modems and audio receivers to create a collage of activity on the streets and on the net."
Source: Lisa Haskel, Pretty Good Pirates,
http://makrolab.ljudmila.org/haskel.html

Marko Peljhan: In 1995, I wrote a problematic text called "The Art of Intelligence and the Art of War Making". This text was spawned by my experience in working on the UCOG-144 project, which stands for Urban Colonization and Orientation Gear.

Hans Ulrich Obrist: This was more on the performative side of your work.

MP: Yes. It was a performance but employing technology and technological models which were strictly and directly from the military-industrial complex. My first question was how to reflect these tools. I started communicating with the producers of these tools. They started sending me letters, more and more of them, and they became very amusing. And then I started to play the game, too. I started to ask for more information from all these different companies in the defense industry, from electronics to more sophisticated weapons. This is sort of an ongoing project which I will unveil when it stops at a certain point. There is quite a pile of communication with the military-industrial complex where they address me: "Dear Mr. Peljhan, thank you for contacting us. Here is what we can offer you." And they are selling commercial navigation systems for rockets...

HUO: So this is really on the market; it's available to everyone?

MP: It's available to everyone because it doesn't include the explosive material. The explosive you can buy at the right time, it's so simple. And then you think about the Internet, how it was invented and why. Suddenly, you realize that almost everything that surrounds us, technologically (even though some people would not agree with me and I've had arguments in the past about this), comes from the military-industrial complex, one way or the other, visibly or invisibly.

HUO: Sometimes it's very visible. I was sitting with Jonas Mekas in a cafe in Paris and he had this very old "bullet" camera that he was permanently loading and unloading. It was really like a machine gun.

Source: Interview of Marko Peljhan by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Art Orbit #3, 1998.
http://artnode.se/artorbit/issue3/i_peljhan/i_peljhan.html

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