Notes for Discussion - Net Strategies & Wrap-up questions

Alex Galloway and the Radical Software Group (RSG)

Alexander R. Galloway is an artist and computer programmer. As the founding member of the Radical Software Group (RSG), he is the creator of Carnivore, a networked surveillance tool based on the notorious FBI software of the same name. Carnivore has been exhibited internationally and won a Golden Nica at Ars Electronica 2002. Alex's first book, PROTOCOL, or, How Control Exists After Decentralization, will be published in 2003 by The MIT Press.

Carnivore is a surveillance tool for data networks. At the heart of the project is CarnivorePE, a software application that listens to all Internet traffic (email, web surfing, etc.) on a specific local network. Next, CarnivorePE serves this data stream to interfaces called "clients." These clients are designed to animate, diagnose, or interpret the network traffic in various ways. Use CarnivorePE to run Carnivore clients from your own desktop, or use it to make your own clients.

CarnivorePE is inspired by DCS1000, a piece of software used by the FBI to perform electronic wiretaps. (Until recently, DCS1000 was known by its nickname "Carnivore.") Improving on the FBI software, CarnivorePE features new functionality including: artist-made diagnosic clients, remote access, full subject targetting, full data targetting, volume buffering, transport protocol filtering, and an open source software license. Carnivore is created by RSG.

Carnivore has been exhibited at New York Digital Salon, University of Michigan Gallery, DEAF, Eyebeam, Ars Electronica Center, Electrohype, Art Futura, Darklight Digital Film Festival, The Watson Institute, NTT InterCommunication Center, White Columns, New Museum, Kontrollfelder, Illinois State University Galleries, Transmediale, and the Princeton Art Museum. Carnivore was a Golden Nica winner in the 2002 Prix Ars Electronica.

US Department of Art & Technology Press Release of Carnivore.

Carnivore Clients

Black and White by Mark Napier

Black and White (CNN)
Read every bit of cnn.com.
0 moves black horizontally.
1 moves white vertically.
Black and white attract to one another.

Police State by Jonah Brucker-Cohen

PoliceState is a Carnivore client that attempts to reverse the surveillance role of law enforcement into a subservient one for the data being gathered. The client consists of a fleet of 20 radio controlled police vehicles that are all simultaneously controlled by data coming into the main client. The client looks for packet information relating to domestic US terrorism. Once found, the text is then assigned to an active police radio code, translated to its binary equivalent, and sent to the array of police cars as a movement sequence. In effect, the data being "snooped" by the authorities is the same data used to control the police vehicles. Thus the police become puppets of their own surveillance. This signifies a reversal of the control of information appropriated by police by using the same information to control them.

JJ by Golan Levin

JJ is an autonomous software agent who displays facial expressions appropriate to the emotional content of the words that are presented to him. Implemented as a Carnivore Client, JJ literally "puts a face" on the information transmitted through his host network, in order to provide a data visualization of the network's "emotional content." JJ operates according to a mapping established between two well-known psychological databases: (A) Ekman and Friesen's set of "universal facial expressions" — the set of face photographs which have been shown to embody basic cross-cultural human emotions (namely: anger, fear, surprise, disgust, sadness and pleasure) — and (B) the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) dictionary by Pennebaker, Francis, & Booth, which categorizes the "emotional associations" of several thousand common English words, and provides an efficient and effective method for evaluating the various affective components present in verbal and written speech samples.

RSG-CPE0C-1 by RSG

The "Carnivore Personal Edition Zero Client" (serial number RSG-CPE0C-1) was the first Carnivore Client. It was written in Perl by RSG and ran on the dumb terminal output of the first Carnivore Linux server—like a welcome screen. It was first ported to Visual Basic in 2001 so it could run as a screensaver on Windows machines. To make it web-accessible, Todd Holoubek ported it to Flash in December 2002. You can view it on the web (demo mode only), or download the files to run on your own LAN using CarnivorePE. Keep in mind that this is an emulation of the original work. The colors are derived from default ANSI colors. The font is a default terminal font. The column height and row width are also based on the terminal window. The audio is taken from the game Half-Life. The surveillance packets are simply printed to the screen left-to-right, top-to-bottom, in a pseudo random fashion. The piece is not interactive. Just let it run.

US Department of Art & Technology
Speech for the End of Time

The US Department of Art & Technology is an artist-led, virtual government agency. The US DAT functions as a conduit between the arts and the broader political and economic culture for facilitating the artists’ need to extend aesthetic inquiry into the social sphere where ideas become real action. The Department proposes and supports the idealized definition of the role of the artist in society as one whose reflections, ideas, aesthetics, sensibilities, and abilities can have significant and transformative social impact on the world stage.

The US Department of Art and Technology is the principal conduit for facilitating the artist's need to extend aesthetic inquiry into the broader culture where ideas become real action. It also serves the psychological and spiritual well-being of all Americans by supporting cultural efforts that provide immunity from the extension of new media technologies into the social sphere.

Secretary Delivers "Speech for the End of Time"
Johns Hopkins University, Washington DC

7:44 P.M. EST

WASHINGTON, DC - On April 23rd, 7:44 PM (EST) Secretary Randall M. Packer of the US Department of Art & Technology completed his nationwide tour at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC to deliver the "Speech for the End of Time," announcing the activation of the Experimental Party, the artist-based political party, the "party of experimentation," and its latest initiative, "10,000 Acts of Artistic Mediation."

In his Washington address, Secretary Packer called on coalition artists "to inspire other artists into action by undergoing aesthetic operation as a form of magic designed as a mediation between our strange hostile world and the human spirit."

Points for discussion:

The insertion of the aspirations of the artistic avant-garde into the political system by means of virtualization, appropriation and the suspension of disbelief.

"Weapons that change consciousness can call the war game in question." – William Burroughs
The power of art to visualize, to create new models, to change the way we see the world, by planing a seed for alternative systems to flourish.

The role of the artist in transforming our vision of the world, and thus our way of solving problems, even in the political arena.

Art as politics, politics as art. Ways in which the artist parodies the political process, deconstrucs it, in order to observe it from a fresh perspective. Conversely, the way in which the politician utilizes artistic technique (i.e. the spectacle) to change minds, to create an image, to be convincing.

What does it mean for artists to take aesthetic action in the political context?

A political candidate who is digital?

"The tools of the artist must be sharpened so that his image of the new world is perfect in every respect."

"Our coalition has one suggestion for the future of humanity - he who can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed out candle."

Semper Phi.