Eva and Franco Mattes were born in Italy in 1976. Since meeting in Madrid in 1994, they have never separated, living a nomadic life throughout Europe and the United States. Neither of them received art education; however, they are counted among the pioneers of the Net Art movement, and are renowned for their subversion of public media.
The couple first gained notoriety in 1998 by snagging the domain name vaticano.org in order to undermine the Catholic Church’s official website. They then went on a cloning spree, copying and remixing other artists’ works, e.g., Jodi.org. They also targeted “closed” websites, such as Hell.com, thereby turning private art into public art. They explained that people use websites interactively and follow what they are supposed to do. The Mattes', on the other hand, view the websites in a different way and decide that they can express them differently. By doing something that is not predicted by the author of the website, "the beholder becomes an artist and the artist becomes a beholder: a powerless witness of what happens to his work." From 1995–97, the pair toured the world’s most important museums and stole dozens of fragments from well-known works by artists such as Duchamp, Kandinsky, Beuys, and Rauschenberg.
The Mattes have manipulated video games, Internet technologies, feature films and street advertising to reveal truths concealed by contemporary society. They have created media facades believable enough to elicit embarrassing reactions from governments, the public, and the art world. In addition, they have orchestrated several unpredictable mass performances, staged outside art spaces and involved unwitting audiences in scenarios that mingle truth and falsehood to the point of being indistinguishable.
The Mattes shocked the mainstream art world with the invention of Darko Maver, a reclusive, radical artist who achieved cult status and was featured in the Venice Biennale before being exposed as pure fiction. This Serbian artist created by the two, presented very gruesome and realistic models of murder victims. He exposed the brutality of war in the Balkans to world. Many of the photographs and models shown were reenactments of actual deaths found on the web. Their message to the world was while artists are making shocking artwork absorbed by the market, real violence is being perpetrated and ignored by a media-anesthetized world. Their off-the-wall performances– for which they have been sued multiple times– include affixing fake architectural heritage plaques (An Ordinary Building, 2006), rolling out a media campaign for a non-existent action movie (United We Stand, 2005) and even convincing the people of Vienna that Nike had purchased the city’s historic Karlsplatz and was about to rename it “Nikeplatz” (Nike Ground, 2003).
Eva and Franco first revealed their love for Second Life through their project "13 Most Beautiful Avatars". In an interview with Domenico Quaranta, they stated that the self-portraits of the 13 avatars were not meant to reveal "the way you 'are', but rather on the way you 'want to be'". The Mattes wanted to stress that our culture revolves around plagiarism. Followed by saying that their project "13 Most Beautiful Avatars" is not a completely original piece. In fact, they stated that anyone who claims that their work is an original, should really "start doubting" their mentality because practically everything in this world, not limited to art, is a reproduction or remix of something that was released once before.
Their art has been featured at the Venice Biennale (2001), the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2001), Manifesta, Frankfurt (2002) and in other venues worldwide, including the New Museum, New York (2005), Collection Lambert, Avignon (2006) and Performa, New York (2007 and 2009).