....{{{ The Panther
Moderns }}}....
-- continued --
As opposed to VNS Matrix who started their work together in the early 90's, "Mongrel"
would begin forming around 1995. As a result they are still working on projects
as a group. Two of their current Projects are "Natural Selection" and "National
Heritage."
Natural Selection is a critical search engine thats undermines the order of digital
culture via the deconstruction of network racializations. Mongrel takes to task
the lack of mingling of ethnic, class and cultural difference within the structure
of code. The difference that the search engine "Natural Selection" brings to foreground
is one of code bound by a history of eugenics, nationality and essentialist stereotypes
that inform racism.
"Mongrel has hacked a popular Internet search engine. When any searches are made
on that engine for racist material the user gets dumped into a parallel network
of web-sites set up by Mongrel. This parallel network has been made in collaboration
with a vast global network of collaborators. It is the nightmare the whites-only
internet has been waiting for."
Their other project "National Heritage" seems to be the overarching, conceptual
architecture within which Natural Selection is the on-line component. National
Heritage includes the proliferation of street posters, zines, and a gallery installation.
It is an international project that forces audiences to confront their own cultural,
biological and technological prejudices. Its goal is to assist in the creation
of methods for working this tension between audience and code. Mongrel exploits
the possibilities presented by new communications technology for art as social
critique.
"The Panther Moderns allowed four minutes for their first move to take effect,
then injected a carefully prepared dose of misinformation" --William Gibson "The
Neuromancer"
As networks rise over nations and software speeds over economies, nomadic theaters
will arise. One such group is calling themselves: "The Electronic Disturbance
Theater"( Ricardo Dominguez, Carmin Karrassic, Brett Stallbaum and Stephan Wray).
They are a group of individuals that took their initial rallying cue from the
Zapatista uprising in Mexico, whose uprising in January of 1994 would earn the
title "The First Postmodern Revolution" by the New York Times. They initiated
their efforts, contact and communications on-line following the news of the killing
of 45 indigenous women and children on Christmas Eve, 1997. Their backgrounds
are in performance, cultural theory, software development, and journalism. As
a result their strategies appear drastically different than that of VNS Matrix
or Mongrel. Their aesthetics and poetics are less dense, their activity more transparent.
From their very outset they were able to cause a stir that would be mapped in
the net based, popular media journals of Wired, The Cyber Times, The San Francisco
Gate, The Boston Globe and Forbes. They would be invited to international new
media conferences like ISEA and Ars Electronica. The winding down of their year
long activity would be published in the New York Times in October of 1998 as front
page news. It was this article that would give them a title that seems to have
followed them ever since, that title being; "Hacktivists."
The Electronic Disturbance Theater re-circuits 'agit-prop' actions to mobilize
micro-networks and act in solidarity with the Zapatistas in Chiapas. By staging
virtual sit-in's on-line and allowing the emergence of a collective presence in
a 'direct digital action'. The staging of the action is an html and javascript
based tool called "FloodNet", which reloads a URL several times a minute, slowing
down the ability of people to access the chosen, target site's virtual presence.
It has been compared to an automated knocking at the door. They intentionally
create a 'bottleneck' under the guise of critical action. It is this very tactic
that likens it to virtual street theater. It also mimics the crowding of streets
in protest and rallying of the 60's and the civil rights movement. The attention
EDT received in main stream media circuits combined with it's simplistic technology
(Flood Net's Java applet) and ease of use for those participating (participants
need only to open the browser on their machines, the act of reloading as well
as the chosen target site is automated for them) has brought it under scrutiny
by both left and the right wing groups.
This reconfiguration of street theater has assisted in the facilitation of the
direct access to non-digital networks. The Electronic Disturbance Theater has
been able to re-route information conduits in both minor and dominant media filters
in order to remind them of the struggle that still continues in Chiapas. The strategy
had been to push the mythology of 'Cyber Zapatistas' to a new level of activity
in order to counter the rise of Mexican Government's low intensity warfare.
The activities of the Electronic Disturbance Theater in it's campaigns of what
it calls; Electronic Civil Disobedience have caused the U.S Department of Defense
on one occasion to counter-attack a Flood-Net action with browser based code.
The action in September of 1998 was positioned at three sites; The Frankfurt Stock
Exchange, The Pentagon, and President Zedillo's website. This 'hostile applet'
was browser based code that attacked by taking over the browsers of the people
participating in the 'action'. This take-over would result in a shut down of the
browser. Such 'networked performances' as the action mentioned above, have made
public the communication between three important micro-networks: net.art, net.activism,
and net.hackers. The mutations that will continue to arise from this cross linking
remains to be seen.
It is in this ecology of temporal network media that these groups build a space
of alternative reflection. All three groups are part of minor cultures that main
stream circuits link to only momentarily and route around quickly. They point
to the hard edges of reality that digital drives attempts to forget as culture
uploads itself. The speed of our techno-revolution has no time to consider anything
longer than a split second. Material functions only serve to slow it down. It
is a movement that remains outside of its dialectical reason or understanding.
It is one the important markers of our postmodern socio-economic condition. A
condition that has inherent in it's very structure a violence. This violence is
camouflaged in a delirium keeps us from recognizing it's hyperpace . A killer
combination that enables digital flow to override the physical reality the rest
of the world. The work of the three groups operate on a parallel track, one that
refuses silence, passivity and complacency in facing the machines that made William
Gibson famous and Bill Gates a billionaire. They retaliate by creating a space
that the mainstream media circuit and it's Hollywood reality engines would have
us believe is impossible.
-- back --
-Diane Ludin
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