From "Eyestorm", 4 Jan 2001
Virtual Sit-InsCorporations and political institutions love the way the internet enables direct feedback from the online audience. But, as writer Tilman Baumgärtel reveals, net artists and activists are increasingly taking that power into their own hands.
Poor Mariella Gramaglia, Mauro Biddau and Claudia De Paolis! When, in early October 2000, these three employees of the City of Rome erased a couple of HTML pages from the public server of the city administration, they got something that they didn't expect in return. In late October they discovered, to their surprise, that the inboxes of their official email accounts were playing host to an international net art competition. More than 60 entries to a contest called 'protest=profit' flooded their inboxes over a couple of days. Ranging from text messages to elaborate little websites, all of their works took as their subjects censorship and activism on the internet.
What had the Roman bureaucrats done to deserve this?
A number of Italian artists and political activists held them responsible for what they considered to be a clear example of censorship: the removal of a number of pages from the websites of the two art collectives AvanaNet and The Thing Rome. In one case the bureaucrats took offense to the online-version of the book Lasciate che I Bambini (Let the little children), published anonymously by Luther Blisset, which can be ordered through any Italian bookstore. The other case was the net art piece Dollspace by the Australian artist Francesca da Rimini, which had previously been widely available on the internet and which has won numerous prizes at international art festivals. The reason for its excision: two gif-images that contained fragments of illustrations from a de Sade novel from 1789.
The organizers of The Thing Rome, who had been using the public server of the City of Rome, moved their site to a new server after the city government ignored their protest. Next they teamed up with the Bologna art group 01001011101101.org to organize a virtual protest rally. They sent out emails asking supporters of the case to mail messages of protest to the officials at the Rome City administration and forward a copy to the organizers of the competition. They warned, however, that 'any message of protest should not be heavier than 1.5Mb. This is NOT an email bombing campaign, but a net art competition'. Prize money was provided by the Valencia Museum of Science, which offered to buy the content from the Rome City employees. A jury of international media art experts awarded the money to the participants.
Not that this made any difference to the Roman bureaucrats whose inboxes were filled with artistic web pages. To quote from one describing a 'performance' by Leipzig-based artist Francis Hunger: 'I sit on the computer. I'm searching 18 search-engines for the term Lasciate che I bambini. I'm counting the hits and visit some of the search results that seem to fit my interest. The performance took place in Leipzig, Germany and lasted for 45 minutes on the 23rd of October 2000. The performance is called Do it again! and I dedicate it to all the people who copy and paste.'
'Protest=profit' is the latest and most humorous in a long series of internet-based 'virtual protest' campaigns that have been executed by artists and activists in the last couple of years. In 1993 the American collective Critical Art Ensemble came up with the concept of 'Electronic Civil Disobedience' in their book The Electronic Disturbance. Since then groups such as the Electronic Disturbance Theater, the Electrohippies, and Rtmark have developed methods of protest that rely exclusively on the internet. The tactics of their 'net strikes' range from overloading the servers of institutions, to mail-bombing, to the use of scripts such as FloodNet that 'ping' servers so often that they become impossible to access.
Among the recent victims of this kind of campaign are the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, the WTO and the Mexican Government. While these cyber-subversive activities were labelled as 'internet terrorism' by some, the activists maintain that they don't actually destroy anything, and limit their actions to short periods of time - unlike, for example, the 'Denial of Service' attacks that have been launched by hackers against the websites of such internet companies as Yahoo or Amazon.
The most famous 'virtual sit-in' was executed by the European net art group etoy, which orchestrated a digital 'Toywar' against the American internet toy vendor eToys that had sued them - because of their similar domain name, or web address - for copyright infringement. The instance that has become known as the 'etoy vs eToys case' was later described as the 'most expensive performance in art history'. The server attacks, the many protest websites, and the bad press that the case got in publications such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and on CNN, drove down the stock exchange rate of eToys from almost $70 when the campaign began to $17, when eToys withdrew from the case in January 2000. The stock has stayed at this all-time-low ever since, amid rumors of imminent closure.
The internet's enabling of direct feedback from the online audience is taken advantage of by corporations, political institutions, and net artists alike. Every once in a while this possibility is co-opted by the users to make their voices heard, and artists have been among the first to radically explore these options. As Mariella Gramaglia, Mauro Biddau and Claudia De Paolis of the Rome City administration learned the hard way, interaction with the public can go further than you might wish for.
protest=profit: HTTP://WWW.0100101110101101.ORG/PROTEST=PROFIT
The Thing Rome: www.ecn.org/thingnet
Francesca da Rimini's Dollspace: www.thing.net/~dollyoko
Electronic Disturbance Theatre: http://www.nyu.edu/projects/wray/ecd.html
RTMark: http://rtmark.com
Homepage of Ricardo Dominguez: http://www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/ecd.html
etoy: http://www.etoy.com
Toywar: http://www.toywar.com