Some of My Favourite Web Sites Are Art
Date: 8.6.98
From: alex galloway
Some of My Favourite Web Sites Are Art
http://www.alberta.com/unfamiliarart/
Project:
ILLEGAL INTERFERENCE
Daniel Garcia Andujar
http://www.irational.org/daniel/pirates/Illegal.html
The name “web collider” describes web art that remixes material found on the net into a new, ready-made artwork. Illegal Interference takes email from newsgroups and secret hacker communities and mixes them together into a new, “illegal” interference pattern.
Like a packet sniffer, the device for eavesdropping on web correspondence without being detected, Illegal Interference intercepts email between hackers as they ask for stolen serial numbers or cracked software. By poking his nose into the back alleys of the web, artist Daniel Garcia Andujar offers a bird’s eye view of information as it is exchanged, misdirected, lost and stolen.
In another project entitled “Technologies To The People,” Andujar states boldly that “Access To Technology is a Human Right!” Forever self-reflexive, much of Andujar’s art focuses on how easily commercial forces might exploit such a claim.
For Andujar the corporate ownership of words and phrases–trademarks like UPS’s “Moving At The Speed Of Business,” or Lucent’s “We Make The Things That Make Communications Work”–reminds us that language, like technology, is not free. Playing with the commercialization of information, Andujar asks: Who controls information and technology?
In Illegal Interference we see the other side, where one must ask: How safe is our control over information?