Tactical Art in Virtual Space-2

A Place Made of Space

De Certeau's distinction between place and space - one importantly adopted by the anthropologist of 'supermodernity' Marc Auge- will be helpful when determining the nature of the tactical mode in net art. Place, for de Certeau, describes the coexistence of things determined by their respective occupation of an exclusive location. And conversely, that location is reciprocally defined by a thing's occupation of it. In short, ''the law of the 'proper' rules in the place.'' (This 'properness' is partly responsible for Auge's positing of 'place' as a form of resistance to the deterritorialised disorientation of supermodernity). Space, by contrast, is ''composed of intersections of mobile elements'' it ''occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalise it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs of contractual proximities.'' De Certeau essentialises this difference by drawing an analogy to the difference between langue and parole. Tactics is then, nearly by defninition, a spatial mode, and one through which place is practiced and experienced.

But what could be said to constitute a place on the Internet? The word 'site', which in ordinary speech would designate a precise location in space, doubles as the technical term used to indicate a particular digital file or 'information object' which is only ever viewed in the form of a reassemblage. That is to say, what we view in our browser window is the software's interpretation of a set of instructions - a string of 0s and1s. On the Internet, although things can be designated a coordinate (an IP number or URL) nothing can ever be said to occupy a unique location. But even if we accept the distinction made by de Certeau and Marc Auge regarding place and space, and even though a website no longer occupies a singular location in the manner of a physical object, it is still possible to see its equivalence to place. As with place, we know what we have to do to get there, as with place we can compare the experience of having been there with others, as with place our knowledge of it is always existential, dynamised by our passage across it, inflected with our intentions towards it, coloured by our encounters within it. But crucially, unlike place, we cannot build a sense of identity around a site on the Internet, we cannot belong to it and least of all attach foundation narratives to it. We cannot feel within it the echo of what Augedescribes as 'anthropological place'.

Quoting from the ethnologist Marcel Mauss, Augediscusses the part-fictional character of anthropological place in terms of the relationship of what the former terms 'average man' to the territory he inhabits. This man is born into a closed world, founded 'for once and all' and inscribed so deeply upon him that it does not have to be consciously understood. The 'total social fact' subsumes within itself any interpretation of it that its indiginous members may have: ''The 'average' man resembles 'almost all men in archaic or backward societies' in the sense that, like them, he displays a vulnerability and permeability to his immediate surroundings that specifically enable him to be defined as 'total''' . As we shall see presently, the connection between environmental permeability and a particular kind of identity are important subjects for the tactical practice of net art. The level of imperviousness which characterise the 'average' user's relation to the Net is a point of investigation for these self-conscious tacticians attempting to create a more bruising encounter between the space of the Net and its subject. In order to become the producer of an idiolect (the personal/tactical mode of enunciation formed within imposed stricutures), the subject must become sensible to the particularities of their environment and confident of their ability to find their own passage through it.

In 1996, the Swiss net art group cum spoof 'corporation' Etoy targeted the supposedly neutral zone of the search engine with their artwork Digital Hijack . Search engines are some of the most frequently 'visited' sites on the Net with Altavista already drawing 32 million users per day by September 98. They act as huge centres of traffic convergence in the supposedly decentralised structure of the Net, but notably - similarly to airports -cannot be described as places of gathering. Although visitors frequently return, it is not in order to find something rooted in a singular location or to meet other visitors, but rather to use a service that spatialises the rest of the Net through the production of a set of URLs. Hartmut Winkler attributes their popularity to their perceived neutrality: ''Offering a service as opposed to content, they appear as neutral mediators.'' It is precisely because the search engine serves as a portal to elsewhere that it becomes a heavily frequented site. For this reason we can see the search engine as the quintessence of the transformation of place into space, or the predication of place on space in the Net. The fact that a site's centrality is directly related to its distributive capacity tells us a great deal about the way in which spatial practices on the Net are characterised by passage rather than settlement . Nothing could be further from the permeability of the subject to anthropological place than the indifference of the Net user to the putative neutrality of the search engine website.

And it is precisely this neutrality that Etoy singled out for attack in their Digital Hijack. In tune with Winkler's criticisms, Etoy created a mechanism for alerting people to their passive acceptance of the search engine's mode of selecting and hierachising URLs. The actual method of aggregating and organising websites in accordance with the user's keyword is, in reality, anything but exhaustive or disinterested. In the early days of search engines, some companies (such as Yahoo) paid employees to categorise websites 'by hand', thus making available only a tiny proportion of the total number of websites on the Net. Of course what was made available was the final result of a series of subjective choices and corporate categorisations made by a team of coders. The subsequent automation of this process has not, however, resulted in any fundamental increase in accuracy, comprehensiveness or compatibility between the keyword and the list of URLs displayed in response . Unable to master complex linguistic issues such as syntax, and therefore unable to interpret the meaning of strings of search terms, many search algorithms will simply prioritise URLs according to the number of times the search terms are mentioned.

This is just one example of how the map of the the WWW produced by the search engine is deficient and, more importantly for us, how the system is vulnerable to manipulation. Realising this point of leverage, Etoy began to analyse the top 20 sites returned by search engines in response to some of the most popular search terms such as 'porsche, penthouse, madonna, fassbinder' . Essentially, Etoy found a way to manipulate the system by updating an older practice called spamdexing. This is a simple 'hacker's' trick by which a keyword is inserted repeatedly into an HTML document to ensure that a website is featured high up in the search engine display hierarchy . Etoy used their 'Ivana bot' (probably an algorithm) to analyse the particular combination of keywords embedded in the top 20 websites returned to a keyword such as 'porsche' and then mimicked it. They then generated thousands of 'dummy trap' pages each of which contained combinations of thousands of popular keywords, thus ensuring that the pages would be returned in the top 20 category of myriad word searches. For a short period after March 1996, surfers using search engines were regularly 'hijacked' by dummy trap pages which, far from displaying information about a desirable car or popstar would harass hostages with the message: ''Don't fucking move - this is a digital hijack by etoy.com''.
If the hostage/viewer decided to follow the links through the website, they would first discover what number hostage of the Etoy 'organisation' they were, then view an animated graphic image file (GIF) of a shaven-headed Etoy member in dark glasses and ambiguously plugged into a cable at the navel , and finally receive a blunt mission statement:

''It is definitely time to blast action into the Net! Smashing the boring style of established electronic traffic channels.

Welcome to the Internet Underground''.

Today, after the search engines succeeded in terminating Etoy's action, the statement posted on a sample site concludes:

''Although officially stopped, we cannot protect you from getting hijacked. We lost control.