The Free Art and Technology Lab (F.A.T. Lab) is an organisation aiming to enrich the public domain through the research and development of creative technologies and media. After being nominated for the Transmediale Award 2010, F.A.T. Lab members met up in Berlin in the first week of February and produced a series of projects dedicated to the topic of the week: FUCK GOOGLE. In addition to producing free software, browser addons, live streams, communiques and on-site workshops, F.A.T. Lab built a fake Google Street View car they took to the streets to see what it’s like to be Google. A PDF with building instructions and a list of needed materials has been made available on the F.A.T. website, along with a host of video material. Read about all the week’s projects here.

UPDATE: Also see the collaborative article and interview with F.A.T. Lab’s Evan Roth, by Marcello Lussana and Gaia Novati: http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=384:

“An interesting outsider project at Transmediale.10 this year, was F.A.T
Lab (Free Art and Technology Lab). A collective of artists, engineers,
scientists, lawyers, musicians and trouble-makers who have been working
together for two years, on the intersections of Pop culture and Open
source. Their stapline describes them as “An organization who is
dedicated to enriching the public domain through the research and
development of creative technologies and media.

For Transmediale.10 they presented a project called Fuck Google,
focusing on reminding us all how this big company has become omnipresent
in our digital lives, refering to the risk that too much data is owned
and is going to be owned more and more, just by Google alone. It exists
as a collection of browser add-ons, open source software, theoretical
musings and direct actions.”

Michael Stevenson is a lecturer and PhD candidate at the Department of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam. For the Society of the Query evening program he presented a very interesting selection of artistic and activist projects that were engaged with (the re-attribution of) different elements related to Web search.

Query

The IP-Browser (Govcom.org) for instance played with the linearity of querying the Web. It creates an alternative browsing experience that foregrounds the Web’s machine habitat and returns the user back to the basics of orderly Web browsing. The IP Browser looks up your IP address, and allows you to browse the Websites in your IP neighborhood, one by one in the order in which they are given in the IP address space.

Shmoogle (Tsila Hassine/De Geuzen) also deals with linearity on the Web, specifically the linearity of the search returns of Google. De Geuzen state that the best search returns that Google offers are not necessarily always the ones at the top. Unfortunately this is where the average Google user gets stuck. Shmoogle offers a way to find the search results in a chaotic way, and in doing so it ensures greater democracy.

The Internet Says No (Constant Dullaart) is a animated, fully functioning Google page (Google is placed in a marquee-frame). this work offers a pessimistic way to surf the internet.

The Misspelling-Generator (Linda Hilfling & Erik Borra). Erik Borra presented the work as a result of the fight against internet censorship. When doing a search in the Chinese version of Google on the Tiananmen Square Massacre, Linda Hilfling discovered a temporary loophole out of the Google self-censorship in China. By deliberately spelling Tiananmen incorrectly, she was taken to web-pages where other people had misspelled Tiananmen, and was thereby able to access pictures of demonstrations as well as the legendary image of the student in front of the tank through the sources of incorrect spellings. The Misspelling generator is a tool that can be used for internet activism. By writing variations like ‘tianamen’ and ‘tiananman’ the isolation politics of the Google’s spelling corrector can be subverted while Google’ selfcensorship can be circumvented.

Images

Z.A.P. (ApFab) is an automatic image generation installation. First you add a word using the ApFab touch-screen, then the ZapMachine will grab an image from the Internet. This image is the most important visual representation of that word, at that time, according to the current Internet authority Google. Finally, the individual images are incorporated into a new context, creating a new tense state of meaning and random relations. With “Zapmachine: Who gave you the right?” AbFab is asking the following questions:

-How much control do we have over the generated collage as artists?
-How much influence do you have on this process.
-How does the collage relate to the initial intention by which the image was uploaded on the Internet by the original author?
-Who is the author of this Zap collage?

Disease Disco (Constant Dullaart) “To every suffering its thumbnail”. Dullaart used the Google image search by color option, to query the word ‘disease’ and changes color ‘rhytmically’. The work is accompanied by the US billboard #1 hit song of the moment that the work was created.

The Global Anxiety Monitor (De Geuzen) uses html-frames to display automated image searches in different languages. Searching in Google for terms such as conflict, terrorism and climate change, this monitor traces the ebb and flow of fear in Arabic, Hebrew, English and Dutch.

Terms & Conditions

Cookie Monster (Andrea Fiore) To capture on-line behavior, thousands of HTTP cookies are sent daily to web browsers to identify users and gather statistical knowledge about tastes and habits. The cookie consensus website hosts a collection of cookies that Andrea Fiore received while surfing through the first 50 entries of the Alexa directory of News sites. In the future it will also host a software that will give the users the capability to create their own cookie collections.

I Love Alaska (Lernert Engelberts & Sander Plug) is a beautifully framed internet movie series that tells the story of a middle aged woman living in Houston, Texas. The viewer follows her AOL search queries over the time span of months. “In the end, when she cheats on her husband with a man she met online, her life seems to crumble around her. She regrets her deceit, admits to her Internet addiction and dreams of a new life in Alaska.”

Flarf poetry can be characterized as an avant-garde poetry movement of the late 20th and the early 21st century. In flarf poetry a poet roams the Internet using random word searches, to distill newly created phrases and bizarre constructions that he later shares with the flarf community.

Flarf poetry can be described as a ‘readymade’, collage technique that has connections to the Surrealists in the 20s and William Burroughs cut-up technique from 1959. Flarf itself exists for a decade and has since then evolved by using web poetry generators and chatbots like Jabberwacky.

Ton van het Hof showed an example of flarf by Sharen Mesmer: “A knowing diabetic bitch”

This is my Readymade Flarf poem using Jabberwacky:

What is Flarf? The greatest two dimensional thing in the world. What is Flarf? A Flatland. It’s a satire on this one.

Although my self made poem doesn’t show this so well (I am unfortunately an amateur flarf poet), flarf poems are often as disturbing as they are hilarious, which have made many people question if flarf will can ever be taken serious. Even though this question is still a valid question today, the movement is showing signs to have cleared a spot amongst the ranks of the legitimate art forms, finding its ways to blogs, magazines and conferences.

French artist Christophe Bruno introduced the audience into some aspects of his art concerning search engines, espacially Google. In order to explain his latest project Dadameter, he initially presented a selection of projects he has worked on over the last years. His career as an aritst started with the project Epiphanies which Bruno established in 2001. It is a Google hack collecting pieces of texts and reconstituting these particular pieces in a new structure. This idea was inspired by James Joyce who walked through Dublin writing down phrase fragments he heard on the streets and called those epiphanies, therefore Bruno calls Google an „ephiphany machine“.

Another project of Bruno is Fascinum from 2001. In this project Bruno developed a program searching through Yahoo! news sites of different countries and select and present those pictures which were looked at the most in each country. In a work of 2002 called Adwords Happening, Bruno depicted the development of a generalized semantic capitalism. He started buying different words at Google‘s AdWords application and presented the price of different words, this creates the awareness that via Google any word of any language has a price and can be bought.

Bruno identified that corporate organizations started to highjack methods formerly applied by conceptual artists and called it „Guerilla Marketing“. This was the origin of a famous work of 2004 called Human Browser, in which persons were verbally displaying search results to other people which were transferred to them in realtime via ear-phones, the individual human being then embodies the world wide web. Logo.Hallucination is a different project of Christophe Bruno in which he scans through pictures circulating in the internet and searches for logos of corporations and organizations that are represented in those pictures. If a logo is detected in a picture Logo.Hallucination automatically sends cease and desist emails complaining about the violation of copyright laws. This selection shows steps leading to Christophe Bruno’s newest project, the Dadameter. It is inspired by the work of the french author Raymond Rousse and is a very ambitious and complex project which cannot be summarized easily, the aim is the production of a map displaying our distance to dada. Due to its complexity it is highly recommended to look up the details about the project here: Detailed information about the Dadameter.