[NetBehaviour] darknetart

[Rob Myers]

On 11/02/12 17:52, ruth catlow wrote:
> 
> Do you have an answer to your own question?
>>Where is the darknetart?

I don't know yet. :-)

> and if you could point to darknetart from here (in the dim light) would
> it still be darknetart?

Well...

It's very easy to identify people who try to conceal their identities.
Ignoring compromised Tor nodes and TCP packet timing, text analysis and
visual stylometry can fingerprint creative individuals. We all have our
tells.

And if we create work on the darknet then post to a mailing list saying
"hey! this is me on the darknet!" then obviously that's fail as a
technically effective anonymity measure.

We don't have to be Banksy in order to make work using darknets that is
politically useful and artistically interesting. That kind of
psuedonymity would help, though.

> the thought of an anonymous audience is an intriguing one too.

Anonymous audiences on the internet tend to trolling.

But there are ways of dealing with this (see 4chan or Slashdot,
historically).

An anonymous audience is a mass or a multitude, presumably?

> i think that one of the powerful attractors of the early Internet
> netartists and especially net.artists (apart from the heroic thrills of
> pioneering in 'virgin' territory) was that it provided 1) the means to
> occupy the attentions of unimaginable audiences 2) to insert themselves
> into a new branch of the artistic canon (often while artfully disdaining
> it) 3) performing on and shaping new social spaces.

Yes it's the undefined nature of the space that I see as an important
commonality. And its possible importance for some kind of future
audience or social relations, protecting privacy and free communication
against commodification.

> In the lightnet 1) we are all audiences in a phase of serious attention
> entropy 2) art is almost entirely marketised (thanks for the recent
> exposition by NBers in this
> http://www.furtherfield.org/netbehaviour/worries-about-blacklists
> conversation) and we don't hear much critique of the artistic canon
> these days

Theorists got fed up with "art about art". It gets in the way of
ventriloquism.

> 3) we can still act on (both perform and shape) networked
> social space but our actions are increasingly restricted by the
> expectations of well trained socialmedia users and threat of
> corporate-sponsored censorship with (recently postponed) SOPA and PIPA
> bills etc.

Old media wants to turn the internet into broadcast media.

New money wants to turn the internet into unpaid labour.

Big government wants to turn the internet into a panopticon.

Small-minded politics wants to turn the internet into a hate rally.

Where these all meet is, yes, in censorship.

> Art in the shadows is an intriguing proposition.

It is. Imagine MANIK shocking without it affecting (or being affected
by) perception of their public persona, Mezangelle being read without
reading through any ideas about who Mez may be, links being posted
without knowing who they're from...

> Let's go!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypherspace

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnunet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.onion

> (but I probably won't 'see' you there)
> : )

Some sort of sonar, possibly. Like bats...

http://grathio.com/2011/08/meet-the-tacit-project-its-sonar-for-the-blind/

:-)

- Rob.