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posted by
steve
on Tuesday May 28, @09:30AM
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Marisa S. Olson posted this review of Open_Source_Art_Hack to Rhizome on 05.28.02
Currently on view at New York's New Museum of Contemporary Art is
"Open_Source_Art_Hack," a group show of artists poetically conflating
hacking with open-sourcing. There is, already, a bit of a hacker ethos to
open source. The idea that often commercially-valuable, always
laboriously-constructed codes should be openly accessible (openly
modifiable!) by all begs the invention of naughty plots à la Bruce
Sterling's 1993 cult classic, "The Hacker Crackdown." But the artists in
this show are not rerouting police emergency calls to phone-sex lines or
breathing heavily into payphone receivers to rip off Baby Bells. They are
co-opting existing means of surveillance or surveillance-culture
indoctrination to make new comments about life in network
culture. Incidentally, by participating in a major museum show, they are
also helping to launch "hacktivism" into the colloquy of contemporary art...
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On Sundays, in New York, the curious can take a walking tour of the city's
hidden cameras, led by members of the Surveillance Camera Players. The
group has mapped over half of the city's estimated ten thousand
strategically-placed cameras--though the total figure continues to rise,
following post-911 rally-cries for increased surveillance. The Players
have worked, through tours, performances, protests, and other activities,
to protect the rights of Americans, outlined under the 4th Amendment to the
Constitution, "against unreasonable searches and seizures." Americans,
they say, have a right to observe those observing them. This mantra plays
out, self-reflexively, in all of the work included in "Open Source Art Hack."
In SCP's case, the surveillance camera is treated like a television camera,
before which the group performs theatrical gems from George Orwell's
"Animal Farm" to Alfred Jarry's "Ubu Roi." After six years of
interventions, SCP has come to feel that passersby have become more their
audience than the police eyes trained on their target cameras, as evidenced
in protests in which members inform oblivious strollers that they were
being watched. Videos of these performances and walking-tours comprise
SCP's contribution to the show. Museum visitors (or otherwise oblivious
strollers) will find themselves peering in at the videos in the museum's
storefront window--an at-once typical site for the investment of
scopophilic energy and atypical site for the museum-display of art.
Next to SCP's videos, and further inside the museum, are the Radical
Software Group's "Carnivore" clients. RSG's packet-sniffing machine
monitors the traffic on a selection of computers--in this case, those in
the museum's media lounge--and visualizes the docking-sites and use of
pre-programmed keywords. Putting the "art" in "art hack," each RSG client
has created a unique interface for this visualization. Particularly
poignant is entopy8zuper's representation of active users as globe-circling
airplanes trudging a crash-and-burn path where logoffs leave fiery
pock-marks in an ambiguous web world. While "Carnivore" is modeled after
the FBI's surveillance engine, RSG-founder Alex Galloway has shrugged off
the typical hacker coat of arms, claiming to be more interested in
exploring positive models of observation than undermining the state apparatus.
Here, RSG, like its "Open Source Art Hack" peers, reestablishes mimicry as
a beautiful, if scientifically-complex, form of defense. But what is it
that is being defended against? For starters, it's the infusion of
panoptic strategies into network culture. Whether it is packet sniffing or
search engine data-cataloguing, internet users are always-already
vulnerable to the search and display of their activities and
communication. Indeed, it is not just that Google is archiving one's
chat-group confessions, but the possibility that any and all future actions
might be monitored that invokes a Foucaultian digital panopticon-an
always-present eye casting an impact upon the moves we make.
LAN's "Tracenoizer" clone sites exploit the abundance of unfiltered
personal information online, creating sources of mis-information about
websurfers bearing a data-based resemblance (say, a similar name) to
"Tracenoizer" users. Filmmaker Harun Farocki, a welcome addition to the
cadre of what has become a too-tight nepotistic circle of "new media"
artists, explores these panoptic issues in his "Eye/Machine." Exposing the
means and motives by which war machines look, Farocki pairs interviews of
surveillance pilots with sample footage. The result is a document of the
constructed realities (read: visions) of war and the impetus for
incorporating military machinery into civilian life.
Both Knowbotic Research and Cue P. Doll have turned established search mechanisms on their heads in creating alternative means of gathering
information about the world's major companies and organizations. Knowbotic
Research's entrancing installation has at its heart a portal for the
exposure of the crack-vulnerabilities of a public group's server. Plastic
containers flash and buzz with varying intensity--a comment on the
physicality of the firewall--as data rolls and pops on screen,
Vegas-style. Cue P. Doll's "CueJack" bites the tongue of the "CueCat," a
barcode scanner that delivers users at the door of retail
websites. "CueJack" also reads barcodes, but rather than touting the many
fine products for sale by the manufacturer of the item you've scanned,
"CueJack" takes you to a database of the corporate wrong-doings and related
boycotts of said retailer. Both Knowbotic Research's installation and Cue
P. Doll's scanner require readings with the body, thereby making users
corporeally complicit in the {art-} hack activities.
Radioqualia calls for sonic participation in their "Free Radio Linux"
project. Artists Adam Hyde and Honor Harger have created an online and
on-air radio station in which a computerized voice reads the Linux
operating system code--an endeavor that will take years to complete. "Free
Radio Linux" is the ultimate self-reflexive case of artists commenting on
the character and relative complexities of existing channels of
representation, distribution, and interpretation. Their project provides
the sonic backdrop for the asking of several key questions underscored by
"Open Source Art Hack." Perhaps most important is the question, "What is a
code?"
The Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS) defines it as
"a set of unambiguous rules specifying the manner in which data may be
represented in a discrete form." The fact that we use the same four-letter
word to describe a system of representation that we do to refer to social
norms (see dress "code") is less a matter of irony and more an indication
of the degree to which that system of representation is a reflection of a
dominant ideology. That special milieu we've named "network culture" is no
more than a percentage of the population at large behaving and interacting
in such a way as to self-reflexively trace their patterns of
protocol-driven activity. Seemingly mechanical activity like the ping-pong
game of one computer chatting with another was scripted by humans who have
been enculturated in a society in which there exist elaborate codes of
propriety and impropriety, in communicative exchange, and where a sort of
social Darwinism has translated keeping up with the Joneses into keeping up
with the OS's. However phantasmatic the traces of these social scripts are
upon computer codes, their products are entirely tangible. Hacktivism,
while admittedly entrenched in recognizing--if not following--rules of
engagement, then seems a worthwhile means of attempting to dissect the
ideological apparatuses at play in this closed circle of coded signification.
http://www.newmuseum.org/
http://www.netartcommons.net/
http://www.thehacktivist.com/
http://www.earthcam.com/usa/newyork/timessquare/ (click camera #5 for SCP)
http://www.rhizome.org/carnivore/
http://www.tracenoizer.org
http://www.cuejack.com
http://radioqualia.va.com.au/freeradiolinux/
http://www.atis.org/tg2k/
http://www.antiwargame.org
http://tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/wray/wwwhack.html
+ troikas in baklava
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