Free Talk on 'Spook', Surveillance and Net Art, NCAD Thursday 6.30pm

national | miscellaneous | news report Tuesday February 19, 2002 18:39 by irishhead - ncadsu ncadsu at hotmail dot com

Conor McGarrigle giving a talk on Net Art and his 'Spook' project, Thursday 6.30pm in NCAD

Conor McGarrigle is coming to NCAD to give a free public talk on Net Art, Surveillance and his 'Spook' project this Thursday 21st Feb at 6.30 pm. The talk is open to the public. Read more about him below or check out spook at http://www.stunned.org/spook/

Conor McGarrigle recently reached the one million-impression mark for his ongoing, on-line interactive net.art piece entitled 'Spook' on the Stunned ArtZine (http://www.stunned.org). His piece utilises the unique technology of robots to counter-survey those that may be snooping around his site. Robots are software programs used mainly by search engines to comb the Internet looking for documents and their web addresses. Robots automatically follow hyperlinks from one document to the next around the Web and when a robot discovers a new site, it sends information back to its main site to be indexed.
Some index every word in a document; others index only the document title. McGarrigle used his 'Spook' piece to explore issues of surveillance, tracking and covert activity on the web, an issue that is of great interest to anyone who is concerned with privacy issues on the web. On June 1st 1999 an unusual pattern of hits was noticed on his server.
The Stunned ArtZine, a contemporary visual art site, began to receive a large number of hits from military sites, specifically a server known by the identifier "gate1.mcbbutler.usmc.mil".
In response to this McGarrigle established his own Spook-Bot™ that visits and indexes (in some cases downloads completely) all sites visited by this military server. The returned information is then posted on the site in an attempt to try to establish a purpose for this activity. Combined as a visual piece it makes for very interesting and surreal viewing.
As McGarrigle puts it "Spook has a performance element to it, a cyber performance if you like. There is an interesting kind of interactivity that blurs the obvious boundaries of paranoids, artists and the military." As with all great art, McGarrigle sees this piece as a mirror to social issues that the public are largely unaware of or simple choose to ignore. "My question is whether it is not better to signal displeasure at being monitored than passively allow it to happen? I believe so. Privacy should not be something that's considered only after it's been breached" he says.