Shadowy wiki editors unmasked with logo_wiki

Wayne Clements writes to let us know his wiki project, evolved as part of Window's online programme last year, continues with logo_wiki.

"logo_wiki identifies military, corporate, and governmental editors of Wikipedia ('the Free Encyclopedia'). It does this by tracing back the editor's IP address. logo_wiki shows recently edited 'diffs' pages (with changes highlighted) and shows who the shadowy editor is. logo_wiki does this by replacing the Wikipedia logo with the editor's logo. Military, corporate and governmental users are responsible for many thousands of unacknowledged alterations to Wikipedia pages. logo_wiki reveals this process occurring in real time."

Quicktake: Small Global and Never been to Tehran at MIC

Currently showing at MIC, this exhibition by renowned new media artists D-Fuse tackles globalisation and it's impact - both in terms of architecture/environments, and in business. The first room is an ambitious, multi-channel installation centreing around the viral growth of fast-food giant McDonalds. World maps chronicle the time and position of every franchise, from local California eatery in the 50s through to global domination towards the turn of the millenium. As usual, the curatorial staff at the Moving Image Centre 'hung' the show impeccably, even adding multiple translucent screens to create a triplicate projected effect (see images).

But what's problematic about the work is it's over the top slickness. The data could actually be displayed in any web browser - via Google Maps or Google Earth - but dfuse instead use a barrage of electronic looking tickers and LED interfaces. What could be a dynamic, intelligently networked piece hooked up to data sources worldwide is turned into static video because of a perceived need to seduce the viewer. Adding another layer of irony, this piece about globalisation is fundamentally localised due to it's media, although d-fuse plan to add more video content as the show makes it's way around the world.


Next door, the superficially simple, "Never been to Tehran" is a case in point. The ambitious worldwide photography project challenged artists to "take photographs (from their home base) of what they imagine Tehran to look like." Participants upload their shots to a Picasa Web Album, allowing a single hub for coordinating, as well as built in features like 'geotagging' to show origin of each image, and RSS feeds allowing blogs to incorporate it into their sites. This open framework means that curators worldwide can re-present the show in a variety of formats.

Meaningful videogames on the rise

Gamers have seen this environment before. Yet instead of a barrage of semi-automatic weaponry at their disposal, they have a Koran. Rather than side-stepping and running through the level, the player is hanging around, chatting to other detainees. Their's little else to do.

Set in the infamous detainee center, "Escape from Woomera" is a MOD (modification) of the immensely popular first person shooter, Half Life. Users can play as a variety of inmates, each with their own backstories, in a thoroughly researched recreation of the camp. "Television footage, press and radio reports, and the recollections of former detainees and employees will be used to mimic the layout and daily life in the centres, down to meal times, the way guards communicate with each other and 'episodic violence'." (SMH) Now archived at SelectParks, the game is one of a growing number of so-called "meaningful games", seeking to introduce a greater quotient of educational, political, or cultural content to an industry dominated by technically brilliant but superficial shooters.


Ian Bogost's Persuasive Games is a company founded on such a premise, with a slew of titles like FatWorld, Presidential Pong, and Food Import Folly. Popular pieces like Airport Security were created within weeks of new legislation on aviation carry-ons, as the "video game equivalent of an editorial cartoon". Reviews from the New York Times revealed some of the power of the medium to force players to experience a situation. "I’ll just say it’s somewhat stupid, and requires fast reflexes and an ability to adapt to absurd and arbitrary rules changes. Just like real airport security." Strangely Bogost doesn't see any ethical dilemmas in developing a variety of commercial games for clients like dessert chain Cold Stone, or creating "Xtreme Errands" for hulking SUV Jeep, which "challenges players to complete tasks utilizing the unique features of this vehicle."


Gonzalo Frasca's first game "Kabul Kaboom!" was entirely produced on a coast to coast flight. "I was disgusted at seeing how the most powerful country on Earth was bombing the crap out of one of the poorest, so I created this game. I wasn't expecting much when I posted it online, but after a few days it had several thousands players from all over the world and this encouraged me to keep using videogames as a form of political expression and experimentation." Frasca's game "September 12th" was a seminal work of the genre, mixing easily accessible web-based play with a controversial political message that still causes hate-mail to this day.

Sadly, designers and developers in the New Zealand Game Developers Association don't seem to stray outside the commercial box. One of the few major studios, Wellington-based Sidhe Interactive pumps out titles like "GripShift" and "Rugby League 2" as well as aligned properties like "Jackass: the video game". Straylight studios major effort has been a 2d multiplayer battleship game, Star-Tag, and Binary Star's rather traditional looking "Homeland" has been in progress for years.

For more 'meaningful' games, check out: Operation Pedopriest, Ayiti: The cost of life, The McGame, and PeaceMaker.

Artists give it away with new distribution models

I'm moving down the form mechanically, name, email, credit card details. It's your standard online order form. Almost. Next to "price" is a blank field and a ? mark. Clicking it reveals a message "It's up to you", and clicking again reiterates, as if it reassure the awestruck digital consumer, "No really. It's up to you."

The work is Radiohead's latest independently released album, "In Rainbows". Following the completion of their 5 deal contract with UK based Parlophone, the band known for innovation is finally matching their model with their music, throwing down the gauntlent to a recording industry which has been defensive and slow.

Pay What you Want isn't giving it away or donation, a model which bloggers and digital service owners frequently use, asking visitors to "consider" giving via PayPal or other means. By stepping punters through standard credit card forms before they get the goods, Radioheads organisation WASTE sets up an expectation and a context of exchange, however little.

Not that giving it away is pointless. The net is full of success stories of artists working the sharing, viral nature of the medium to their advantage. When Bloc Party played their first series of shows in New York, they were amazed to find fans singing along to song that weren't even released - but that had been leaked months before. OK Go are the treadmilling poster boys for this model, rising from obscurity to fame almost overnight through their innovative music video, which has received 23,282,615 views on YouTube.


Free Culture at NYU ran a Creative Commons art show giving rights to viewers, a model which New Zealander Adam Hyde regularly propounds through initiatives like FLOSS Manuals ("free manuals for free software") and streaming radio workshops. Also locally, we're talking with Annie Bradley about a screensaver work which could be distributed at a Window opening. Picking up on the office theme of the piece, visitors could potentially have it downloaded onto a USB key drive or iPod or burnt to a blank CD.

Quick Take: Virtual Pay? Virtual Strike

During negotiations with IBM, the union representing workers for the Italian branch of the computer giant asked for a salary increase. The request was denied, and the usual "performance bonus" incentives canceled. In response, the Italian union, together with Union Network International, have planned a virtual strike to occur in Second Life next week.

Interested residents can teleport to Commonwealth Island, where they're armed with a strike kit: from a UNI t-shirt, to signs stating "Our demand was...." and even giant animated fish which can be carried like balloons.

Gimmicky? Sure. Virtually useless? Not at all. What UNI understands is that the virtual can swing the physical - global media will ignore a local computer branch in Italy, but a strike via the transnational Second Life is both bizaare and compelling. From Information Week to The Register, ABC Spain to Radio Canada, UNI received the awareness which is so vital for activism.

Mediating the environment

Open on a shot of a kid walking the street with a black backpack, followed with a handheld videocam. He reaches his destination and unzips the bag. Spraycans? Homemade bombs? Surprise, sliding out of the bag is a digital projector. Snaking a cord to a nearby lamppost, the kid's just created a 50 foot screen - and an audience.

Years ago you'd have to know these guys personally. With the internet they can share it with interested artists and activists from Sydney to Paris - 8 in-depth steps on Instructables, including all the gear, best locations via Google Maps, and open-source code written in C++.

What's interesting here are not the tags themselves (sometimes juvenile or straight digital translations) , or the illegal buzz associated with it. Look past that, and you'll find kids mediating their environment - 'growing' generative graphics on slick corporate hotels, talking back to patronising billboards, humanising concrete with colour and line.


In the past this took the form of physical modifications. Modernisms famous whipping boy is the story of Le Corbusiers houses for factory workers in Pessac. Almost as soon as they were built, workers added shutters, paint, and knick-knacks to personalise their 'machines for living in'. In the future, this might be more abstract - students escaping their 30 square apartments in Auckland for a simulated or gaming world which is more expansive, both conceptually and in terms of 'space'.

TradeMe eats itself: Auction sites reused by artists

William Boling is an accomplished photographer. He studied drawing and painting at Georgia State University and L'Ecole Des Beaux Arts in Rennes, France. Featured on both Rhizome and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Boling's studies of time and place are restrained and rigorous. But for this latest series of work, he didn't travel or scout locations. He surfed.

Finding and pairing objects from both TradeMe and it's U.S. counterpart, eBay, Boling created a series of odd couples - dress shoes and deer hooves, paintings and princess diana posters. Through Window, he's printed these and auctioning them off over the next month. To complicate matters, he's then taking the screenshots, emails, and user feedback involved in the first phase, compiling them into 3 books, and auctioning these off at the end of the project.

And while this is new terrain for photography, subverting web services and highlighting art as commodity has cropped up in other places recently. Daniel Malone purchased space for himself to promote his recent Gambia Show, "Black market next to my name". An upcoming show at Te Tuhi will also utilise TradeMe extensively. Austrian artists Alessandro Ludovico and Paolo Cirio staged "Google Will Eat Itself" a couple years ago, filtering funds received from Google AdWords to purchase stock in the global search giant.

Update: Emil McAvoy's "Better Work Stories" series follows this pattern, confronting TradeMe buyers with disturbing history both old and new: 1981 Springbok riots and police rape allegations. His "Police Baton sculpture for sale" features 3 batons in red, white and blue, incorporating molds of the artist's penis. Current bid: $1,010.00.

Playing the Players: Subverting gameplay

Players login to a games server, spawn and start purchasing semi-automatic weapons and grenades in preparation for the standoff. They're playing Counter-strike, a now dated game that retains a diehard group of fans years on. They swap tips: turn graphics down to up your framerate, fire machine guns in short bursts to increase accuracy - anything to give them an edge in this hardcore FPS (first person shooter) featuring terrorist/counter terrorist squads. But some players have different ideas.

Recipe for Heart Stand-in by A.M.S.

1. Ask the members of your Counter-Strike team, (must be at least 14), Counter-Terrorist or Terrorist, to stand in a large, low, flat open area in the game that can be viewed from above.
2. Arrange everyone to stand in the shape of a heart. Do not move or return fire.
3. On all player chat send out the message repeatedly: "Love and Peace"
4. Retain position stoicly.

Terms for this type of behaviour are as wide ranging as the 'interventions' themselves - griefing, meta-games, performance. Wikipedia states that, "In this meta-game, there are no rules of engagement, and the objective is to make someone else miserable." Microsoft shifts the definition of griefer to being "plain cyberbullies" and perceives the behaviour and the players as purely negative; "ne'er-do-wells".

Projects like Velvet Strike (mentioned above) use political reasoning to justify their actions, launching into a treatise on Post 911 America, violence, realism, and the shooter genre. Some players want to test others, like Sims blocking paths for other sims. Others use this behaviour to explore gameplay and systems. One player of the experimental narrative game Facade explains. "The first time I played Facade, a friend who was with me asked, 'So, how are you going to play first time through?' 'I’m gonna break this f***er,' I replied."

Lisa Galarneau, member of the GamesLab at the University of Waikato, sees this behaviour as positive, experimental catharsis, saying "....how often do we get to see what happens when we are jerks to others? One of my hypotheses is that there is not so much a griefer archetype, so much as there are people who play at griefing just to see what happens when they do." Her article entitled "Is it really so bad to be bad?" elaborates: "Isn't it better to take out my aggressions in some PvP (editor: Player versus Player) rather than beating my wife or kids, or pulling someone out of their car and beating the bejeezus out of them when they cut me off in traffic? The world is a horrible, frustrating place. Where else is that anger going to go?"

3 Interventions: Undermining the digital landscape

Came up with a few ideas last weekend on actions to highlight power structures in the online space. If Web 2.0 means the Time Person of the Year is me, then how can I use my authorship as an activist? (3 of 6 total)


Me vs. Google AdWords. Works like Google will Eat Itself and Cory Arcangel's Kurt Cobain's Suicide Letter vs. Google AdSense exposed the weaknesses in keyword based revenue. Exploit.

Mistag Flickr images. Most tags for photos are relatively benign and objective ("red","apple","landscape"). What happens when these becomes value judgements ("freedom","terror", and "perfect")?

MySpace puppet. Users on sites like Bebo, Facebook, and MySpace manipulate representation and identity to show themselves as they want others to see them. NZ/London artist Leon Tan has proposed a single identity/page controlled by many, while NYC artist Derek Lerner has extended this to his "sock puppet" Robin Astro, giving out "Robins" login info to Digg, YouTube, Wikipedia, and Second Life. Exploit.