(2007) Dissidents and Restrictions In the mean time, in the so-called "free world", things are not all as free as they might seem to be. Especially since 9-11, walls have been erected and cameras have been placed so that our every move can be traced. Content and behaviour of everyday internet use is progressively monitored. And although as a result issues of privacy are becoming more relevant by the day, the sheer violations of our private sphere is not something that is broadly discussed in our media. Also our online identities are not as unrestricted as we believe them to be. Yes, the popular myth of the internet promises us a space/place where we can be who we want to be and act anyway we want to act. In reality our online behaviour and the ways in which we are represented in the digital sphere are socially constructed and our movement is restricted accordingly. This ranges from openly stated rules of play such as the terms of agreement that users must sign to participate in Second Life to forms of self-censorship that inhibit a truly free expression of the possibilities that an avatar can have in such a digital environment. Economic rules policed by Linden Labs (SL owners) further restrict the range of movement. Many initiatives have started to circumvent internet censorship, such as Psiphon, a human rights software project developed by the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies, allows citizens in uncensored countries to provide unfettered access to the Net through their home computers to friends and family members who live behind firewalls of states that censor. Psiphon turns a regular home computer into a personal, encrypted server capable of retrieving and displaying web pages anywhere. Other projects, such as the one by govcom.org's "Leaky Content" internet censorship research project help you to find blocked or censored content on non-blocked sites. Streamtime.org, provides a platform for the production of content and networks in the fields of media, arts, culture and activism in crisis areas, like for example Iraq. The project www.open-search.net proposes to build a distributed, peer-to-peer, search-engine. By combining the already existing technologies of peer-to-peer file storage, distributed crawling and peer-to-peer searching, they hope to solve the problems inherent to a centralised search-engine: manipulation, censorship and profiling. Nart Villeneuve's Internet Censorship Explorer and EPIC's Censorware project, likewise aim to raise awareness for this issue. Impakt Online's Dissidents and Restrictions theme focuses on projects that deal with restrictions and rebellion. Programmers are building viruses for Second Life. Scientists have developed a virus for the biometric passport, bloggers from censored parts of the world have high rankings in technorati. A diverse selection of artist and artgroups were contacted to present their work for this Impakt Online presentation. Some of them present their work for the first time others made special modifications for the Impakt Online and again others showed long forgotten but appropriate and well-timed projects.  Gazira Babeli (works) Gazira Babeli (Gaz) is a code performer born in Second Life on 31 March 2006. In his work he is always exploring the different layers of poweroperating ...  Linda Hilfling (works) Did you mean: "Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/index.html A search engine is ...  Impakt Online would like to offer a series of links to projects that are considered to be a substantial addition to the Dissidents & Restrictions theme. All of ...  Dominik Bartkwoski (works) The representation of lust and desire has its own specific visual language. A language that is not neutral, but colored by moral codes. When applied to the ...  A Few Questions about Chroma By Annet Dekker Dominik Bartkowski grew up in Poland and France, he holds a degree in Graphic Design From Le ...  A Few Questions about the Misspellings GeneratorInterview by Sabine NiedererSabine Niederer: Where are you from and what's your artistic background?Linda Hilfling: I am from Denmark, ... |
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