Re: <nettime> How We Made Our Own "Carnivore"

[Are Flagan <areflagan@mac.com>]

On 6/21/02 7:36 PM, "Florian Cramer" <cantsin@zedat.fu-berlin.de> wrote:

> The bottomline: "RSG Carnivore" is a packet sniffer for the purpose of
> creating aestheticized visualizations.

First: A word of appreciation for the technical outline Florian Cramer
provided.

Due to the _transcoding_ principle, the net art scene has of course become
inundated with projects that offer a visual and highly anesthetized
treatment/display of data streams, collected by various methods such as user
input, network sniffing, search engines, and so on. What seems almost
collectively to be lacking in this _artistic_ processing are efforts to
invoke an intelligence at the front end: why those algorithms, this
appearance, these rules? At this juncture, these endeavors may rise from the
level of ability to utility (like the FBI has made very clear). Any critique
leveled at the increased surveillance of the network must surely start from
the base presumption that the bitstream channels knowledge and not pretty
pictures for the screen.

-af



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