[spectre] read_me 1.2 statements on rhizome-digest

[Olga Goriunova]

Dear all!
It appears that something went wrong with presenting of read_me 1.2
statements on rhizome-digest.
My mail was sent out complete, but with the jury statements below the titles of the
honorary mentions deleted.
So I am resending the honorary statements only.

Full version of read_me 1.2 jury statements can be found here
http://www.macros-center.ru/read_me/add.html

+++++++++++

read_me 1.2
software art / software art games
http://www.macros-center.ru/read_me/

HONORARY MENTIONS in alphabetical order:

CARNIVORE  by RSG  http://www.macros-center.ru/read_me/now/7/
Bosses currently use all kinds of elaborate software to spy on their workers. Products like MailCensor (http://www.mailcensor.com) encourage bosses to check for "unauthorized transmission of Email containing confidential data" and "provide a safe and productive work environment for employees, by filtering out offensive/inappropriate email from the Internet."

On some networks, software can be installed by users to spy on their bosses as well. Packet sniffers, used by systems administrators to diagnose network problems, can often be used or modifed to do just that.  Some packet-sniffing software is expensive, some free:

        http://www.tucows.com/, search on sniffer
        http://www.softpile.com/search.phtml?query=sniffer&pp=10&in=title

The trouble is, most of this software wouldn't be easy for a non-technical user to convert into a tool for gathering useful information. Those products that are easy to use for corporate spying tend to have pricetags that are easy for bosses and companies to afford but not for employees. Among currently available sniffing products, the jury likes Ethereal (http://www.ethereal.com), a free, cross-platform diagnostic tool that can be used fairly easily by employees to spy on their boss's e-mail, websurfing and other network communications.

An upcoming version of Rhizome's Carnivore is planned to make it easier for an art audience to get involved in corporate spying.  The jury hopes it will do this.  Since Carnivore is open source software, other people with the appropriate programming expertise can also write such modifications themselves. For now, Carnivore only runs on specialized servers, and it doesn't gather data in a human-readable form.

The relationship of Rhizome's Carnivore to the FBI's spying tool of the same name seems to be a matter of concept and hipness-value, but it is not explained and is not very obvious.

PORTRET OF PRESIDENT   by Vladislav Tselischev http://www.macros-center.ru/read_me/now/37/
It is a small application that installs a portrait of President Putin in an oval frame on the desktop of a computer user. The political and critical point of the project is obvious - the author proposes that you decorate your desktop (=workspace) the way Russian bosses have done for centuries:  they decorate the walls of their offices with portraits of higher bosses to show their loyalty. The transfer of such loyal behaviour into the virtual sphere is logical; it's inhabited by the same humans with all their merits and shortcomings. Also, when a PC user customizes her desktop she tells about herself to the people around her. The jury would like to point out the simplicity and elegance of this work as well as the program's ease of use and its political orientation.

RE (AD.HTM   by mez breeze http://www.macros-center.ru/read_me/now/71/
An honorary mention goes to "Re (ad.htm" by the Australian artist mez, This entry created a lot of discussion in the jury, and quite dissimilar individual rankings and opinions. "Re (ad.htm" consists of a selection of writings or, to use the artist's terminology, "wurks" that had been posted to several net cultural and arts-related mailing lists. They are highly condensed pieces written in "mezangelle", an invented hybrid language which mixes syntactical snippets of programming languages, network protocols and markup code with the English language. The resulting texts can be read in multiple, often contradictory ways due to their elaborate use of ambiguity and compound ('portmanteau') words noted in rectangular brackets, thus resembling regular and Boolean expressions in commandline programs and programming languages. In contrast to a merely ornamental code chic, this hybrid language is used to expose and deconstruct the epistemological politics engendered into seemingly "ne!
 utral", technical codes. It is poetically dense, involving and difficult, but also humorous.  Of course, it is not technically executable code, although the bracketed expressions expand into multiple combinatory output sequences. But above all the mezangelle targets fictitious, fantastic compilers, creating a dream-like imagination of metonymic contiguity between human bodies and machines. Sure, this topic
has been spelled out in popular culture and media theory multiple times, but mez succeeds to free it from all cyber-kitsch by tackling it from within, in structure.

"Re (ad.htm" of course provokes the question whether it can be legitimately considered software art even more than "Screen Saver". But it clearly is art whose material is formal instruction code and which addresses cultural concepts of software.  Imaginary, pretended and otherwise broken or pseudo-code in fact has a long tradition in poetic software programming, starting with the Algol poems of the French Oulipo group in the 1960s and not ending with the Perl poetry popular among hackers since the early 1990s. In the non-digital realm, Russian Futurists, concrete and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets approached programming code poetry when they experimented with the formal elements of conventional language.  mezangelle, which historically departed rather from the net.art tradition of experimental ASCII art, differs from the
former in various respects: It neither is a concrete poetry-style conceptualist clean-room design of code, nor is it naive haikus or love poems like most Perl poetry. So mezangelle does for code poetry what 1990s net.art did for ASCII Art when it turns an idea that itself was brilliant, but carried out naively, into something contemporary and sophisticated.

TRACENOIZER by LAN  http://www.macros-center.ru/read_me/now/58/
Other projects have worked with the idea of introducing noise into surveillance processes for the purpose of allowing individuals to hide themselves. The actual effectiveness of such techniques is often questionable. Such was the case with TraceNoizer. As far as the jury can tell, TraceNoizer is not literally effective at introducing noise into our data identities; after several weeks we still couldn't find our data clones in search engines at all.  TraceNoizer's interest to the jury, however, was its use of algorithmic processes as critique.  In TraceNoizer, static data becomes a dynamic process; the omniscient search engine database is transformed into something like a video feedback loop. Each generation of TraceNoizer cloned webpages is fed back into itself and
(at least in theory) back into the search engines, generating new pages that echo their originals - and their subjects - more vaguely with each successive generation. The noise added to the database is not external, but the search engine turned on itself. Search engines use exclusionary
systems to determine and dictate data "relevance" - from Google's incestuous PageRank technology to other search engines' blatant payola practices. Given this fact, TraceNoizer's system of having data reproduce by looking up its own ass seems an appropriate and entertaining response.

WINGLUK BUILDER by CooLer http://www.macros-center.ru/read_me/now/27/
WinGluk Builder belongs to a cracker culture of "revenge software," i.e. creating programs that affect the normal work of an operating system and give the impression that your computer is broken or infected by a terrible virus.  Despite the saboteur character of the program the jury decided to nominate it for the following reasons: 
- The program is focused on understanding the computer as an object with certain physical and aesthetic qualities and tries to reveal these qualities. 
- It uses a computer against its purpose, overcoming the predetermination imposed by the pragmatic software creators.
- It takes a critical attitude towards hacker-cracker culture: using Wingluk Builder, everyone can feel  like an impressive virus creator by pressing a couple of buttons.
-The project implies the possibility of integrating other "viruses" into the program (it has  thorough instructions on how to do that) 
- An attempt to create a community around itself.
- The project ironically comments on the interface of Windows applications - it looks exactly like a proper program with an uninstall feature, a help file and all the other features of a decent program that humorously contradicts its own purpose.
- And last but not least: the program in fact is not that "evil" - it can't destroy your computer or erase your data. It rather gives you an opportunity to reflect on the possible results of hackers' activity, on the attention with which you should use your computer, as well as on the fact that your digital friend does not necessarily have to be a boring hybrid of a mailbox and a DVD player, but sometimes can perform strange and funny things.
-       And the lat but not least: the program in fact is not that "evil" - it can't destroy your
computer or erase your data. It rather gives you an opportunity to reflect on the possible results
of hackers' activity, about attention with which you should use your computer, as well as about the fact that your digital friend does not necessarily have to be a boring hybrid of a mailbox and a DVD player but sometimes can perform strange and funny things.