The Zapatista Tactical FloodNet
A collabortive, activist and
conceptual art work of the net
by Brett Stalbaum
FloodNet Functionality
Tactical FloodNet's
automated features are used:
1) To reload a targeted web page several
times per minute.
2) For the conceptual-artistic spamming
of targeted server error logs.
The web site of an institution or symbol of Mexican neo-liberalism is
targeted
on a particular day. A link to FloodNet
is then posted in a public call for
participation in the tactical strike. Netsurfers follow this link;
then by
simply leaving their browser open the FloodNet
Applet will automatically
reload the target web page every few seconds. The intent is to disrupt
access
to the targeted web site by flooding the host server with requests
for that
web site.
Floodnet Interactivity
As FloodNet performs automatic reloads of
the site in the background, slowing
or halting access to the targeted server, FloodNet
also encourages interaction
on the part of individual protesters. Netsurfers may voice their political
concerns on a targeted server via the “personal message” form which
sends the
surfer's own statement to the server error log. Additionally,
a mouse click
on the applet image (containing a representation of the targeted site),
sends
a predefined message to the server error log. In the current version
of
FloodNet, this process is automated as
well.
FloodNet as Conceptual Art
FloodNet is an example of conceptual net.art
that empowers people through
activist/artistic expression. By the selection of phases
for use in building
the "bad" urls , for example using "human_rights" to form the url
"http://www.xxx.gb.mx/human_rights", the FloodNet
is able to upload messages
to server error logs by intentionally asking for a non-existent url.
This
causes the server to return messages like “human_rights not found on
this
server.” This works because of the way many http servers process
requests for
web pages that do not exist. FloodNet's
Java applet asks the targeted server
for a directory called, in this example, "human_rights", but since
that
directory doesn't exist, the server returns the familiar “File not
Found” or
“Error 404” message, recording the bad request. This is a unique
way to leave
a message on that server.
Past versions of the FloodNet have tuned
this idea to current events, such as
during the June 10 protest when the names of the Zapatista farmers
killed by
the Mexican Army in military attacks on the autonomous village of El
Bosque,
were used in the construction of the "bad" urls. In an artistic sense,
this is
a way of remembering and honoring those who gave their lives in defense
of
their freedom. In a conceptual sense, the FloodNet
performance was able to
facilitate a symbolic return of the dead to the servers of those responsible
for their murders.
FloodNet Philosophy
“Only art history still knows that the famed geniuses of the Renaissance
did
not just create paintings and buildings, but calculated fortresses
and
constructed war machines. If the phantasm of all Information Warfare,
to
reduce war to software and its forms of death to operating system crashes,
were to come true, lonesome hackers would take the place of the historic
artist-engineers.”
Frederich Kittler
http://www.aec.at/infowar/NETSYMPOSIUM/ARCH-EN/msg00001.html
Taking the place of “historic artist-engineers” only becomes possible
if we
focus on genius as a emergent quality of human-machinic networks (the
cybernetic as distributed collective) . “Lonesome hackers”, is somewhat
misleading in the context of fine artists working on software weapons,
if only
because it unfortunately indexes all of modernism’s notions of troubled
genius, without qualifying it in the context of the conflation of biological
life into the consciousness prosthetic of the network. The Zaps FloodNet
hopefully serves as a counter example to this notion of individualist
genius,
because, as media art, it has emerged from and serves a community which
genuinely requires the development of such attention weapons as a matter
survival.
As an alternative to the re-emergence of the artist as the lonely hacker,
we
could in turn seek an ontological status for artist as "true" defensive
worker
in the network era. But the destructive implementation of “Defense”
as
euphemism for war (as in the name change in the United States from
the
“Department of War” to the “Department of Defense”), long ago erased
the
distinction between defensive and offensive capabilities once evident
in the
various designs of fortresses and war machines. The cryptanalytical
foundation
secrecy, correctly identified as the foundation of contemporary information
processes, is simultaneously defensive and offensive under this implosion.
Can
the fortress be reinstantiated?
It seems that the reconstruction of the fortress as a somehow useful
strategy
is no less misguided and romantic than the reinstantiation of the Renaissance
artist figure as a cryptanalytical war engineer. If anything, the
cryptanalytical accomplishments of the past two centuries have soundly
defeated the wall as a defensive mechanism; not only by blurring the
distinction between defense and offence (as in Ronald Reagan’s star
wars
imaginary), but by simply rendering walls and other manifestations
of
protection useless.
As such, fortifications and secrecy are a kind of trap for information
artists
for many reasons. Information is ephemeral, becoming stale quickly,
leaving it
as one of the most perishable of tactical tools. Additionally, most
artists do
not have the capital to compete with the information warfare apparatus
of
corporations and governments. And of course, no one really cares about
an
artist’s secrets in any case! It is better to not have secrets, because
to do
so is to pretend walls of comfort around us which no longer exist.
More
importantly, it reduces the amount of friction the info-artist must
face:
secrecy requires little work if we are little concerned with it. It
is better
to take public actions which call attention to dangerous situations
for real
people. Artists as communications engineers, working in groups to design
the
next generation of networked communications pulse-weapon, will allow
still
larger groups to leverage their numbers in tactical performances of
presence;
these are the goals of non-violent inforwar.
The Zaps FloodNet represents just such
a collective weapon of presence.
Designed as a collectively actuated weapon, inverting the logic of
wide open
propaganda pipes by flooding network connections with millions of hits
from
widely distributed, fully participatory nodes, the FloodNet
enables a
performance of presence which says to Mexico (and its close ally the
United
States): "We are numerous, alert, and watching carefully." After the
initial
design, the roles played by communications artists are best described
as only
the initial low-dimensional attractors upon which the critical tertiary
projection of similarity in the dynamic net-system of cybernetics is
articulated. This is not only evident in user participation with the
FloodNet
performances, but in other similarly directed mass actions. Instead
of the
return of the Renaissance artist/engineer or the sedentary seclusion
of the
fortress, we seek instead the self-organization of human-machinic networks
of
good conscious, visibility, and presence.
Ricardo Dominguez- Organizer, Agitator, Artist, Theorist
(http://www.thing.net/~rdom)
Carmin Karasic- Artist, Interface design and testing, Graphic Design
(http://www.pixelyze.com/users/carmin)
Brett Stalbaum- Java Programmer, Artist and author of FloodNet Applet
(http://cadre.sjsu.edu/beestal)
Stefan Wray- Theorist, Writer, and Agitator
(http://www.nyu.edu/projects/wray)
Information on actions:
(http://www.nyu.edu/projects/wray/ecd.html)
To actually instantiate the software and engage a target:
(http://www.thing.net/~rdom/zapsTactical/foyer2.htm)
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