UBERMORGEN on Conceptual Hacks, Rage Bait, and Markets

In an interview with Anika Meier for SLEEK, the Swiss-Austrian collective UBERMORGEN—founded in 1995 by Liz Haas (lizvlx) and Luzius Bernhard, now including their child Billie Bernhard—discusses their evolution from a digital art duo into an intergenerational family project. They reflect on early conceptual hacks like Vote-Auction (2000), Google Will Eat Itself (2005), and The Sound of eBay (2008), which probed election markets, search engines, and online marketplaces. The group distinguishes their experimental methodology from today's rage-bait economy, arguing that their work is driven by curiosity rather than algorithmically optimized provocation. Vote-Auction, which offered a platform for buying and selling votes in the 2000 U.S. presidential election, will be shown at Art Basel in the Digital Masterpieces booth curated by Georg Bak for ArtMeta. The collective also discusses their NFT series The D1cks, minted on Tezos, and the PMC Wagner Arts project (2023), which examined art as whitewashing and propaganda. They note that social media has become parasocial media, and Billie Bernhard explores radical personalization as a potential artistic strategy. Luzius Bernhard expresses enthusiasm for showing at Art Basel, calling it the largest distributed art marketplace.