FAKEPRESS. UBIQUITOUS PUBLISHING AND DISTRIBUTED STORYTELLING, Penelope.di.pixel

Eng: Monica Fontana


“Swarming city, city full of dreams! Even in broad day the spectre accosts passers-by. Everywhere mysteries flow like saps through the narrow canals of the mighty giant” - C. Baudelaire (Paris, 9 Aril 1821 – Paris, 31 August 1867)


Infoscape

The scenario described by a timless flaneur as Baudelaire has been significantly modified during the last one hundred and fifty years, but the image of those "mysteries that flow like saps in the mighty giant" belongs to us. An information layer in multiple levels and distributed over the space, as well as objects, people and architecture, determines the possibility to change the world into a hybrid reality generated by a great variety of viewpoints, voices, shapes, gestures and sounds.

SPIMEs (1), location based media, augmented realities, a distributed interaction, sensors that capture changes and distribute them, emotional and experiencing design: these are the main tools that enable the transition and help the transformation process.

Enormous implications, anthropological, philosophical, political, economic and relational: reconsidering the way we communicate, exchange, share, distribute and disseminate knowledge within and through Infoscape(2), where to interact with the inhabitants/elements (both physical and immaterial) of the new landscape, a desire/need is evident and it deeply affects the collective mind

A new idea of publishing house

How does the role of the publisher change in this context? And how do literature, essays and the reading experience change? Which and are the media involved and how do they get involved? And finally, what are the faces and voices of these stories? How are they told, and where?

According to Salvatore Iaconesi (3) and Luca Simeone (4), as well as for Federico Ruberti who soon joins the conversation with great enthusiasm about the project, the answer is FakePress (5). A new model of publishing house, based on the creation of open narrative, cross-media, multi-artist, able to use location based technology, augmented reality, SPIME and natural gestural interfaces to build layers interpreting reality through non-deterministic and intrinsically pluralistic network issuing processes.

The publishing house does not lose its basic requirements - select, package, distribute information. But it expands. Interstices, distributed displays and projections become a stage to represent the information, the spime stories and the sentient cities(6): everyware. the book shape is disappearing, and it has been disjointed and rejointed through media tracks made by a variety of subjects: wide-tagging, geo-localised contents free to download, open-ended stories.

In short: ubiquitous publishing and storytelling distribution. A process where design, learning methodologies, education and narrative forms cross together and easily tend to adopt strategies p2p, by changing theorists, specialists and "staff" in new types of authors/publishers/communicators.

How it works

A FakePress publication is made according to precise methodologies. The topic - that was the result of a selection through projects, authors, social networks and territories - is described trough many media that can express a geographic and time distribution of the contents, possibilities and forms of interaction, the creation of social relationships, the interaction of bodies, emotions, ideas and knowledge, according to the case. This step is performed through the contribution of some groups

According to this description, the contents are joined together using a series of existing platforms (and made from some mashup works) or specially prepared. In the case of the first publications, for instance, three communicative channels have been created: one in relation to the web, one to the territorial consultation and the last to the paper format consultation. These are able to interact with other modes.

“The contents - as Salvatore Iaconesi explains - have been joined thanks to a modified version of the Wordpress platform to create a fluid process in which a group of publishers/authhors could prepare the contents for all the channels. On the one side the elements of the publications are arranged in a visual way through georeferenced coordinates given by GPS, Google Maps and Google Earth functions. On the other side the same contents are organized to be accessible both from the web and on mobile devices ( iPhone, Android and Symbian platforms with adequate number of technical requirements, by now), covering the territory. And on paper format, for books that through a crystalised form of hypertext allows to serf on places, times and points of view”.

In short: a web application; a mobile platform to view the publication in the form of location-based contents and of an expanded reality; a paper publication in the form of a hybrid (half touristic guide and half a crystalised hypertext) produced in self-publishing and printed on demand, and wordly distributed online. The three levels are not competing but correspond to different needs and use different objects/products, while other publications have other channels of communication, and there will be different forms of interaction and different technological devices.


Then, reading becomes a complex activity, which consists of reading the classics, or looking at geographical and architectural locations - where you can experience contents through the places in which they were conceived and see the reason of their existence – or as well, it can be the ability to make continuous changes of perspective between authors, topics, times and spaces.

To get a better idea of the browsing experience, of visualisation and of the type of platforms used, we can finally surf the website of NeoRealismoVituale-Nervi (7), an ongoing publication by FakePress, but perfectly serves its purpose .

On going project

The newborn FakePress has already had its official baptism in Rome at the Frontiers Interaction V (8), an environment that deeply belongs to it and which has shown interest to blend its stimuli

Ubiquitous Anthropology is instead a project in which it will get involved in the future. Anthropological research by Massimo Canevacci on the Bororo, population of Mato Grosso that the professor has been studying for about 20 years, turns into a cross media publishing and location based web application where access is a prerequisite for the creation of a "tourist guide "ethnographic evolved and a new way of conceiving the academic publications /research.

We'll talk about Ubiquitous Antropology in another article.And we leave with a clarification: apart from its name, FakePress is a real publishing house open to work with artists, researchers, institutions, and entrepreneurs interested in experiiencing the same viewpoint and the same themes that inspired its creation.





1. Dumbing Down Smart Objects di Bruce Sterling ("Wired" ottobre 2004): http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/view.html?pg=4

2. O datascape: paesaggio di dati/informazioni.

3. http://www.artisopensource.ne/t

4. http://luca.simeone.name/

5. http://www.fakepress.net/

6. v. SENSEable City lab : http://senseable.mit.edu/

7. http://www.neorealismovirtiale.com/

8. http://frontiers.idearium.org/2009/program/

above copied from: http://www.digicult.it/digimag/article.asp?id=1567

Communication Guerilla - Transversality in Everyday Life? autonome a.f.r.i.k.a. gruppe

Several years ago we coined the term "communication guerilla" to designate a number of political praxis forms - praxis forms that traverse the old boundaries between political action and the everyday world, subjective anger and rational political action, art and politics, desire and work, theory and practice. In other words, the term does not denote an organization like Globalize Resistance, nor a political network like Attac, nor any of the more complex, rhizomatic and continuously newly constituted formations of the global protest movement, such as People's Global Action [www.agp.org] or the European noborder network [www.noborder.org]. The imaginary brigades of communication guerillas are not necessarily networked with one another. What joins them is a specific style of political action drawing from a watchful view of the paradoxes and absurdities of power, turning these into the starting point for political interventions by playing with representations and identities, with alienation and over-identification.
As it emerged in the 90s, the concept "communication guerilla" was, not least of all, a response to the exhaustion of traditional leftist activism after the fall of the Berlin wall. The search for new forms of praxis led (at least in some points) to a new, transversal praxis beyond the realm of the "old" activism - even though the point of departure for this search was the experience of a seminal defeat of the left. Today, following the rise and possibly already the incipient downfall of a new global movement, the situation is a different one, and the question arises as to the extent to which this concept from the 90s is still useful. The new activism has become more global, more networked, but most of all, it has developed a new dynamic beyond political and national borders. At the same time, however, this activism still evinces many features of the old polit-activism, not only in the neo-communist party version of the SWP (Socialist Workers Party) and Globalize Resistance. Despite all the rhetoric, activism often still has a stance that is strangely separated from people's everyday life, even that of its own protagonists. The future of this global activism will depend on whether it succeeds in being capable of action at the local level, the level of everyday life, while continuing to develop its transversal, border-crossing character at the same time. The most important border that has to be crossed is the border that constitutes the activist her or himself in a separation from the "rest" of society. We think that the praxis of the communication guerilla can contribute to this kind of border-crossing. This is our motivation for discussing in the following text experiences with this praxis along the lines of flight that are inscribed in it, along the border-crossings, through which it is constituted.


Art and Politics

A web site [www.gatt.org] that turns the self-presentation of the WTO right side up: an inattentive conference assistant enters the words WTO into a search engine - and a representative of the Yes Men can appear as a representative for the World Trade Organization at a congress for international law [www.theyesmen.org], transforming the conference into a slapstick scenario. We encounter the same Yes Men shortly after the protests in Prague, costumed as "Captain Euro" at a demo against repression and arrests in front of the Czech consulate, but also at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, at art events in Barcelona, Vienna or London - is it all an artistic end in itself or political action? The campaign against the German deportation airline Lufthansa [www.deportation-alliance.com] starts with a poster exhibition ("Deportation Class") that attacks the airline's self-presentation and links it with the theme of deportations. This exhibition tours through German art institutions, while the corporation simultaneously attacks the Internet version of the same pictures with furious legal threats. This, too, is an uninhibited way of dealing with the border between art and politics. It is not the question of which of the two fields a project should be attributed to that is interesting, but rather: Does it work? How does one manage to make a fool of a seemingly over-powerful institution or person and possibly even partially force them to take a defensive position?

Communication guerilla differs from traditional political forms of action in that it consciously draws from the density of meanings of images and narrations. We are tired of private security services and the omnipresent purchase obligation, the removal of park benches that forces passers-by into cappuccino bars or to just move on. We know about the privatization of inner cities, the disappearance of public space. But how is it possible to intervene against the apparent automatism of these processes - with an information event? A demonstration? A blockade of the pedestrian zone? Or how would it be, if there were suddenly an obstacle, a break in the Saturday business of the pedestrian zone - not a colorful street theater or exhibition project providing information about the limitations and constraints of privatized urban space, but rather something else that makes it possible to see and experience these constraints, a test arrangement, in which the users of the shopping street are assigned their actual roles, but in an exaggerated form?

The images: a pedestrian zone -- lifestyle shops, cafes, buying, street musicians and idlers, who are discreetly expelled from the square, advertising stocks, black-clothed security at the portals of noble shopping passages ... construction sites .. red and white barriers in the flow of the promenading crowd ... a large square area in the middle of a city square is blocked by red and white ribbons, flanked by security guards in black jeans and white T-shirts. Friendly employees wearing the company logo address passers-by, the same logo is repeated at an information table. Information sheets with a questionnaire about the use of the pedestrian zone are distributed: How often do you come into the city? How much do you expect to spend today? Which method of payment do you prefer? The questionnaires are used to determine permission to cross the area or not. The narration: "We are conducting this survey for the company Bienle, which is contemplating the purchase of the entire Castle Square. We are using this test arrangement to determine the user profile of the area to be purchased, in terms of profitability." [1] What is important is that the picture is right. The barricade is executed precisely, the body language of the security guards radiates uncompromisingness, the company employees operate smoothly and in a friendly manner, but firmly; the corporate identity is thoroughly and professionally styled, all the way from the company logo to the outfit for the "staff". The activists adapt the language of power, the plausible over-identification is implemented through precise and reflected observation, an eye for aesthetic details and a professional way of dealing with materials.

This action was carried out by the politically active artist group 01, but it was not identified as an art action -- except to a few irritated members of the police force, who had obviously not been informed by the "Bienzle Company" ahead of time. The art label was thus employed here only instrumentally as camouflage and protective shield. For the passers-by, the action was an irritating reality resulting in a subjective experience of the fact of the privatization process in their city, forcing them to take a position more than an information or protest event would have done. It is also imaginable that a project like this could be conducted in the framework of an art festival -- there, however, the predominant framework of interpretation for outside observers would not have been "privatization" or "intervention in the freedom of movement", but rather "art": the same project, conducted within the boundaries of an art space, produces tame artistic social criticism, not communication guerilla. It is also imaginable that a project like this could be exhibited in a museum -- the art business' current greed for contact with "authentic" actors makes it possible. [2] The Yes Men subsequently exhibited their appearance as "Captain Euro" as a video installation at worldinformation.org in Vienna [www.theyesmen.org]. At the same event, a technical device for checking irises regulated the turnstile at the entrance. Here criticism of the surveillance possibilities of the control society take the form of technical playfulness in keeping with the site of the presentation, the Technical Museum. The potential of an action depends on the context, this determines which codes the audience uses to read it.

Communication guerilla pursues a political concern. It attempts to criticize the rules of normality by creating irritations and ambiguities, thus enabling new ways of reading familiar images and signs. The criticism of naturalized power structures first requires making these visible -- and they become visible where the smooth functioning of the sign systems and interpretation mechanisms starts to get stuck. This is hardly possible, however, within the framework of art operations: the general interpretation framework of "art" has the effect of a kind of lubrication that makes it possible for the viewer to easily swallow even the crudest provocation. Radically slandering the established art scene, for example, has long since been legitimized and thus defused as a modus of the artistic avant-garde. Mixing up images and signs by employing artistic techniques first becomes exciting, when it leaves the integrating framework of art behind.

"Is it not better to distort the signs than to destroy them?" Roland Barthes once asked. The militant leftist scene works hard at signs, too, their actions are also symbolic -- yet here it is a matter of the gesture of a military attack, of the destruction of signs: paving stones into the windows of banks, the obligatory trashing of a McDonalds branch, the battle with robo-cops. The significance of this praxis of signs with its staging of battle, revolts, tumults, should not be underestimated. It is not without reason that the Seattle riot functions as a sign, simultaneously symbolizing and catalyzing the emergence of a new global movement. The media treatment of this riot catapulted the image of a militant resistance against the abstract lack of alternatives of the capitalist economy into the eye of the public. This image -- a war machine opposing the abstract war machine of global capital -- developed a huge mobilizing impact. At the same time, though, militant resistance is always already integrated in the mythology of parliamentary western democracy. In the bourgeois media, the images dwindle into an illustration of basic democratic principles: the ones to "blame" for the street battles are a few wicked hooligans, who functionalize the peaceful, colorful protest for their own purposes. The "Black Block" does not uphold the basic rules of non-violent protest, the recognition of private property, the democratic game rules, and must therefore be restrained with a massive police presence. This figure of argumentation legitimizes not only the violent appearance of state power, but also the right of the globalization managers to continue to make their decisions without public scrutiny.

However, the example of global protests can also be used to show the effectiveness of the tactical distortion of signs. At the protests against the World Bank meeting in Prague in September 2000, the hip-swinging fairies of the "Pink Block" not only managed to penetrate into the symbolic "heart of the beast" (the conference center of the World Bank meeting) -- which neither the Tute Bianche in their cushioned overalls, nor the black-clothed warriors of the Black Block had succeeded in doing -- in addition, they also created images that took the icon of the stone-throwing street fighter against the police to the point of absurdity. The warrior is a fighting woman in pink, she is a samba dancer. A year later in Genoa, it was martians, UFOs, the U-NO men and women soldiers of the PublixTheatreCaravan, bikini girls, tire men, and others that distorted and alienated the firmly fixed image of what a radical demonstration is supposed to look like and how it is to act.

We have the feeling that the self-image of many militant activists holds the danger of thinking of oneself as separate from the rest of society: an activist subculture is emerging with its own signs, its own values, and its own patterns of legitimization. Resistance derives its legitimacy from the authenticity of the use of one's own body, the intensity of one's commitment. There are lamentations about the isolation of the activist ghetto, but at the same time, the "purity" of one's own side is anxiously maintained, the rhetoric of confrontation and the apocalyptic millenarianism of the activists camp clearly separates it from mainstream society. This separation also finds expression in the turbulent discussions about contacts with the mainstream media, or in the laboriousness of attempts to make contact with the neighborhood of squatted houses. Despite occasional collaboration, one is distrustful not only of the often narcissist art world, but also of the "geeks", the cyberactivists of the 90s, who flocked around events like the "next 5 minutes" congress in Amsterdam. A playful way of dealing with signs, images and meanings, allowing for hybridity and complexity, could contribute to partially breaking down these demarcations. In an optimistic scenario, the paradoxical meeting of two marginal social fields, the art scene and polit-activism, could lead to the emergence of a transversal art-polit-activism that overcomes the boundaries and limitations of the respective scenes. In October 2000, the Museum for Contemporary Art in Barcelona held a series of curated workshops on the theme of "Direct Action as one of the Fine Arts", which evolved into a two-week meeting of activists [www.lasagencias.net]. Watched at first distrustfully by many "veteran" activists, this event resulted in several political projects that are still active today -- ninguna es ilegal organized a border camp in 2001 at the southern tip of Spain [www.sindominio.net/ninguna], where thousands of African refugees arrive; indymedia Barcelona [barcelona.indymedia.org] was founded, and a coalition was formed that took part with graphical and theatrical means in the protests against the planned and then canceled World Bank meeting. It is not a coincidence that communication guerilla forms and techniques are often used with projects that arise on occasions like this, forms that can stimulate the pleasurable appropriation of artistic methods in political work as well as the politically effective employment of artistic potentials.

The environment of the global protests creates a social space of its own in the form of an activist subculture that transgresses national borders and is constituted through manifold digital and physical networks. Sometimes it seems that the networking itself and the mastery of its tools are (still) the most important result of this movement. The "art scene" provides a room on the side in this social space, too. People meet again -- not only at the next global protest, but also at biennales and film festivals, at Documenta and Ars Electronica. The interaction between art and political scenes is still intermittent, communicated through a few hyperactivists oscillating between art and politics. A stronger interaction, which could become the starting point for a broader transversal praxis, still needs to be developed in concrete projects. The art scene's current interest in "real social life" can provide an impetus for this; the possibilities for succeeding in the art market with resistive practices will also play a role. Whether or not more will come of this remains to be seen.


Activism, Everyday, Work

The media image of the activist, as well as his self-image (for the person represented is usually a "he") reduce the activist to the practice of action. It seems as though these people do nothing else but occupy buildings and organize demonstrations -- just as the artist is also reduced to his projects and products in the public view. Both, however, the artist and the activist, are normally quite different. They work in agriculture or in construction, as seasonal laborers, professional charity donation collectors, in social work, or as part-time employees in offices and call-centers; they teach at language schools, adult education centers or universities. Not least of all, they work in the field of new media -- graphics and web design, network administrators, computer specialists. They move in the working world and simultaneously in an activist world that has its own calendar, its own temporal and spatial order. This is nothing new (the artist Franz Kafka was an administrative employee, too); what is new though, in our opinion, is the increasing integration of knowledge, lifestyle and resources from both areas.

Just as it is still customary in some trades to take tools during the lunch break in production for one's own needs, office copy machines are used for the production of flyers, information material is run through the company postage machine. Various indymedia sites are largely updated from places of work. On the other hand, many media workers have their means of production, like computers and video cameras, at home and can use them not only for work, but also for political actions. Most of all, though, the knowledge of the dominant discourse and the predominant aesthetics constantly glides from one area to another, can be used both for reproduction and for criticism of existing power relationships.

Here the border-crossing goes in both directions: knowledge about how to arrange texts that activist desktop-publishers acquire through faking city information brochures or official letterheads, is also useful for paid commissioned work. Those who conversely reproduce the design and ideological structures of the advertising world day after day in their professional everyday life, can turn the statement of advertising aesthetics upside-down with just a little twist in a successful fake. The knowledge of the "language of power" that is required in professional life can be turned into resistance and into subversion at any time. For communication guerillas, this knowledge is central. One of the reasons why the campaign against the deportation airline Lufthansa was so successful was because the form of professional self-representation was imitated so perfectly, while the meaning was turned into its opposite through consistent exaggeration - from Lufthansa's "we fly you there" to the " we fly you out" of the Deportation Class.

For communication guerillas, it is not enough to know the adversary -- the point is to master the forms and signs that constitute "the language of power", so to speak, ourselves. Communication guerill@s are not spies or undercover agents in the working world or the world of bourgeois consensus. In their life praxis, they are often part of it, accepting roles as teachers or colleagues, assuming functions in the capitalist system. Yet it is precisely in this way that the oscillation between radical criticism and camouflage becomes possible. The recipient-journalists and their readers, potential customers, everyone confronted with the advertising material of the Deportation Class, are automatically drawn into the contradictions of the capitalist system and its western humanistic ideology: Is Deportation Class really a cynical special offer from Lufthansa for cheap seats on deportation flights? Or is it in fact a particularly successful criticism of their deportation practice? If the recipient decides on the first reading, then they are confronted with the question of whether this entails money-making at the expense of human dignity or a legitimate marketing instrument. If they see through the Deportation Class as a fake, then they cannot simply dismiss it as an absurd slander -- it is too close to the logic of the narration of the real Lufthansa ideology. Regardless of which reading the recipient decides to take, once the questions are posed, they stick to Lufthansa. In this way, soiling an image breaks open what is widely accepted and taken for granted in the capitalist system, thus opening up an unmediated view of contradictions between reality and representation.

The communication guerilla must have no fear of contact: she has to dare to completely enter into the logic of the detested dominant discourse, in order to turn it around from the inside. And he has to trust in the effectiveness of signs, not give in to the temptation to offer explanatory information after all and thus dropping the mask. In the course of the warring escapades of the German SPD government, which was also supported by the Greens, a poster turned up with the familiar dying soldier ("Why?") [www.contrast.org/KG]. A slight distortion turned the "Why?" into "Why not?". The logos of the SPD and the Greens at the lower edge of the poster suggested that the poster could be a publication from these parties -- although the knowledgeable reader of signs understands very well that political parties would never state the cynicism of their politics that openly. Through the choice and montage of the images, the poster clearly said: a cynical "Why not?" is the attitude of these parties, whether they admit it or not. With the addition of a reproachful text, however, this intervention would have left the space of the communication guerilla to become propaganda/agitation. Its function would have been an explanation with a grin factor, rather than irritation, which forces reflection in the best case.


Globalization

There is no doubt about it: we are in the midst of globalization, particularly as activists. The skills that are practiced with the protests of the often so-called anti-globalizers, are exactly the ones that every corporate boss would wish for in his employees: capability for teamwork in time-limited projects together with previously unknown colleagues. Flexibility, cultural competence, knowledge of foreign languages. Flat hierarchies, optimum use of limited resources, ability to improvise. Mastery of digital communication tools. Speed, full dedication. Transversality here too -- the only question is, to which end?

If it is true that we find ourselves in the midst of a transition to the control society, then in the future it could be even more important to hone our subversive potential at the molecular level, to make it even more targeted. In the emerging Empire, it will become even less possible for us to direct our displeasure to individual governments -- the game with images and representations will become increasingly important in the networked parts of the world, but without a decrease in the importance of vehement actions in public space. It is a matter of a political positioning that is not limited to theoretical analysis in the terms of sociology and cultural theory, but rather which also thinks in images and knows how to use sign systems. Fury and irritation and the desire to flip off power often lead more effectively than rational reflection to recognizing the cracks and contradictions in dominant discourse. Yet the communication guerilla does not stand still in a self-referential temporary confusion -- she continues to link it with argumentation in bourgeois and own media, is connected to counter-public spheres and refers to the themes and concerns of social movements. In recent years, these movements have taken over new technologies, from mobile phones to the use (and faking) of increasingly interactive web sites and videos, to live streaming.

Information technologies, useful instruments of the control society, can be subversively turned around, activists can make use of the skills they acquire in their paid work for other purposes as well. Conversely, the ways of working that they learn in the scene world can also be useful to them in the neoliberal, flexibilized everyday world of work. Time-limited, project-oriented teamwork and spatial flexibility are only two examples from many. Particularly in a societal formation, in which signs, branding, images are increasingly important not only in the business world, but also for governments and multinational structures such as the WHO or the G8, the communication guerilla can carry out efficient attacks. The world of activism is not located outside the globalization process, the transition from the age of bourgeois democracies to something else, something not yet defined. It is part of this -- and it is in the intimate knowledge of the structures to be fought that its potential to at least question their legitimacy is found -- even if the next grand narrative is yet to come.


Translated by Aileen Derieg


[1] cf. S. Brünzels, Dos ejercicios tacticos para hacerse con el espacio publico, in: Modos de Hacer, ed. P. Blanco et. al., Ediciones Universitad de Salamanca 2001
[2] Although an art project by "Everyone is an Expert" at the Turin Biennale in Italy was thrown out after publicly criticizing Berlusconi, cf. www.expertbase.net

above copied from: http://republicart.net/disc/artsabotage/afrikagruppe01_en.htm

hac

Female Extension net.art work by Cornelia Sollfrank

press release, Sept.12,1997

EXTENSION, the first net.art competition has been hacked

127 contributions to the world's first competition for internet art have not been produced by artists but by a computer program.

"280 registrations--two thirds of them are women", says a press release launched by Kunsthalle Hamburg at 3rd of July, 1997, while the net.art competition EXTENSION still was in progress. The news were picked up and disseminated by several on- and offline magazins and newspapers like 'Morgenpost', and 'Bunte online'.

But the museum as well as the press fell victim to a hack: In fact, 127 of the contributions to the competition do not originate from artists but from a computer program. It was the Hamburg-based net.artist Cornelia Sollfrank who has developed and used the program in order to automatically generate net.art websites. For her intervention to the competition, Sollfrank has invented hundreds of fictitious female net.artists, equipped them with names, addresses, and even functioning e-mail addresses. Then she registered the fresh artists to the competition, and after she had received the passwords to send in the material for the competition, she made use of the computer program which would generate the art. The sent in websites consisted of randomly recombined webpages which a defined serach engine had collected before.

Besides the increased chance of winning one of the prices, the artist tried to take the theme of the competition particularly serious: "Internet as material and object".

What does the gender model of male/female mean on the net? Is it possible to check if there's a male or a female person behind an e-mail address? Is the number of virtual identities into which a net.artist can split up limited? FEMALE EXTENSION does ask these and many more questions.

But first of all FEMALE EXTENSION demonstrated that art on the internet can mean much more than just creating websites. It is about picking the technological dispostives of the net as a theme, and working with them as the material of art.

From the Artist's stie:

EXTENSION

In February of 1997 the Galerie der Gegenwart (Gallery of Contemporary Art) of the Hamburger Kunsthalle (Hamburg Art Museum) was the first museum in the world to announce a net art competition. The event was supported by Philips, the German news magazine, SPIEGEL, and their website, SPIEGEL ONLINE. The name of this competition was EXTENSION, and was meant to be an extension of the museum into virtual space. The competition posed the question of how traditional tasks of the museum, collecting, preserving, mediating, and researching, could be applied to art on the internet.

The call for contributions to EXTENSION asked explicitly not for art on the net, but for net art. Traditional works of art should not be represented in digital format, but artistic works that applied familiar art concepts, such as "material" and "object" to the internet. The Gallery of Contemporary Art entered a new territory with this experiment, and at the same time gained the attention of a world-wide public.

The announcement of EXTENSION met the Zeitgeist of the year 1997. The established art world had started to become interested in this new art form and tried to deal with it more or less appropriately. Nobody wanted to miss the hype, everybody wanted to take advantage of the potential publicity and -- in the best case -- be the discoverer and supporter of a new art form. A subcultural phenomenon was about to be turned into high art. But still, the lack of a market potential of this new art form posed great problems for the art world. Net art had to conform to the needs of the market, or the art world had to change.

Typical for this development is the lack of competence and the insecurity of those who show, curate, categorize and judge net art. To deal adequately with net art, those experts who are trained in traditional art, need an understanding of the new medium which is based on practical experience. Without this understanding, the characteristics of net art fall victim to the aesthetic and economic considerations of the curators. This happened at Documenta X, where "net art" was presented predominantly without any connection to the net.

In the case of EXTENSION, it was planned to upload the projects of the artists onto the server of the art museum. What would remain of works based on communication, exchange and interaction with the user and are in a permanent process of change, or with works linked to other sites? In addition to that, the call for contributions implied that the internet and the World Wide Web were the same, and limited net art to web art. What was left out were works that use other protocols such as e-mail, muds and moos, as well as context systems such as The Thing and t0-netbase.


FEMALE EXTENSION

This problem became particularly clear with my contribution to EXTENSION. I simulated more than 200 international female net artists. Their names were assigned to 7 different nations. Not only did they have complete addresses with phone numbers, but also working e-mail accounts on a number of different servers. I registered these "artists" for the competition and got a password for each of them. The art museum was happy about the large number of contributions, and issued a first press release on July 3rd, 1997: "280 applications - Two thirds are women". A number of print media published this news tidbit, and disseminated the surprise and the joy about the high number of women.

I proceed to produce net art in an appropriate quantity. Using a computer program that collected HTML-material with search engines on the World Wide Web and recombined this data automatically, the net art projects were generated. These projects were uploaded with the names of the "artists" onto the server of the museum. Again the museum expressed great satisfaction in their press release: "On the closing date on June 30th, 120 MegaByte of net art had been submitted. 96 of the artists were from Germany, 81 from the Netherlands, 28 from the US, 27 from Slovenia, 26 from Austria and the rest from GB."

Apart from the higher probability to win a prize with this intervention, I also took "Internet as material and object", the theme of the competition, particularly seriously.

Unfortunately, my attempts were not met by success. I did not get a prize for this automatically generated net art. Even though two thirds of the participants were women, the three money prizes went to male artists.

The jury that consisted of the art historians Prof. Dr. Uwe M. Schneede and Prof. Dr. Dieter Daniels, the artists Dellbrügge & deMoll and Prof. Valie Export, as well as Spiegel editor Rainer Wörtmann had faced a difficult task. They were surprised by the apparently meaningless flood of data and didn't get the idea behind it. On the day the winners were announced, I issued a press release that revealed my contribution. Nobody had discovered my intervention until then.

Credits:
I could have never realized FEMALE EXTENSION on my own. Therefore I would like to thank the network that helped me:
Konrad Becker and Herbert Gnauer (t0.netbase, Wien), Wolfgang Staehle and Gisela Ehrenfried-Staehle (The Thing, New York), Heath Bunting, Rachel Baker and Steve Mynott (irational.org, London), Luka Frelih (ljudmila.org, Ljubljana), Neil de Hoog and Andreas Broeckmann (V2, Rotterdam), Geert Lovink (Digitale Staad Amsterdam), Michael van Eeden (Society for Old and New Media, Amsterdam), Rob Bank and Walter van der Cruijsen (desk, Amsterdam), Barbara Aselmeier (Internationale Stadt Berlin), Tilman Baumgärtel, Karl Heinz Jeron (sero.org, Berlin), Knut Johannsen (surver.net, Hamburg).


CYBERFEMINISMUS

I consider FEMALE EXTENSION as a typical example for CYBERFEMINISM. The term CYBERFEMINISM describes a group of artists, activists and theorists that started to meet the male dominance in cyberspace in an unusual fashion in the last couple of years. We use the potential of the term CYBERFEMINISM that arises from its contradictory and undefined nature. These contradictions didn't develop out of the fusion of CYBER and FEMINISM, but are already inherent in the two terms. The fusion of these two terms creates additional confusion. An important strategy of CYBERFEMINISM is the use of irony. Irony is about humor and seriousness. Only with irony can the contradictory views can be joined. All these diverse approaches are necessary and important and create a productive tension. That's why CYBERFEMINISM is not just a rhetorical strategy, but also a political method.

A new concept of politics is needed. The methods of earlier decades don't work anymore. An expanded concept of politics has to contain the possibility of both paradox and utopia. It has to be in opposition, able to argue from different perspectives at the same time, and at the same time make meaningful political action possible. A concept of politics that simulates politics, while being politically effective at the same time. With this concept of politics, once again, we approach art.

Copied from Female Extension

Hacktivism and Machinic Performance, Jon McKenzie

Early calls for creating electronic forms of social resistance coincidence almost exactly with the emergence of the world wide web. In 1994, Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) published The Electronic Disturbance , which began with this urgent call:

The rules of cultural and political resistance have dramatically changed. The revolution in technology brought about by the rapid development of the computer and video has created a new geography of power relations. […] The new geography is a virtual geography, and the core of political and cultural resistance must assert itself in this electronic space. [1]

That same year, the First International WWW Conference was held in Geneva; Mosaic, precursor of the Netscape Navigator web browser, was only a year old and its usage limited to computer scientists; finally, in 1994 there were scarcely a thousand sites on the web, whereas by 1999, there were over 9 million. [2] Today, the web has become dominated by e-commerce sites, while links to the entirety of CAE’s seminal text can be found in the resource section of www.thehacktivist.com, a site dedicated solely to facilitating electronic disturbances.

Over the past several years, I have been studying cases of hacktivism or electronic civil disobedience. ‘Hacktivism’ refers to the emergence of political activism within digital environments, primarily but not exclusively, the Internet. My goal has been to theorise the performance of hacktivism, thus connecting my study of electronic civil disobedience to my ongoing performance research. This research, however, extends beyond the kind of performance most familiar to artists and cultural theorists. That is, while I’m interested in cultural performances such as performance art and political theatre, I’ve also focused on the relationships between cultural performance and two other types of performance, such as those found in ‘high performance’ technologies and ‘peak performance’ organisations. And beyond these three performances (cultural, organisational, and technological), I’m most interested in performance as the defining modality of power in contemporary society. [3]

I’ll speak more about these two areas of research in a moment, but let me begin in the middle, as it were, by discussing ‘machinic performance’, a concept I will use to connect the two areas. I must ask for the reader’s patience here, as I’ll be using the terms ‘machine’ and ‘performance’ in fairly unusual ways.

What is machinic performance? In a short text called ‘Balance-Sheet Program for Desiring-Machines’, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari give an account of something they call the ‘machinic’. Deleuze and Guattari write that the

object is no longer to compare humans and machines in order to evaluate the correspondences, the extensions, the possible or impossible substitutions of the one for the other, but to bring them into communication in order to show how humans are a component part of the machine, or combine with something else to constitute a machine. The other thing can be a tool, or even an animal, or other humans. [4]

Because the machinic cuts across people and mechanisms, the authors distinguish it from the mechanical and the technological per se. A horse, a rider, and a stirrup formed a powerful machine in the age of Gengis Khan; in the modern era, a machine made of iron ore, workers and factories defined the industrial age. In both cases, specific machines came to co-ordinate a wide range of existence. Today, the machinic can perhaps best be seen in interface design and the study of socio-technical systems. In both these areas, the stress lies not so much in adapting technologies to humans or humans to technologies, but rather in creating performances that stretch across different systems.

I will define machinic performances as arising whenever different processes ‘recur’ or communicate across diverse systems, thereby creating performances that escape subjective control and even objective analysis. Machinic performances do not occur at discrete performative sites; instead, their occurrence is distributed. They happen at multiple sites through multiple agents, both human and technological. Machinic performances pose a real challenge to study, for to research a machinic performance is perhaps to become part of it. However, there are several paradigms of performance research we can draw upon to help us.

Here I must try to condense my research into the relation of cultural, organisational, and technological performance. Let me begin with cultural performance, which has been studied for decades by Performance Studies scholars. Forms of cultural performance include theatre, ritual, performance art, popular entertainment and folklore, all of which centre around human performance. Cultural performances actualise or embody larger symbolic systems at particular times and places. Though cultural performances can support or maintain such symbolic systems, Performance Studies scholars tend to emphasise their transgressive or subversive potential, their ability to seize symbolic elements from their normative systems, critique and rearrange them, and then reinsert them back into society.

Now, it was with some surprise, and then growing amazement, that I discovered another paradigm of human performance. I refer here to organisational performance, which includes the work performed by individual labourers, small work teams, and even entire institutions. On an intimate level, employees are routinely subjected to annual performance reviews of their work. On a larger scale, the Clinton administration in 1993 established the National Performance Review, a government-wide evaluation of organisational efficiency and waste. Elsewhere, I’ve shown that ‘Performance Management’ represents a paradigm away from Taylorism or Scientific Management; while the former stressed rationality and corporate mono-culturalism, the latter stresses creativity and cultural diversity. [5] Nonetheless, in contrast to the transgressivity of cultural performances, organisational performances obviously tend to be highly normative.

For a long time I called this paradigm of organisational performance ‘high performance’.[6] But gradually I came to realise that the term ‘high performance’ actually originated in yet another paradigm of research, that of technological performance. In the 1950s, ‘high performance’ became a common criteria used to evaluate materials and systems in the military and aerospace industries. In short, research of technological performance took off during the Cold War; its launch pad was America’s military-industrial-academic complex, the triangle of military agencies, industry contractors, and research universities.[7] Today, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know about high performance: there are high performance cars, computers, and stereo systems. Indeed, most consumer appliances come with brochures detailing the devices’ ‘performance specifications’.

By combining the often divergent perspectives of cultural, organisational and technological performance, we can get other angles on this thing I’m calling ‘machinic performance’. Divergent perspectives are needed because machinic performances involve conflicting grids of power. From my research, I’ve identified three distinct challenges of performative power:

1. the challenge of efficacy , the ability of cultural performances to maintain or transform social structures;

2. the challenge of efficiency , the ‘minimaxing’ of organisational inputs and outputs; and finally

3. the challenge of effectiveness , the optimising of technological functionalities (such as speed, accuracy, weight etc.)

With machinic performances, these demands for efficacy, efficiency and effectiveness can and regularly do come into conflict. I realised this when I discovered The Challenger Launch Decision , a landmark study of the 1986 shuttle disaster, written by sociologist Diane Vaughan.

What’s striking about Vaughan’s study is that it focuses on three different types of imperatives that influenced the fateful decision to launch the shuttle. Significantly, Vaughan calls these imperatives ‘performance pressures’. These performance pressures are:

1. the political pressures of maintaining NASA’s image in Congress, in the country, and around the entire world;

2. the organisational pressures exerted by the NASA hierarchy; and

3. the technical pressures presented by the O-rings themselves. [8]

We can easily recognise the imperatives of efficacy, efficiency and effectiveness within the three pressures described by Vaughan. Organisationally, technologically and culturally, the entire Challenger mission was characterised by multiple and conflicting demands to perform—or else.

Challenger constitutes a machinic performance. Again, machinic performances involve multiple agents and multiple performative sites. They set up recurrent communication between diverse systems, and they unfold under multiple performance pressures. Now that we have some insight into machinic performances, let me turn to the other term in my title, ‘hacktivism’, and do so by looking at a high-stakes case of machinic performance.

In late November, 1999, an online theatre of war was gearing up. I refer here to TOYWAR, an incident of electronic civil disobedience that pitted an online European art group called ‘etoy’ against an online American toy company called ‘eToys’. The background is this: the art group etoy had been around since 1994; its website etoy.com since 1995. The art group is known for its performance and digital projects, having won a prestigious Ars Electronica prize in 1996. On the other side, the toy company started in 1996 and launched its site, etoys.com, in 1997. It went public in 1999, and by November of that year its stock sold around $60/share, giving it a total market capitalisation worth about $6 billion. Though they shared very similar names and website addresses, etoy and eToys lived in peaceful co-existence until the summer of 1999, when a young boy visited the art site thinking it was the e-commerce site. Trying to open an animation file, he got a message that said: ‘get the fucking Flash plug-in’. He asked his family what this meant. Soon after, his irate grandfather contacted the toy company demanding an explanation. The toy company in turn contacted the art group and tried unsuccessfully to purchase the domain name. A legal battle ensued, with the toy company suing etoy for trademark violations in September. At the end of November, the art group also received a court injunction from the Los Angeles Superior Court, fining it $10,000 a day as long as etoy.com remained up. The artists immediately closed down the url and moved the site to another address.

This was the beginning of TOYWAR. Fighting back against the strong-arm practices of the toy company, etoy was joined by RTMark and the Electronic Disturbance Theatre. RTMark is an online clearinghouse for anti-corporate activism, while the Electronic Disturbance Theatre or EDT has created software for conducting ‘virtual sit-ins’ using common web-browsers. It’s important to note here that while common ‘hackers’ (or ‘crackers’, as programming hackers like to call them) take aim at technical systems, the hacktivist’s primary goal is to hack the social groups attached to specific systems

Over the next two months, etoy, RTMark, and EDT used the Internet to protest the actions of the eToys corporation. They employed tactics drawn from traditional civil disobedience, converting them into the 1s and 0s of digital technologies. RTMark created an etoy,FUND, allowing online users to ‘invest’ or donate money to assist the artists. Email campaigns were launched to eToys’ investors and officials, as well as the online and print press. Small traditional protests took place outside offices and courthouses, but the most effective tactic was the virtual sit that took place from 15-25 December. At the height of the holiday season, people around the world could log on to EDT’s site at specified times to participate in a ‘denial of service’ attack on eToys’ web site. The attack consisted of repeating requesting non-existent files from the eToys’ server. As a ‘pure’ e-commerce company, the site was the toy firm’s only store, so tying up its web traffic effectively shut down the business for hours every day for ten consecutive days.

The toy company countered by persuading service providers to cut off etoy’s email and to shut down the Electronic Disturbance Theatre’s website. However, EDT had set up mirror sites around the world, keeping the virtual sit-in going. In the end, the art group prevailed. Their site is back up, the lawsuit was dropped, and the injunction lifted. The toy company even agreed to pay the legal fees of the artists. In this hacktivist battle between a small art group and a big e-commerce company, the little guy won and big business lost. From late November to late December of 1999, eToys lost around $4 billion in market capitalisation. Whether all or even most of this loss was due to TOYWAR is debatable, but there’s little doubt it had some effect. (Amidst the subsequent crash of the dot.com economy, eToys laid off its entire workforce, and in February 2001, the toy company declared it would officially close down that April.)

I’d like to look at both eToys and etoy as machinic performances, starting with the toy company. E-commerce sites have been called ’selling systems’, and etoys.com was a prime example.[9] Using digital technologies, it brought together buyers and sellers and sought to create unique ‘user experiences’. It allowed users to browse through products, learn about the organisation, and make purchases—all online. If someone wanted to, they could even invest in eToys stock. Though we might think the art site is totally different, there are some striking similarities. The etoy.com site also uses digital technologies to design unique online experiences between buyers and sellers. It allows users to browse through etoy.PRODUCTS, learn about the etoy.BUSINESSPLAN, and make purchases online. If someone wants to, they can even invest in etoy.SHARES.

One thing that has struck me in my research of machinic performance is how technological, organisational, and cultural performances can embed themselves within one another, how the values of efficacy, efficiency, and effectiveness can enter into different arrangements. This is precisely where the machinic performances of etoy and eToys differ. With eToys, organisational goals of efficiency/profitability guide the underlying business plan, the co-ordination of capital, labour and resources necessary for conducting toy sales over the web. Values of technological effectiveness guide the building of back-end servers and databases. On the front end, cultural values of creativity and expression are mobilised through marketing, branding and interface design techniques that create ’significant user experiences’ between customers and toy company.

A very different arrangement is at work with the art group etoy. Here cultural values of creativity and expression are embodied in music files and graphical artwork, as well as documents of performance events. Values of technical effectiveness and organisational efficiency are certainly parodied and mocked; but at the same time they are effectively and efficiently deployed through these very parodies. That etoy has a website at all attests the group’s investment in technological effectiveness, and despite their parodying of bureaucracy’s more sinister effects, the success of etoy in mounting a worldwide act of hacktivism shows their organisational savvy. The art group creates ’significant user experiences’, though the users, the experiences and the significance vary radically from those of eToys.

We often hear of the recombinant use of image and text in both modern and postmodern art; what we have here are recombinant performances produced by artists and business people alike. In the information/service economy, companies are increasingly turning to cultural performance for models of collaboration and for building and maintaining their customer bases. At the same time, artist and activist groups have known for a long time that small and large scale collaborations can benefit from organisational theory. We can think here of Meyerhold’s use of Scientific Management to invent a revolutionary theatre of ‘biomechanics’ in the early twentieth century.[10] Likewise, in such hacktivist groups as RTMark and EDT, organizational processes are utilized even as they are parodied and critiqued. Etoy and eToys can thus be understood as two machinic performances. Both extend across social and technical spheres, but each consists of radically different arrangements of performative values. With eToys, cultural and technological concerns serve organisational goals. Artists and writers, programmers and engineers work almost exclusively for the goal of making profits. With etoy, organisational and technological concerns serve broader cultural goals: to make art that challenges the world of business and technology by retooling the very practices of business and technology. These two machines collided, however, when their performances were short-circuited by a youngster surfing the web. The result was identity crisis, brand confusion, experience overload. The two performances merged, and for a time, formed an even greater machine: TOYWAR.[11]

I want to conclude by looking at hacktivism and machinic performance from yet another angle. I began by suggesting that two areas where the machinic was most visible are interface design and the study of socio-technical systems. In new media, interface design primarily concerns discrete human-computer interactions, such as occurs in front of an ATM machine or on a web page. In my interface design courses, we focus on how the user experience is shaped by the design and architecture of information. The machinic performance is precisely the interaction between an individual and a PC or other device, each providing the other with information, inputs, and outputs. From another perspective, however, we can say that all human-computer interactions are actually close-ups of larger socio-technical systems. It’s not simply one person standing at an ATM machine: it’s a customer base interacting with a financial institution, or even a whole client sector interacting with a multinational banking industry. The study of socio-technical systems can be found in the field of science studies or the sociology of technologies. Vaughan’s Challenger Launch Decision is one such study, as is Bruno Latour’s ARAMIS or the Love of Technology and Donald MacKenzie’s Inventing Accuracy . The former is a study of a defunct transporation system; the latter a sociology of guided nuclear missiles.[12] Socio-technical systems perform machinically: they entail communication across diverse structures and processes, and their ‘events’ are not confined to discrete times and places, but are instead distributed across many performative sites.

But Deleuze and Guattari, to return to the text I cited earlier, also distinguish ’social technical machines’ from ‘desiring-machines’. For them, the difference between the two is not one of scale. Socio-technical machines can’t be reduced to large machines or machines used by large number of people. Nor can desiring-machines be reduced to gadgets or machines used only by small groups. Furthermore, socio-technical machines cannot be characterised as ‘practical’ and desiring-machines as ‘impractical’ or simply whimsical. Why not? Because socio-technical and desiring machines are the same machines —or rather, they are the same machines performing under different conditions. Deleuze and Guattari write:

Desiring-machines are not in our heads, in our imagination, they are inside the social and technical machines themselves . Our relationship with machines is not a relationship of invention or of imitation; we are not the cerebral fathers, nor the disciplined sons of the machine. It is a relationship of peopling: we populate the social technical machines with desiring-machines, and we have no alternative. We are obliged to say at the same time: social technical machines are only conglomerates of desiring-machines under molar conditions that are historically determined; desiring-machines are social and technical machines restored to their determinant molecular conditions.[13]

By molar conditions, Deleuze and Guattari mean that socio-technical machines tend to be rigid, centralised, and governed by binary oppositions, whereas molecular desiring-machines are supple, decentralised, and attuned to much more subtle differences.

Now, before we quickly condemn socio-technical machines as machinic performances of power and jump to champion desiring-machines as performances of resistance and liberation, we should realise that the difference between socio-technical and desiring machines points to the difference between two types of power. It’s the difference, say, between the official power structure of an organisation and the informal power alliances found within that very same institution. It’s the difference between what an organisational chart shows and what goes on in the hallways and backrooms. In A Thousand Plateaus , Deleuze and Guattari thus distinguish between macropolitics and micropolitics, just as they distinguish between State fascism and microfascisms.[14] Macropolitics are found in socio-technical machines, micropolitics in desiring-machines.

What about hacktivism? What is its relationship to socio-technical and desiring machines? Again, it would be all too easy, indeed, all too human, to see hacktivist groups as small desiring-machines battling against large socio-technical systems. There’s little doubt that hacktivism is most often aimed at socio-technical systems, but normative desiring-machines pose just as serious a risk. Not only are the normative desiring machines within socio-technical systems very hard to identify without extensive fieldwork, but they can also spring up within hacktivist groups themselves.

I’ve just introduced the concept of ‘normative desiring-machines’ because I think the machinic performance of hacktivism strive to be mutant desiring-machines, machines that connect different spheres of knowledge and practice. Critical Art Ensemble writes that in an activist cell,

the schism between knowledge and technical ability […] must be closed. A shared political perspective should be the glue that binds the parts […]. Avoid consensus through similarity of skills, since in order to be useful, different skills must be represented. Activist, theorist, artist, hacker, and even a lawyer, would be a good combination of talents—knowledge and practice should mix. And one shouldn’t dismiss the bureaucrat either, for ‘the authoritarian fetish for efficiency is an ally that cannot be underestimated.[15]

From this perspective, the machinic performance of hacktivist groups involves creating mutant desiring machines that cut across different technological and social systems. The challenge lies in forging alliances, not so much against socio-technical machines, but within them, seeking out and making connections with mutant elements already at work within them, while at the same time guarding against the microfacsisms that inhabit activist groups of the Right and even, at times, the Left.

Jon McKenzie is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he teaches courses in performance studies and civil disobedience. His works include Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (Routledge 2001), the essays “Democracy’s Performance,” “Laurie Anderson for Dummies,” and “Towards a Sociopoetics of Interface Design: etoy, etoys, and TOYWAR,” and a 1996 broadcast commemoration of the 1986 shuttle disaster titled “CINC: A Challenger Radio Drama.” Jon’s texts have been translated into Croatian, French, German, Japanese, Polish, and Portugese.

Endnotes

(Note: a version of this text was delivered at the colloquium Performative Sites: Intersecting Art, Technology and the Body , held at Penn State University, USA in October 2000. It is published for the first time here.)

[1] Critical Art Ensemble. The Electronic Disturbance (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1994),

3. Though this small manifesto, known as TED to many of its readers, was published a

decade ago, it seems a century has past—and indeed one has. Since TED ’s publication,

the World Wide Web has emerged; the dot.com and IT boom came and then really went boom; the Enron and Arthur Andersen scandals were exposed; al Qaeda attacked the US, which in turn invaded Afghanistan and Iraq; the US Congress passed the USA PATRIOT Act and, though Act II has stalled, its component parts are entering into effect through non-legislative means; George W. Bush has been re-elected; the Asian tsunami has taken the lives of hundreds of thousands. The work of CAE has evolved, shifting to another area of critical concern, bio-engineering. Here the group has recently run headlong into what one might call ‘hysterrorism’, a certain US hysteria over terrorism. The details of this storyread like a Kafka parable. One day, CAE co-founder Steve Kurtz awakes to find that his wife Hope has passed away in their Buffalo, New York, home. He calls for an ambulance, and upon arrival, the EMS personnel notice lab equipment, equipment used by CAE in its bio-art installations. It is quickly determined that Hope has died from cardiac arrest, but authorities call in the FBI and a HAZMAT (hazardous material) team, while the local news media spin stories of chemical agents, secret labs and bioterrorism. The house is quarantined, the streets blocked off, and Steve K. is detained by the FBI, who seize his computer, manuscripts and art materials. The HAZMAT team finds a strain of the bacteria Serratia marcescens , commonly used in high school chemistry classes—and used precisely because it is non-lethal and poses no biological threat. The authorities having no legal basis to hold him, Steve K. walks out of detention. Nonetheless, they keep his possessions, convene a grand jury, subpoena witnesses, and eventually bring charges— only not for bio-terrorism or biological weapons, but for mail fraud, the government charging that Steve Kurtz had illegally used the postal system to obtain the bacteria. Paradoxically, this charge of mail fraud, though much less serious, may be much easier to convict on, and the maximum prison sentence is twenty years. At the time of writing—1 February 2005—he is scheduled for a March 2 hearing. For additional information and ways to support Steve Kurtz and CAE, visit the CAE Defense Fund site at http://www.caedefensefund.org>.

[2] Sources: ‘A Little History of the World Wide Web’, World Wide Web Consortium (www.w3.org/History.htm) and ‘Internet Usage and Growth Statistics’, S.E.O. Technologies (www.jhemans.powerup.com.au/internet_statistics/Internet_usage.htm).

[3] The framework of this research can be found in my Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (London: Routledge, 2001).

[4] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. ‘Balance-Sheet Program for Desiring Machines’, trans. Robert Hurley, in Félix Guattari, Chaosophy ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1995), 120-1.

[5] See McKenzie, Perform or Else , Chapter 2.

[6] See McKenzie, ‘Virtual Reality: Performance, Immersion, and the Thaw’, The Drama Review 38:4 (Winter 1994), 83-106.

[7] See William J. Fulbright. ‘The War and Its Effects: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex’, Super-State: Readings in the Military-Industrial Complex, ed. Herbert I. Schiller. (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1970).

[8] Diane Vaughan. The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 220.

[9] See Steve Bodow. ‘Attention Internet Shoppers: E-Commerce and the Structure of the Store in Cyberspace’, in Websights: The Future of Business and Design on the Internet ed. Katherine Nelson (New York: RC Publications, 2000), 134-51.

[10] See Joseph Roach. ‘The Future That Worked’, Theatre 28, no. 2 (1998),19-26.

[11] For additional insight into TOYWAR, see Electronic Disturbance Theatre Hacktivism: Network_Art_Activism ed. Ricardo Dominguez ( Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, forthcoming).

[12] See Bruno Latour, ARAMIS or the Love of Technology , trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996) and Donald MacKenzie, Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990).

[13] Deleuze and Guattari. ‘Balance-Sheet Program’, 137-8.

[14] Deleuze and Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia , vol. II trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 214-15.

[15] Critical Art Ensemble. Electronic Civil Disobedience and Other Unpopular Ideas (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1996), 23, 25.

Above essay reproduced from: http://www.foraysforyou.com/public/performanceparadigm/journal/issue-1/articles/hacktivism-and-machinic-performance/