Network as Material 020613
Concepts
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Interventionism: rather than simply represent a phenomenon, artists intervene in systems
of power to attempt to reframe the debate about the issue at hand
Détournement: intervening in a particular media system to subvert its meaning
(examples, billboard correction)
Tactics vs strategies: strategic acts are more long term, systemic, institutional actions;
where as tactical acts are considered more interventionist, ephemeral short term actions
instigated by those without power
Cultural inscription: used by CLUI, manmade alteration of land
Urban spatial justice: in urban env, where space is limited resource, space is political,
those with power have greater access
Networks
Julian Oliver’s: Newstweek
 Router in innocuous plug
 Tested in Berlin hacker conference
 Hijacked browsers via man in the middle attack
 No one suspected: browser defined reality
 Deployed to multiple nodes throughout Europe
 DIY website
Radical Software Group’s Carnivore;
 Carnivore is the third incarnation of surveillance software such as Etherpeek and
Omnivore created by the FBI to snoop data (email, urls, Instant Messages, etc...) sent
through ISPs.
 Gov says necessary for War on Terror, but issues of constitutionality
 Infringements on personal privacy, free speech, Internet regulation, and the formulation
of Echelon - a parsing agent for suspicious words,
Jonah B-Cohen’s Police State (Carnivore client)
 20 radio controlled police toy vehicles controlled by a Carnivore client looking for
information related to US domenstic terrorism
 Once finds info, assigned to an active police radio code, translated to its binary
equivalent, and sent to the array of police cars as a movement sequence
Social
Krzysztof Wodizco
From: The Interventionists: Users Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life
Art Close Up http://www.wgbh.org/pages/artcloseup/features/content/0504/index.html
Art: 21 http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/wodiczko/index.html
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Born in 1943 in Poland, Wodizco considers himself part of a mass immigration
movement.
Since the late 80’s he’s been developing devices for ‘modern nomads’ such as
homeless people and immigrants that serve as tools for survival and communication.
He coined the term "interrogative design" to describe artworks which give participants a
public forum to speak about painful social issues.
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Describes his designs as vehicles for people who might otherwise by alienated,
traumatized or silenced to communicate with strangers.
He views these devices as prosthetics to extend human potential and address
hardships.
He points out that despite the explosion of communication tech, there is an increasing
breakdown in inter cultural communication
Says technology can be used as a neutral ‘transitional object’ or interface, that
occupies the space between inner and outer.
Wants to design for marginalized people to be able to more easily participate in public
discourse.
Says his designs are for his collaborators who actually utilize the objects or experiences,
the perception of the public is essential as social witness but secondary.
“Some times it takes being useful to make oneself and artist.”
Homeless Vehicle (1988)
 worked with group of NYC homeless to design a survival instrument for urban
nomads.
 The modified shopping cart addresses both livelihood and shelter with facilitates for can
and bottle recycling and a telescoping design to provides temporary shelter.
 It was crucial for this group to be able to move from place to place with all their personal
belongings quickly and efficiently in order to function in the city, so key factor in vehicle’s
design.
 The project was meant to disrupt our image of how homeless should function in the city.
 Highlights the social reality of the situation and challenges responses to it (temp fixed
shelter)
 Wodizco frames the homeless as a consumers of a product, describing them in a manner
a consumer culture might more readily understand.
 Functions as a case study for responses to the situation
Laurie Jo Reynold’s Tamm’s Year 10 prison reform legislative & artistic interventions
 Tamms, a 500-bed supermax facility, keeps its inmates in solitary confinement, where
they spend 23 hours a day in 7-by-12-foot cells. There's no mess hall, library, classroom
or yard at Tamms.
 Closed January 2013
 Many consider solitary confinement consider a violation of the Eighth Amendment, which
forbids "cruel and unusual punishment."
 Great article: http://www.autostraddle.com/when-will-the-us-abolish-cruel-unusual-andinhumane-solitary-confinement-153372
Trevor Paglen & IAA’s Terminal Air, 2007
http://www.appliedautonomy.com/terminalair/index.html
 Trevor Paglen is an experimental geographer out of Berkley
 Recent subject matter has included California’s prison system & unmapped military black
sites
 Terminal Air is a visualization of CIA’s Extraordinary Rendition Program
 Suspected terrorists captured by Western governments extradited to nations more
amenable to torture.
 Carried out using leased equipment & private contractors
 Private planes use civilian airports, so are subject to public record: filtered data to find
flight patterns of planes that were not accounted for
 Dual channel installation visualizes movement of 30 known planes
 Left channel, movement over last 6 years
 Right channel, over last 10 minutes
 New info is displayed by map and announced through ringing telephones
Stephanie Rothenberg & Jeff Crouse’s Invisible Threads / Double Happiness Jeans
http://www.pan-o-matic.com/blog/?page_id=72
 explores the growing intersection between labor, emerging virtual economies and real life
commodities through the creation of a designer jeans sweatshop in the online, 3dimensional world of Second Life (SL).
 Real life has a dressing room with selected models and portal to an SL factory
 SL hires people pays in Linden $’s to work machines
 Results in real life printing from large format printer, require “simple assembly”
Santiago Sierra’s work with undocumented labor
Environmental
Critical Art Ensemble’s Free Range Grain, 2004
 Portable public lab to test foods for more common genetic modifications
 Bring issue of food purity, manufacture and dist into public conversation
 EU passed legislation concerning the labeling and movement of Genetically Modified
(GM) foods in order to inform the public about their origin and manufacture
 In America, manufacturers for GM foods are not required and so do not disclose this info
 CAE therefore skeptical whether EU can uphold its laws to disclose info re large amounts
of corn and soy it imports from US
 Idea of project is to expose discrepancies of market philosophy: on one hand, global
economy where goods thought to move freely, on the other considered possible to
regulate markets and maintain notions of nation / state
Betriz de Costa’s Pidgeonblog , 2004
 Wireless airquality sensors on the backs of homing pidgeons
 Pigeons carried custom-built miniature air pollution sensing devices enabled to send the
collected localized information to an online server
 Pollution levels were visualized and plotted in real-time over Google’s mapping
environment, thus allowing immediate access to the collected information to anyone with
connection to the Internet.
Preemptive Media’s Areas Immediate Reading, 2006
http://www.pm-air.net
 PM explores the social & political ramifications of new technologies, particularly their
impact on individual’s rights
 For AIR, PM prototyped portable kits to measure air quality in lower Manhattan, as well
as create data visualizations of their findings
 Onboard particle testing allowed users to explore their neighborhood for fossil fuel
burning hotspots
 Onboard GPS & compass connected to database of polluters & heavy industries
showed people their distance from other polluters as well
 Information uploaded to a map of the city that was slowly populated
 As series of workshops served as a platform to discuss energy politics and their
impact on environment, health and social groups in specific regions.
 The work was intended to develop a new process oriented, socially based artwork that
integrates the community into the creation and presentation of the work
Leif Percifield’s MFADT thesis dontflush.me
 To help NY residents know when a sewer overflow event is happening so they can
reduce waste water production (flushing toilets)
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Happens when sewer system is overloaded and dumps 27 billion gallons of raw sewage
into NY Harbor every year
Urban Space & Mapping
Mark Shepard’s projects: Sentient City Survival Kit
 A collection of critical design products that explore possibilities for transgression in a near
future city assumed to be structured by deep data as much as physical architecture
 Collection of under(A)ware that vibrates in response to hidden RFID sensors; assuming
that all objects (and people) will be tagged / addressable, and that data sniffing
surveillance will be omnipresent
 Travel mug: assuming all network traffic surveilled by smart filters, bandwidth determined
by personal worth; travel mug for creating ad hoc “dark” mesh networks. Commuters can
share messages tapped out on the side of the mug with other mug holders
 CCD Me Not Umbrella: umbrella studded with infared LED’s visible only to CCD
surveillance camera, meant to mess with object tracking (how?)
Julian Oliver’s The Artvertizer, 2008
 Replaces billboard ads with art, via real time, hand held, augmented reality device
 Works by training program to recognize different ads, to replace them
 Tries to change “read only” proprietary imagery of urban spaces into “read write” platform
for the presentation of critically engaging content
 Neologisms include “product replacement” and “improved reality”
Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), www.clui.org
 Supposidly official org set up to “increase and diffuse” knowledge about how US land is
apportioned, utilized and perceived
 To understand how we interact with land, explore meaning in the forms that we create,
intentionally or otherwise
 Believe that manmade landscape is a “cultural inscription,” that can be read to better
understand who we are and what we are doing
 Fantastic Land Use Data base
#whOWNSpace: http://whownspace.blogspot.com
 urban environments, where space limited resource, spatial is political
 urban spatial justice land disproportionately distributed to those with power, what are
negative effects to those without power
 ownership of space determines: how it is accessed, used, performed;
 More space held by private & commercial entities > less public, effects civic climate
 Question rules they feel are contradictory or unfair, reveal when they are broken
 Advocate or alternative rules and designs that promote civic discourse
 Mapping initiative
Solidarity NYC: http://solidaritynyc.org
 Caroline Woolard
 solidarity economy advance principles of democracy and community through the
exchange of goods, services and knowledge
 often unseen, because not dominant financial practice
 Mapping and analysis project to chart out exchange economy in 5 boroughs
Matthew Wilse’s MFADT thesis Cyclee.org
 Open source, open data backbone to network community of cyclists & visualize their
transport patterns
 Map your use patterns to help visualize bottlnecks and hazards
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Bikes are essential to NYC, but to demand rights, need to be more visible
Cooperative Balloon Mapping for Occupy: http://grassrootsmapping.org/?s=occupy
 Spy kites: wireless cams attached to balloons, stitch images
Surveillance
Institute for Applied Autonomy (IAA) iSee, 2001
http://www.appliedautonomy.com/isee.html
 IAA’s mission to provide technologies which extend the autonomy of human activists
 iSee is a web app that charts the location of closed circuit televisions (CCTV’s) used in
urban environments
 Users can chart “paths of least surveillance,” viewed by as few cameras as possible
Jenny Marketou’s Red Eye Skywalkers, 2008
http://www.jennymarketou.com/works_2008_10.html
 Small wi fi video cameras attached on 99 red weather balloons in Seville airport
 Cameras capture live aerial data
 Balloon security cam and archive images mixed & broadcast live via Internet
 displayed on screens located along departure gates
 Creates spectacle from surveillance, calling attention to what we take for granted
Hasan Elahi, Tracking Transience: The Orwell Project, 2003-9
http://trackingtransience.net
 After an erroneous tip-call to police in 2002, artist Hasan Elahi was subjected to an
intensive FBI investigation
 Cleared after 6 months of investigations, conceived of this self tracking system that tracks
his whereabouts and personal data
 Project questions techniques of interrogation & surveillance, as well as creating an
essential alibi for him in case of further problems
Speech & Sound
Erika Rothenberg’s Freedom of Expression National Monument, 2004
http://erikarothenberg.com/pubproj/freedom.shtml
 For three months in 2004, before the 04 Bush / Kerry presidential election
 Monument occupied Foley Square in Lower Manhattan, btn federal, state, and city
courthouses
 Meant to provide platform for New Yorkers to speak their minds during the election
season
 Both celebratory and ironic about process of being heard in democratic commons
 Evokes struggle to break through mass media and partisan politics where individual
voices tend to diminish
 Part of what some have called ‘unmonument’ movement, instead of memorializing great
men and historical moments for history, it memorializes a civic function
 Previously installed in 1984, issues then voiced were issues of HIV/AIDS and
homelessness in NYC
Christina Kubisch Electrical Walks
http://www.christinakubisch.de/english/install_induktion.htm
 electrically produced sound, electronic magnetic headphones respond to electrical fields
 Magnetic fields, electromagnetic induction
 Interaction between headphones w/magnetic coils and electric wiring
 Trying to give listener access to the a personal space related to their own time and
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motion
Music is experiential, created by motion through space
Theo Watson’s Audio Space, 2005
http://www.theowatson.com/site_docs/work.php?id=15
 3D Spatialized sound, BFADT thesis project,
 Using headset, can leave sound ‘messages’ in space, and hear other people’s sounds
located in space as if they were still there.
Games
Blast Theory: http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/bt/index.php
 A Machine To See With:
http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2011/01/how_i_tried_to_rob_a_bank_toda.html
You’re invited to take the lead role in an imaginary heist movie. Instructions by cell
phone; potential bank robbing a possibility
 Uncle Roy All Around You, 2003: play online in virtual streets and as well as actual city
streets, find Uncle Roy’s office before making year long commitment to stranger.
Capitalizing on unexpected to make city a zone of possibility and new encounters
http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/bt/work_uncleroy.html
ARG’s: McGonigal’s I Love Bees