The Story of Techno Viking

I found Matthias Frisch’s documentary about the whole Techno Viking case via another video “The Meme that Sued It’s Creator’ which pretty much sums it up in one line. Matthias Frisch filmed the man who became Technoviking at Fuck Parade in Berlin in 2000, but it later became a meme and out of control of both artist and subject. (enable subtitles as it’s a mixture of German and English).

It raises very interesting issues about derivative works – even mashups – that use a person’s likeness, how those people can control those things – if they even can – and the desire to be private and forgotten when engaging in a public space. And how that when an artist makes a work, can they be held responsible for it going viral? Should they, or can they even control that?

Interesting this case would not fly here, Germany is fairly unusual with it’s ‘personality rights’ law, the question might be one of exploitation and money/commercial exploitation, but I do feel the Streisand Effect is strong in this case….because stupidly the real ‘Techno Viking’ tried to also after the first ruling sue all derivative works out of existence, which given ‘A Man Pointing’ is pretty much all hero tropes and predate him, as does the Viking imagery and Mjölnir et al.

Techno Viking was told to drop that by the senate, as I suspect that is impossible to enforce, and a massive overreach into artistic expression and comment.

Then again, given the Mjölnir and the iconography, maybe Techno Viking is quite right-wing/white supremacist and quite happy with dictatorial expressions of power like that? (BTW white supremacists have co-opted Nordic imagery and symbology for a very long time, not all Vikings are nice. In fact it’s gotten to the point if I see runes I start asking questions, cos they are quite often dodgy neo-celtic/neo-pagan Nazis. But if he is who I think he is, expressions of such power should horrify him, which makes the court case all the more weirder. And where did he get the money for that?).

I had some sympathy before that, because I felt that Matthias ‘leaning in’ to the meme as an artist felt a little exploitative, but interestingly I never knew he had tried to track the man down many times before with no success. I’ve heard various rumours about who Techno Viking really is, interestingly they tend to agree and it seems he lives in another country and I suspect he is part of a radical community there, very much ‘off grid’.

Maybe Techno Viking doesn’t understand how this works and you can’t delete yourself off the internet anymore? Maybe he wants to try and make it like that, roll back the clock? Sadly that’s not actually possible anymore, you can’t insist everyone deletes their hard-drives and memories like ‘Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind’. Like it or not, that’s the world now.

I suspect the EU’s ‘Right to be Forgotten’ law is part of this, but memes resist all that. That you can be as anti-capitalist as you like, but you cannot control how you are seen in public. He was lucky this was in Germany, because as I said in the UK he’d really have to prove damage or commercial exploitation. Derivative works have protection in the UK and US, various fair use laws, and the artist owns the video. I understand the desire to not want to be part of any exploitation, but certainly a lot of people exploited ‘Techno Viking’ apart from the film-maker (who didn’t invent the name nor the meme) and they didn’t get sued?

You cannot expect privacy at a public event, although exploiting that work unless it’s a crowd shot, you might have difficulty legally because of a lack of ‘model releases’ – but newsworthiness and the like can override all this. And indeed uses in non-commercial or artistic context are allowed unless they can be proven to be damaging or invasive.. But that is nothing like the German law, as I understand it. I don’t think we have any ‘personality rights’ laws here, at least not to that level.

Hence the tabloids have full reign, not that great, but the opposite leads to nasty stuff like this. A freezing effect on comment and art, and a blunt weapon against comment you don’t like.