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Maciej Wisniewski is the creator and chief scientist of netomat, a network- and software-based art project that has been shown at such venues as the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany.

Do You Copy?

The scarlet E of economic collapse may have soiled the Internet's reputation in mainstream culture, but artists are still hard at work milking the medium's subversive capacities. Some of the results will be on view at "Open_Source_Art_Hack," curated by Steve Dietz of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; New York artist Jenny Marketou; and Anne Barlow of New York's New Museum of Contemporary Art, where it opens May 3. Participants such as American programmer-artist Cue P. Doll, the global collective RSG, Critical Art Ensemble, and radioqualia, a duo based in Australia, are modern Lettristes fusing multimedia, self-criticism, and agitprop; their works combine industry strategies with cultural critique and outlaw agendas, kicking ass and literally taking names. (RSG's Carnivore, for example, sees the e-mail you write and receive and the Web pages you surf.)

What you won't find at this show are works that involve computerized breaking and entering. These "hackers" operate more tactically. Besides addressing themes of surveillance and code transparency (the death of the author updated as the death of the programmer), many projects don witty veneers that give way to open-ended systems. Cue Jack, by Cue P. Doll in collaboration with distributor ®™ark, plugs into at-home bar-code scanner CueCat to provide data outside the marketing plan (regarding environmental viability, safety recalls, and so on) instead of retrieving sanctioned product details. Its creator aims to erode imbalances of information between individuals and corporations. "Information capital," she says, is "infinitely copyable." Merging product (re)design, programming, and entertainment, "Open_Source_Art_Hack" will show socially conscious Internet art holding its own in the agitprop tradition.
—Rachel Greene

A 1993 New Yorker cartoon by Peter Steiner depicts a canine surfing the Web. The caption reads: "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." Since artists these days can be just about anybody if they put their mind to it (think Nikki S. Lee or Sophie Calle), it's possible that some online presences—software engineers, corporations, and even government entities—are really artists, clandestinely working toward politico-aesthetic ends. What if the Internet were secretly powered by a cabal of painters, photographers, and performers chuckling behind the curtain? Of course, the following sites may be exactly what they appear to be; on the other hand, could anyone but artists have come up with them?

		NJ.com Police Scanner www.nj.com/policescanner The voyeuristic possibilities provided by webcams have created a slew of (perhaps unwitting) performance artists. If you are an obsessive observer of sensational subjects, check out the New Jersey police scanner, where you can tap into a live, unedited audio stream from the world of law enforcement and emergency response. Is it art imitating life, or life imitating Cops?

		J-Track Satellite Tracking liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov /toc.asp?s=Tracking A couple of years ago, Patrick Meyer, an aerospace technician in data systems at NASA, with help from Tim Horvath of Teledyne Brown Engineering, created a satellite-tracking program called J-Track and posted it on the Web. The program displays half a dozen satellites and spacecrafts such as Mir and the Hubble telescope in their real-time orbital positions around Earth, in addition to the latest weather patterns from the Intellicast weather service. Viewers can see in two- or three-dimensional displays a good bit of what's floating above us in the outer atmosphere. As I watch J-Track on my desktop, I prefer to think of it as an artwork; otherwise I'm stuck wondering whether one of those dots is about to hit me on the head.

		License Plate Gallery webreference.com/outlook /license/gallery2.html If you are puzzled by the once ubiquitous phrase "information superhighway" and how it might relate to the actual highway system, you'll find an answer at Richard Wiggins's License Plate Gallery. This collection of vanity plates featuring Internet-age buzzwords (IDOHTML, says one Kansan, while Florida is home to WEB DUDE and WEB GEEK) demonstrates people's desire to broadcast a bit of their Web identity on the road—from New Hampshire to California, not to mention the Australian outback.

		"Ask Andy Roid!" www.trycolony.com/ask.htm Transcom Software has developed an application called Colony, whose autonomous agents mimic the behavior of a colony of ants. This colony's work ethic is designed not to build a hill, however, but to meet your research needs. The search agents collaborate in responding to your queries and in learning how better to respond in the future. The latest addition to Colony is Andy Roid, a "research assistant" who compares the results from search engines such as Google, AltaVista, and Go. When I asked the search agent, "Are you an artwork?" it replied, "I'm sorry but I don't know"—an answer perhaps only an artist posing as an insectoid reference librarian would think to give.

		Web Karaoke www.hawaiizone.com /wkaraoke.html This site enables closet lounge singers to belt out such classic sing-alongs as "Copacabana," "Feelings," "YMCA," and "New York, New York" anywhere they can connect to the Internet. Karaoke is traditionally a very social affair; whether your audience is friend or foe, you're singing (or attempting to) in public. Now, through the magic of the Internet, you can become a karaoke singer in the privacy of your own home. Doesn't everyone want to be an artist, even when no one is watching?

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