According to the 2008 edition of Transmediale, the concept of »conspiring« is definitely a multifaceted one. One of its perspective is related to the social use of technologies and how small groups of smart persons can make a substantial difference in the contemporary economy of relationships. Actually »social« is also one of the most abused words in the current debate about technology development and marketing: the »social« status, involvement and even improvement is always enhanced in both analysis and corporate communication. But if technology marketers use »social« meaning »mass market«, a huge part of society is nevertheless using and sometimes suffering technologies, whose »social« characteristics are dictated by the capitalist agenda. So how artist are embracing this change arming the masses with radical ideas on how to look at or use social technologies (and eventually act accordingly)?
Awareness
Contrasting the corporation propaganda starts when we\'re aware of our surroundings and their invisible data waves and rules. The omnipresence yet invisibility of the IT networks is a matter of fact, and it is barely perceived when a mobile phone is used. But the myth of large bandwidth available everywhere embodies the extension of the virtual world to the whole physical reality, completely duplicating and then infinitely extending it. Perhaps being inspired by the dangers of such an appointed future, »Constraint City: The Pain of Everyday Life« [http://www.yugo.at/equilibre/] is probably the most visionary project of the young Gordan Savicic. It consists of a wi-fi enabled Nintendo DS Lite console (Linux booted) translating the internet access points presence and signal strength by proportionally tightening in the chest of a jacked equipped with servo motors. The jacket wearer is then passively involved in a pleasure/pain game, where the wireless waves becomes the entity dominating (the master) without a face and the wearer is the punished (the slave), in a metaphoric as well as physically even painful relationship. The risk of almost suffocating because of the pervasive communication network infrastructure is then dramatically rising the awareness of the urban territory we live in and definitely changing our vision on urban technologies. The project won the 3rd place in the Transmediale Award 2008, indeed.
Fighting Back
One can be suffocated by technology omnipresence, while another can be by censorship. China is the first country that effectively succeeded in what net activists thought was impossible: censor the Internet. And even more fascinating (and dramatic) is that the censorship mechanisms, its infrastructure and the amount of people involved is totally unknown, but tremendously effective, leaving the high-tech west in the dust.In the short but active history of China censorship workaround there were many simple tricks for circumventing it in the beginning, but the last trend is to stop fighting it in the verbal domain, that is undoubtedly predictable.That\'s why Picidae.net [http://www.picidae.net/] by the Swiss-German couple Christoph Wachter and Mathias Jud has outlined and implemented one of the possible counter hacks to the so-called \'Great Firewall of China\' translating the data in a different shape. Their tool for freeing information acts on a simple but ingenious concept: transforming web pages into pictures, while maintaining their link structure. The data translation is made by a few servers placed in China and Europe. Beyond the mechanism the challenge here is to think about data as a liquid material, not as a printed page or a sequence of pictures (a movie) where censorship can be easily applied, but a conglomeration of information that can be rethought at will into known and yet unknown abstract shapes. The project won 25.000 swiss francs by the Migros Kulturprozent and an honourable mention at the the Transmediale Award 2008.
Revenge
Government censorship is really painful for every citizen, but also freedom can have its own drawbacks. Spam, for example, embodies the extreme consequences of freedom of expression, unbearably exploiting private electronic mail inboxes with a overwhelming amount of unsolicited purchasing (or money-related) stimuli. The unstoppable pervasiveness of spam feeds more and more revenge feelings against the anonymous, invisible, unreachable spammers. PleaseSpamUs [http://www.pleasespam.us/] by Jonah Brucker-Cohen is one of the art project focused on spam that focus on these feelings by the exploited users in a creative way. It\'s a »collaborative filtering project and voting system« to submit addresses that would attract spammers and their infamous spambots on the customized project home page. Exposing an email openly, after a social \'judgement\' is a way of using \'social networks\' not for feeding the newest dotcom hype and cash flow but to elaborate the frustration in a public and sometimes sympathetic environment. It\'s (as the above projects) a way of \'conspiring against a common enemy, that is not an abstract category, but a tangible manifestation. The project was on display during Transmediale in the lounge space.
Conclusions
After Transmediale probably the verb \'conspire\' can be reformulated, updating its old \'dark\' and elitist characteristics with social and public ones empowered by networks and collaborative tools. If \'conspiring\' used to mean a top level obscure collaboration, from the net advent on it\'s about bottom-up developing strategies and actions to subvert the apparently unavoidable status quo. The spirit is the same (\'fighting to change the reality together with a small group/avant garde), the results can be effective as well on a political scale, but not necessarily for a global effect. Ideas, in fact, develops when they\'re conspiring against reality.