etoy
the digital hijack
0. the digital hijack, online action, 1996, local version
1. http://digitalhijack.org
online version [owned by the etoy.HOLDING]
2. http://www.hijack.org online
version [owned by the etoy.VENTURE-ASSOCIATION]
3. the digital hijack 1996, .zip version to download
3. the digital hijack 2 / dh2, conceptual work by etoy.BRAINHARD
/ HANS BERNHARD, capetown / southafrica, 2000
3. local version
3. online version
3. .zip version to download [without .mov]
comment:
early MEDIA HACKING by etoy, HANS BERNHARD, e01, etoy.BRAINHARD, etoy.HANS
etoy * THE DIGITAL HIJACK
"Joyriding the datahighway" - Basics on THE DIGITAL HIJACK
etoy: http://www.etoy.com
Original Web site: http://www.hijack.org
etoy's TANKSYSTEM: http://fanclub.etoy.c3.hu/tanksystem/
Digital Hijack 2: http://www.digitalhijack.org/dh2
The Digital Hijack was an act of
deliberate sabotage of one of the most important tool for
the common Internet user: the search engine. In the first days of the Internet
age, it was
one of the most relevant tools for creating hierarchy within the informations
you could get
on the Internet and an instrument of control and regulation of your behaviour.
Nothing new, every info-gate plays its game. DH principally aimed at challenging
a social
use of the net through search engines: what was at stake was the role of the
'user' of the net
(that in etoy's vision had not to be a simple 'user' at all).
So, as the cultural role of the search engine was hijacking people's attention
through
(impersonally) selected social knowledge, etoy decided to hijack users by their
own.
Operationally, etoy wants to interfere into the process of management of informations,
playing an active role within the conceptual machine of search engines: web
page screening,
indexing and results hierarchical displaying. Is Internet simply an archive
or a new
revolutionary and still hybrid mass medium? The answer is today pretty clear
and the
results achieved, but in 1995 this looked like a cultural battle still to be
fighted.
In a moment when the WWW was just starting being populated with branded sites
and the
interfaces were more and more quickly achieving graphical features, etoy imagines
the
Internet as a stage for a 'total action' (ever heard about the 'total work of
art'?). In etoy's
words it becomes 'action entertainment': a mass show that hits people individually
by
making them lose control of their actions while innocently (too innocently....)
navigating
the net and searching for (not really innocent) topics.
Hacking here is still a metaphor but a good one: etoy did enter a system, that
is not a
server (like in the 'old school' server hacking) but a two-sided cultural artifact,
made -
on the one side - by designing a tool of selection and hierarchization and -
on the other side -
on a social use of this tool.
THE DIGITAL HIJACK recipe
- Hacker-like attitude
- Pop culture as field of action
- Understanding Internet as medium
- Mis-use brand power (etoy.TANKSYSTEM)
- Legal sabotage: forcing the search engine way of processing informations through
intelligent agents
- On the side of the user: the hijack alert and modifications on browser proper
functioning
- Common people's reactions
- Reactions from hackers world
source: d-i-n-a.net / http://www.d-i-n-a.net/dina/hijack.html
/ by vanni brusadin
and http://www.fiftyfifty.org/hack_tech/txt_hijack.html
copyright 2002 HANS BERNHARD