 |
A
collaborative project developed with Markus Miessen which created an
unsolicited monument proposal for the International Telecommunications
Union (ITU) after an investigation about Internet goverance and site blocking
politics.
The installation is comprised of an LED Ticker Screen,
a take-away brochure and photos/renderings of the monument proposal.
The ITU initiates summits and conferences around the world to address
emerging communications technologies and their employment. Notably, ITU
has partnered with the UN in 2003 and 2005, in organizing the World Summit
on the Information Society (WSIS) in Geneva and Tunis.
As a mobile entity,
the monument travels alongside the conferences organized by ITU and is
installed on both the facade of conference facilities, as well as the interior
spaces of the proceedings. The monument adapts to the specific architecture
of the location and takes new forms upon each iteration. The ticker-tape
LED displays depict, in realtime, blocked web sites internet users have
attempted to access, as well as blocked Keyword/Chat/SMS terms (as seen
from nations with highly advanced filtering technologies). The display
operates as a live repository of forbidden searches.
Adopting the real-time
Keyword displays as is infamously found in several Google offices, we propose
to also display the queries that are never or only selectively returned.
The title of the monument borrows from terminology used by some national
firewalls, who mask their filtering practices by serving up web pages reading “Host
not Found” or “Connection Timeout”. Likewise, the monument
references the history of “moral monitoring” by referring to
Anthony Comstock’s (of the Comstock Act) founding of the New York
Society for the Suppression of Vice (NYSSV), in 1873.
|
|
