The Internet World Tour

The Internet World Tour

Mini interview with tsunamii.net by Are Flagan

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The artist duo tsunamii.net consists of Charles Lim Yi Yong and Tien Woon.
Their work uses various communication devices and protocols to explore the
interplay between physical and virtual space, so it may serve as a textbook
introduction to say that they hail from Singapore and are found, of course,
at http://www.tsunamii.net. In the ongoing "alpha" series, which is upgraded
in version numbers as the core project evolves and changes, they started off
with a Webwalkabout in 3.0: a Global Positioning System (GPS) device tracked
a walker through a Singapore housing estate and triggered web sites
contextually related to geographical locations in the walker's path. The
alpha 3.4 upgrade, following an intermediary 3.3 undertaking, became a hit
at last falls Documenta 11. Charles and Tien followed a similar conceptual
trajectory and walked from Kassel to Kiel in the company of a GPS device, a
mobile phone and a server that triggered longitude and latitude derived IP
changes to a browser in the Documenta gallery space. Their love affair with
telecommunication and its effects further came to an eponymous "Crush" in
version 3.5, when remote traffic to a server logged its programmed
destruction in an industrial press. Alpha 3.8 Translocation is currently in
development with the support of Walker Art Center and the Jerome Foundation.

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Question:
Since you title your work in a manner akin to software upgrades, it may be
interesting to ask what the release notes and read_me file for version 3.8
would say?

Charles:
The last few projects in the ongoing alpha series all centered around
"programs" to drive the work. Tien likes to think of them collectively as
real-time performances facilitated, or rather made possible, by a computer.
Although the ubiquitous read_me files were present to present the
circumstances of what was taking place, at any given time before, during and
after launch, it seems important to note that the term "alpha," as in the
pre-release position and condition that usually follows the public feedback
of "beta," is the tech-talk way of saying that these programs and
performances are crucially not singular instances, or works, resolved in one
place at one time. They fluidly coexist in and among vectors and planes at
the intersections of the virtual and real.

For alpha 3.8 Translocation there will be little central programming
involved, except for a simple traceroute utility. Over the course of a year,
we will migrate our hosting of tsunamii.net from webserver to webserver to
cover 44 countries, starting and ending in Singapore. The site will remain
the same, but DNS changes will reflect our changing location. Visitors,
however, will only be able to resolve any discernible difference via
traceroute. Here the actual "programming," if one can elevate the
implementation of one command to this level, is not actually necessary for
the concept to take root, but it usefully serves to "illustrate" the idea.

Tien:
Although I think any read_me files were and are practical, and in a rather
humorous twist theoretical, supplements to these programs, I do not think
that there is much to distill from them compared to the implementation of
the actual "software" projections. We were mainly concerned with the actual
processes of these programs, rather than their aesthetic explanations and
general friendliness toward non-users – to turn that leading aphorism of
the computer age around a little. For example, the webwalker programs were
really only used by us to, on a technical level, manipulate the dichotomy of
the "virtual" versus the "real," by keying in new IP numbers or URLs for an
Internet browser based on geographical location. And here we return to what
Charles has already touched upon: I feel that the alpha series emerges in
the interstitial spaces that combine physical installations and performances
with computer programs and networking. It originated from us asking some
fundamental questions about the Internet and looking at the spaces, in every
pluralistic sense of that troublesome allocation, it renders invisible.
Every one of our undertakings has both in effect and affect had a certain
ping and traceroute facility about it. Like acupuncture for the Internet,
the project inserts itself to stimulate and realize calculated responses
across the network.

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Question:
If we stay with the upcoming alpha 3.8 Translocation, it appears that simply
returning the traceroute entry, perhaps with a parallel WHOIS lookup,
primarily serves to resolve your current hosting situation geographically
from a technical point of view. Although this impressive server migration
qualifies to become a logistical miracle for cyberspace, akin to the Jules
Verne challenge of traversing the Earth in 80 days, I am not quite sure how
much it actually tells us about the varying conditions of the Internet
around the globe. We know, for example, that a basic broadband connection
can cost many times more in Africa than it does in the United States; we
know that the extremely low baud rate of dial-up accounts in many places
makes graphical content nigh impossible to access; and we know that the cost
of web hosting in many countries with a developing ICT infrastructure is
extortionate. Are you planning to integrate such concerns and consequences
into your IP travels?

Tien:
Yes, we are very interested in such concerns and alpha 3.8 is really all
about the consequences, a pragmatic project setting out to uncover and deal
with them. Often ISPs and other companies in the technology sector produce
ads that show the world seamlessly connected through the network and thus
give the impression, or rather creates the illusion, that the Internet is
indeed a perfectly flat and level structure. We are interested in creating a
situation where the user can experience and ponder the various "textures"
within the Net and appreciate how they interweave.

In addition to the traditional issues of access, usually revolving around
cost and speed in the proportional pricing of bandwidth, I feel that alpha
3.8 focuses on the web hosting aspects in particular. As we migrate the
geographical location of the server that host the project site,
http://www.tsunamii.net, the connection of the user depends on the path
between their ISP and the latest stop on our strangely static worldwide tour
of the Internet. In other words, your location in relation to the site
location effectively plays an important role in what kind of service you
actually get from the server. The focus on hosting also brings in a host of
other concerns related to the ownership of content, the circumvention of
national and cultural borders, and legal jurisdictions that have
proliferated lately. The traceroute utility planned for the site, intended
to keep track of our project and progress, is of course quite superfluous on
some level; it can even be replaced by any other traceroute utility, of
which there are many. Our point is simply to keep access simple for as many
visitors as possible, who may or may not be versed in the terminal commands
of their networking vocabulary. Traceroute is in many ways a very
straightforward portal to the complexity of the Internet.

For us, the most interesting aspect of the project is that the website
remains visually the same, while so much is going on behind the scenes to
maintain this uniformity. This returns to the initial questioning of a
globally undifferentiated Internet so popular in media rich Flash ads for
the new economy. Another central issue is that some countries do not even
allow open Internet access. Myanmar, for example, reserves this privilege
for workers in the government sector, while the public can buy email
accounts for US$ 150, an absolutely extortionate price (even by Western
standards). We will meticulously archive all such findings related to alpha
3.8, and it may in keeping with the alpha series lead to another work: To be
continued…

alpha 3.8 Translocation is scheduled to depart on March 31.

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tsunamii.net
http://www.tsunamii.net/

The Walker Art Center Commission
http://www.walkerart.org/gallery9/jerome/

VisualRoute Traceroute Demo
http://www.visualware.com/visualroute/livedemo.html

The Slashdot response to Alpha 3.5 Crush
http://slashdot.org/articles/02/09/08/1944257.shtml?tid