Cyclops

Cyclops, by Trevor Paglen, is a networked performance, collaborative narrative, and alternate-reality-game designed to be played by groups of people working together across the word.

Paglen’s interactive speculative reality artwork, titled CYCLOPS, takes the audience on a journey through the world of 1960s-era CIA mind control experiments, psychological operations, and unexplained historical anomalies. For this new work, the artist drew inspiration from Ed Ruscha’s Rocky II sculpture hidden in the Mojave Desert; collisions of facts and fictions in Benjamín Labatut’s book When We Cease to Understand the World; and Internet-era enigmas such as the “Cicada 3301” project.

Featuring documents, videos, and other archival materials produced between the 1950s and early 1970s, CYCLOPS requires active engagement and participation. Users are tasked with reconstructing events, deciphering codes, conducting open-source intelligence investigations, and analyzing music, literature, and poetry to move through a work that is part treasure-hunt, part historical unfiction, and part cybersecurity challenge. In this way, CYCLOPS teaches many of the skills behind Paglen’s own investigative practice, exploring how a clandestine history of research into psychological operations, mind control, and paranormal phenomena has shaped media and politics of the present moment. This networked, collaborative experience spanning the digital and physical worlds can be accessed online at cyclops.sh.”

Domestic Tension

For Domestic Tension (2007), a networked durational performance, Iraqi artist Wafaa Bilal confined himself to a gallery space. He broadcasted over the internet 24/7, inviting viewers to watch and chat with him at all hours. The audience was also given the option of shooting Bilal with a robotically controlled paintball gun.

Solar Protocol

Solar Protocol is a web platform hosted across a network of solar-powered servers set up in different locations around the world. A solar-powered server is a computer that is powered by a solar panel and a small battery. Each server can only offer intermittent connectivity that is dependent on available sunshine, the length of day and local weather conditions. When connected as a network, the servers coordinate to serve a website from whichever of them is enjoying the most sunshine at the time.

Synthetic Messenger

Synthetic Messenger

“Synthetic Messenger is a botnet that artificially inflates the value of climate news. Everyday it searches the internet for news articles covering climate change. Then 100 bots visit each article and click on every ad they can find”.

And you can watch them live on Zoom while they do so.
Great project by Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne.

Time Out of Joint

Time Out of Joint” is an online exhibition, curated by Eva & Franco Mattes for the Yerevan Biennal, and entirely taking place on the Darknet, a remote location at the “periphery” of the Internet, where time operates at a slow pace and pages load unhurriedly.
New works by six artists including Joshua Citarella, Clusterduck, David Horvitz, Vladan Joler, Amalia Ulman and 2050+ will be added once every two weeks, from October 2020 to January 2021, and in peer-to-peer style they are available to be seen, copied, reused… The title for this show was borrowed from a novel by Philip K. Dick.

To see the exhibition download the Tor Browser at www.torproject.org
and go to -> http://fjroxjgxhmd2ymp2.onion

Hyper Current Living

ryder ripps

Hyper Current Living is a performance by Ryder Ripps in which he “lives” and “works” at Red Bull Music Academy between April 28th and May 5th 2013 – he’ll be drinking Red Bull and creating digital stuff at hyper speed. In the stream, our output is valued by its proliferation and its likes and favs – what incentive is there to spend 4 years writing a novel if it will just be a link in a stream lasting a few hours? The piece brings this trait into light by designating a time and space to the creation of such fragmented, short interactions native to social media.”

Personal Internet Cache Archive

Personal Internet Cache Archive is a project by Evan Roth:

“Internet cache: “a mechanism for the temporary storage of web documents” (Wikipedia)

An ongoing study of archived images collected passively through my everyday Internet usage. Internet cache is visualized using off the shelf screen saver and image viewing software to produce archival prints and videos. Each print is a unique archive of cached images from a specific date.”