Voteauction

Voteauction was the brainchild of James Baumgartner, at the time a student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute,[8] the website was later sold for an undisclosed sum to Ubermorgen.com in Austria. The artist duo consisting of lizvlx (AT) and Hans Bernhard (CH/USA) ran it from August 1 – November 7, 2000, posing as "Eastern European business people". CNN.com called them "Maverick Austrian Businessmen".[9] Legal precautions against extradition and rendition were taken by consulting specialists in different countries and by physically moving on a daily basis.[10] The auctioning web-site was re-designed in September and underwent minor changes over the course of the project.[11][12] The web-site initial domain voteauction.com (hosted by Domainbank) and the second domain vote-auction.com were disabled by American court orders[13] and without legally served court order by CORENIC in Geneva,[14] leading to a series of press-releases to communicate the new location, hence generating more publicity for the web-site.[15] The server-infrastructure was attacked several times and the site had to move to a more secure location.

UBERMORGEN.COM shows all the original documents (approximately 700 kg of complaints, court decisions, injunctions) generated by the proceedings in exhibitions worldwide,[16] and refers to them as ‹foriginals› (a combination of ‹forged› and ‹original›). The permanent amalgamation of fact and fiction[17] realized in this way points toward an extremely expanded concept of one’s working materials, which for Ubermorgen.com also include (international) rights, democracy and global communication (input-feedback-loops).[18] Vote-Auction was exhibited at the Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz (Austria) 2005, Eyebeam New York, 2010,[5] expo.02 Switzerland, 2002.

As an affirmative approach towards the illegal delivery of court orders from U.S. courts to Europe, UBERMORGEN.COM released the "Injunction generator", an engine which renders customized court orders on demand.[19]

In 2004 UBERMORGEN.COM released the 2nd part of the "Election Trilogy" named *THE*AGENCY for manual election recount.[20][21] In 2007 WAHLGELD.COM, a vote-buying and selling platform for the Swiss parliamentary elections was launched. The actual selling and buying of votes was covered by leaking information about the authors (as artists),[22] therefore the election commission, the media and the voters were certain about the non-commercial motivation. Approximately 700 electoral votes were bought for an average of CHF 75.-.[23]

• Ubermorgen.com[24]
• Hans Bernhard aka Dr. Andreas Bichlbauer[25]
• lizvlx aka Sandra Baierl aka Elisabeth Haas[26]
• James Baumgartner[25][27]
• Tilmann Singer[28]
• Silver Server[28]
• lo-res.org[28]
• Oskar Obereder[25]
• Christoph Johannes Mutter[25]
• hell.com[28]
• Bootlab Berlin[5]
• Domenico Quaranta[29]
• Domain Bank Inc.[25][30]
• Luzius Bernhard[25]
• Stephanie Schliepack[14]
• State of Missouri[31]

• Vote-auction Website, with Archive