government

Author Rachel Visser wrote a unique insta novel about Farihah, a young Afghan refugee who just like other teenagers dreams about a future. At a young age, Farihah flees from Afghanistan and arrives in the Netherlands, where she is eventually living in a refugee centre. Together with her friends Noor and Lucas she dreams of going to secondary school and to become an artist. This dream is severely interrupted when she received a letter from the Dutch government.

ScareMail is a web browser extension that makes email "scary" in order to disrupt NSA surveillance. Extending Google's Gmail, the work adds to every new email's signature an algorithmically generated narrative containing a collection of probable NSA search terms. This "story" acts as a trap for NSA programs like PRISM and XKeyscore, forcing them to look at nonsense. Each email's story is unique in an attempt to avoid automated filtering by NSA search systems. One of the strategies used by the US National Security Agency's (NSA) email surveillance programs is the detection of predetermined keywords. Large collections of words have thus become codified as something to fear, as an indicator of intent. The result is a governmental surveillance machine run amok, algorithmically collecting and searching our digital communications in a futile effort to predict behaviors based on words in emails. ScareMail proposes to disrupt the NSA's surveillance efforts by making NSA search results useless. Searching is about finding the needles in haystacks. By filling all email with "scary" words, ScareMail thwarts NSA search algorithms by overwhelming them with too many results. If every email contains the word "plot," or "facility," for example, then searching for those words becomes a fruitless exercise. A search that returns everything is a search that returns nothing of use. The ability to use whatever words we want is one of our most basic freedoms, yet the NSA's growing surveillance of electronic speech threatens our first amendment rights. All ScareMail does is add words from the English language to emails written by users of the software. By doing so, ScareMail reveals one of the primary flaws of the NSA's surveillance efforts: words do not equal intent.

(Source: ELO Conference 2014)

Datafeeds is a short (21 node) exploration of a single incident in three universes (hearing, sight, and feeling). You can follow the story by clicking on the braid, the page numbers, or the connecting thoughts.

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Artist's statement:

Hypertext/new media writing/electronic literature is first and foremost an exploration into possibilities. What if links can hold meaning—from emphasizing the "anchor" word or image (the place to click on the link) to coloring the destination? (Of course, many systems held out for multiple types of links—where we see a difference in causal, direct, conditional, etc links—and what would happen if artists and writers got their hands on those kinds of links?) What would happen if text could move—even to surround the reader’s body? (Caves and other holographic technologies make this possible.) What would happen if text and sound and images were inextricably bound together in an orgy of meaning? The possibilities are endless. One aspect of this multiverse of meaning fascinates me the most—structure. The structure is the meaning of the piece, and the meaning of the piece is inherent in its structure. (Of course, I could use this same formula for images, sounds, navigation, presentation, text, and words—and it would be equally as valid.) But I am spell bound by structure. I created a series of short poems based on the flow of the main word as a kanji, an ideogram. I saw how lines can fit together to form a coherent whole. I played with formalizing a range of potential combinatory structures in Firefly, which presents a poem in 6 stanzas of 5 lines each—where each line is actually 5 potential lines. The 180 lines add up to a similar astronomical figure as Raymond Queneau's Cent milles milliards de poèmes. "DataFeeds" takes my obsession with structure to a different level—what would happen if we examined the same incident from three different perspectives? A braided structure shows the linear progression in the three parts—each part of the braid covers one moment of the incident. The perspectives come from my background—I had corrective surgery for severe eyesight problems in the mid-90s. Thus I came into the sighted world too late to cope with the social niceties of recognizing faces, concentrating on eye contact, and not being distracted by patterns. I wanted to share my experiences to show how important our senses are in our social interactions. In a blind world, everyone is on the same footing, and the meeting goes well. In the sighted world, the narrator who is new to sight makes many errors (I've made all these and more). And in the heartbeat world, the narrator who is new to sensing heartbeats makes all the errors that any of you would make if you were transported to that world and given the ability to sense heartbeats. Only in these brave new media can we explore these ideas—and so much more. Each person’s work is different—and each person creates an entirely new genre or perspective or way of writing with each new work. I'm thrilled to be a part of this grand exploration.

(Source: 2008 ELO Media Arts show)

The Cabinet Noir was the name given in France for the secret office where the post of suspected persons was opened and inspected before being forwarded to its final recipient. Governments since have used similar Black Chambers to spy on their populations communication via telegram, telephone and internet media. In order to avoid detection, some individuals have resorted to the technique of Steganography, where communications are hidden in seemingly innocent messages. This can lead to a state of paranoia where every text may contain evidence of nefarious intentions. This work takes the email exchange and data produced for the WEISE7 Labor exhibition and mixes it with the text of Edgar Allan Poe's detective story The Purloined Letter. The result is a paranoid archive of implied subtext.

The Ed Report is a hypertextual US government document, describing the covert military exploits of a technical writer named Ed. (The coincidentally-named Ed Commission produced this once top-secret report.) Epic hero Ed leaves off his ordinary life - in which he writes software documentation, takes care of his autistic younger brother, and pursues early Near Eastern scholarship - as he is pressed into service as an Akkadian code-talker during an undercover operation in Colombia.

Of course, The Ed Report is also fiction, constructed collaboratively by Montfort, Gillespie, and Meissner. Written for the Web, it was revealed serially in the summer of 2000. It has also been read (in a press-conference sort of performance that borrowed from oral epic poetry traditions) in New York City, Chicago, and Bergen, Norway. The Ed Report exploits the novelty of the Web by presenting itself, in deadpan fashion, as a genuine text. On the Web, because of the gullibility of readers and the difficulty in verifying textual authenticity, parodies are frequently mistaken for reportage. The Ed Report was inspired, in part, by Orson Welles's radio play based on the H.G. Wells novel "War of the Worlds," which caused panic in America as listeners mistook it for an authentic news broadcast. It would be difficult to play such a splendid prank on the radio today - but the Web is a different story. Another influence was the Starr Report, which may have been, from the standpoint of the United States, the most important Web-original story yet published.

(Source: Author's submission statement To trAce Alt-X New Media Competition).

The Cape is a short work that engages the history of visual print-based authority by combining impersonal, government-created images with a purportedly personal story. Carpenter animates decades-old black-and-white photographs, illustrations, and maps, adding to these a few laconic caption-sized texts to extend an exploration of "place" that digital space evokes.

(Source: Electronic Literature Collection, Vol. 1)