Archive for the ‘hacker’ tag
ART AND POLITICS IN THE INTERNET AGE
ART AND POLITICS IN THE INTERNET AGE
By Domenico Quaranta
© Arte e Critica. All rights reserved
“Counter communication is more global than ever… the days of off-line activists, condemned to street demonstrations and fighting to be listened to and have their arguments recognized with the press, are numbered.” Geert Lovink [1]
May 1999. In the middle of the electoral campaign George W. Bush, governor of Texas and running for the presidential elections, snapped: “there ought to be limits – there ought to be limits, to, uh, to freedom”. The blunder did not go by unnoticed, and this unhappy remark gave some of the most important American newspapers this result: an internet site, gwbush.com, created by a group of famous American pranksters, that looked like the Official Bush website but with the contents controversially modified.
This date can be taken as a symbol of a new historic phase of political activism. With the skilled use of the Web and the similarly skilled manipulation of information, the authors of the site, the collective ®™ark, have managed, at no cost, to give their operation global visibility, and to make their controversial objective the victim of his own words.
