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Manual Labor
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The Internet has yet to deliver
on the electronic republic pundits promised in the '90s.
Indeed, Al Gore's "Athenian Age" of enhanced democracy was a
lot shorter-lived than the original, if it drew breath at all,
and with the election fiascoes and terrorist attacks of the
past two years, the Bush administration has easily drowned out
pleas for online town meetings and voting, clamoring instead
for roving wiretaps and encryption controls. All of which
turns the clock back a decade, to a time when the task of
exploring new forms of electronic democracy fell to activists
and artists. The creators of the following sites may wield
fancier tools, but their spirit echoes the days when the
Internet was freedom's new frontier.
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Refugee Republic
http://www.refugee.net/
This project by Ingo Gunther
proposes a nongeographic nation composed of the world's
refugees. Arguing that the stateless population
represents a "comprehensive spectrum of cultures,
civilizations, and religions," Gunther expands on the
model of online collectives such as Nova Roma (which
unites "spiritual successors to the Roman Empire") to
create a homeland for people who currently don't have
one. Aside from the downloadable passport cover, the
site is less a practical experiment than a conceptual
gesture aimed at raising consciousness about the plight
of refugees. Though Gunther's project may be satiric, it
nonetheless points to the increasing relevance of
transnational entities in a globalized
economy. |
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Net.flag
netflag.guggenheim.org
No nation, online or off, would be
complete without a flag, and someone has finally created
one for the Internet. Net.flag, 2002–, by veteran
online artist Mark Napier, is an emblem for a new kind
of "territory." Its design changes constantly,
manipulated by users who make selections from familiar
motifs: stars, color fields, patterns, and insignia. As
Net.flag's viewers add their contributions, one
country's motifs temporarily overlap another's. Since a
flag's elements generally act as symbols,
Net.flag also includes a "browse history" feature
that shows the evolution of its aggregate symbolic
value—the percentage of signs indicating "purity,"
"peace," "blood," and so on present in the flag at a
given moment. Why pine for an isolated sovereignty
untenable in a world connected by copper wires and
international terrorism? Wave your Net.flag with
pride. |
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Carnivore
rhizome.org/carnivore
Based on FBI wiretapping software
of the same name, Radical Software Group's
Carnivore uses "packet-sniffing"—a technology
that eavesdrops on telecommunications—to create vivid
depictions of raw data. Carnivore, winner of this
year's Ars Electronica Golden Nica award for Net Vision,
consists of two parts: the box that ties into a local
area network and serves the resulting data stream via
the Internet; and artist-made interfaces that tap into
this stream. So far, Carnivore has been let loose
only in fenced-in pastures—participating galleries, for
example—but with a new downloadable version,
CarnivorePE, RSG's project of demystifying FBI
technology can now reach the masses. To date, a handful
of cofounder Alex Galloway's fellow artists, among them
Joshua Davis, Scott Snibbe, and Entropy8Zuper! have
contributed; their interfaces interpret data variously
as billowing circles, expanding supernovas, and a
Virtual Reality Modeling Language update on
Monopoly. |
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Metamute Meets Echelon
www.metamute.com/forum
/viewtopic.php?topic=44&forum=1
Echelon, the worldwide intelligence
network run by the United States and its
English-speaking allies, automatically monitors phone
calls, faxes, and e-mails by comparing them against a
list of suspicious keywords like mailbomb and
rebels. To raise awareness of government
surveillance, hacker-activists previously tried to flood
e-mail systems with messages containing these words—but
Echelon is purportedly too smart to be fooled by words
out of context. In response, Mute magazine
invited authors to craft literary works that employ the
maximum number of keywords. The winners, archived in the
magazine's site, Metamute
(www.metamute.com/eletter/archive10.htm), may not merit
a Pulitzer, but they do show that Tom Clancy doesn't
have a lock on spook-inspired literature. |
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