Interview with Linda Hilfling Interview by Sabine Niederer Sabine Niederer: Where are you from and what's your artistic background? Linda Hilfling: I am from Denmark, usually living in Copenhagen, however at the moment I am situated in Rotterdam doing a master in media design at the Piet Zwart Institute. I have a background in studies of filmmaking, architecture and urbanism. SN: This work deals with internet censorship. have you made (info-) political work before? LH: Yes, regardless of whether working with physical public spaces or information structures, I am interested in the power structures inherited from the way we organize and use them. I have been working a lot with alternative ways of creating platforms for media production, for instance by activating already existing media resources such as surveillance cameras or ATM-machines - expanding or even hacking their functionality according to different local contexts. SN: Are you generally worried about information politics, censorship and privacy? LH: Coming from a Scandinavian welfare state where people are usually well aware of the right to public spaces and of public resources, I see an unlucky tendency to ignore such issues in relation to media spaces. An example is for instance the search engine - Google encourages us to "search instead of sort", but the cultural implications of the structures in which this is taking place is not evident for most people. SN: How did the misspellings generator come into being? LH: In the autumn of 2006, when doing a search in the Chinese version of Google on the Tiananmen Square Massacre, I discovered a temporary loophole out of the Google self-censorship in China. I realized that if you deliberately misspell Tiananmen it will give you access to web-pages where other people also have been misspelling Tiananmen. In that way you become able to access pictures of the demonstrations as well as the legendary image of the student in front of the tank along with snapshots of smiling tourists posing on the square. You might call this an act of accidental activism, because by writing variations like "tianamen" and "tianaman", the isolation politics of the Google spelling corrector is subverted. In order to take advantage of this informational grey-zone of misspellings, I decided to develop a misspelling search engine - an alternative search engine collecting data from the net and returning with a list of variations and deviations of the current search term. The very first version had a basic command-line interface and I wrote it in python and bash. SN: After developing it, we invited you to work on it so it could become a plugin. Could you tell us about this process and how it related to the original concept of your work? LH: The version I initially had developed was a very simple installation, it worked mainly on a conceptual and abstract level by pointing out the kind of 'corrective' info-culture regime of search engines like Google. The plugin Impakt commissioned was developed in collaboration with Erik Borra. It is now a publicly available tool. But I think it is important to note that its main strength is still as being an artistic reflection on the impact of search engines. Using it for actually evading censorship might be dangerous, as the tool is querying possible censored words several times. As Erik has pointed out it can be very useful though, for sharing copyrighted material through simple encryption, where people customize the tool and agree to communicate through specific letter mappings. SN: The misspellings generator holds an interesting paradox between enabling the user to circumvene censorship on the one hand, but on the other hand it could also be used to write spam. How do you feel about this tension in your work? LH: Of course we all have a tendency of automatically thinking that spam is bad, but in reality spam might also be thought of as an useful indicator of the premises of our communication patterns, since it always inhabits and exploits such structures. Do not just think of "v1ag12a" as a misspelled derivative of Viagra intruding your mail-box, but rather think of how spam performs the claustrophobia of everyday communication from "I have been looking for you" to "Why didn't you answer?". In this context I can easily imagine how building a tool using spam could be meaningful, just as using misspellings are paradoxically useful. SN: Some users have reported that after using the generator for a couple of weeks, google didn't work properly until they uninstalled and de-installed the plugin. Do you think Google is keeping an eye on you and the users of your tool? LH: In one way you may express it like "keeping an eye on". Though it is not like a person is literally keeping an eye on you, but rather that the control is built into the Google search engine itself. In order to avoid mis-use the engine requires any querying to go through a web-browser such as Mozilla, Explorer etc. In order to overcome this in the Misspelling-Generator, we have to pretend that the program is a user, who is using a specific browser. But sometimes if the search term is too long, the engine is able to identify the activity and it gets suspicious. In order to dismiss any possible bot-activity that would be extracting Google's data it requires you to do the typical capcha-test of verifying some random characters in order to determine whether you are human or not. SN: What are you working on at the moment? LH: I am in the middle of my final project at the Piet Zwart Institute. It is a critical investigation of participatory media platforms. I am working with tv-tv, an artist-run local tv-channel in Copenhagen. Making what you literally could call a participatory tv-"programme" - a software which executes the tv-transmission and uses the code as a reflection of the notion of mediatized democracy itself. |
|
