Error 404 Magazine by Danni Sue Design

Internet as Artifact

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The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had. <Eric Schmidt/> Our history is defined by artifacts. Cuneiform & hieroglyph. Victorian ephemera and 90’s paste-board ‘zines. A tangible object hood that persists despite the recesses of environment or time, fragile collections of human experiences one can touch, or destroy. An immortality beyond the flesh. But what of the internet? What artifacts do the tubes of cyberspace hold, its servers of content existing like flotsam, saved only as forum archives or screen captures in broken code? The artifacts of a jpeg compression are more accessible, perhaps, than any virgin webpage or pre-rich html site. It’s a collective marked by AOL chat rooms and dead links, gone to waste through its very function of existing in the present. Never in a past. How will we preserve this internet? Not through its own means; the cloud is nebulous and fragile, data is omnipresent and easily deleted with the stroke of a finger. The crash of a hard drive. We need more than back-ups. We need new contexts of paper, pulp & print. Through punch cards and CMYK dot patterns. An existence marked by technology and communities, its memories uploaded into our memories and downloaded into synapses and ink splatters. Ever breathing. Ever breaching. Where does the internet go, once our computers are asleep? This is a publication of hackers & electric sheep.

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a year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace

hope fading nightly // all the speed he took

all the turns he’d taken +

the corners he’d cut in Night City he’d still see the matrix in his sleep bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void

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Data

Slut

Photography

Liberation

Hannah

Schwob

New

World

Madison

Disorder

Behringer

would virus

rather than a

be goddess

a â&#x2013;&#x161;

Who inhabits cyberspace? Are they expansive corporations, monopolies of bandwidth and dot.com bubbles peppering our internet infrastructure in a new form of diagonal integration? Are they hackers, designers or engineers, streamlining objects into products of interface and interaction, a representative world built onto code? Or are they people, a populace projecting identity onto forums, establishing relationships through the medium of screen-to-screen contact, lashing out violently

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in the sub-spaces and hollows of the integrated circuit? Who inhabits cyberspace, when cyberspace inhabits you? In 1991, the internet, the quintessential network of networks, was inchoate and uncharted, channeling through phone modems, small pockets of chatrooms and messaging, data a cumbersome process to invest still. Yet, it was in this spread of data that British Cultural Theorist Sadie Plant identified a sea-change at play: cyberfeminism. A cultish group of advocates, artists, dissenters, thinkers and computational agents, the underground that had previously belonged to anarchist theorists such as Situationist International now lingered in the hollows of standard internet protocol suites (TCP/IP). These individuals were forging an avant garde not unlike

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characters within the peculiar prose of William Gibson or Joanna Russ, a cyberculture beyond any totem of fashion or political alliance seen before. It was a community of connection, a matrix of the faceless, mixing politics/art/criticism into a new sort of spirituality more similar to the nationalistic revolutions of the 1800’s than any populist movement of the 20th century. An oppositional and cultural critique of the so-called cyberpunk subculture of the 1980’s, this antimisogynist, inherently queer and unabashedly global cohort first collectively gathered under the masthead of the VNS Matrix. From Leonardo, MIT’s arts journal, in 1998: “[their] question is not one of dominance and control or of submission and surrender to machines; instead it is one of exploring alliances, affinities, and

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VNS Matrix: Matrix: VNS CYBERFEMINIST MANIFESTO MANIFESTO CYBERFEMINIST FOR THE 21ST CENTURY FOR THE 21ST CENTURY We are the modern cunt positive anti reason We are the modern cunt unbounded unleashed positive anti reason unforgiving unbounded unleashed unforgiving we see art with our cunt we see art with ourwecunt make art with our cunt we make art with our cunt we believe in jouissance we believe in jouissance madnessmadness holiness and poetry holiness and poetry we are the virus of we are the virus of the new world disorder the new world disorder rupturing rupturing the symbolic from within the symbolic from within saboteurs of big daddy saboteurs of big daddy mainframe mainframe the clitoris is a direct line to the matrix VNS MATRIX terminators of the moral codes terminators of the moralmercenaries codes of slime mercenaries of slime go down on the altar of go down on the altar of abjection abjection probing the visceral temple probing the visceral temple we speak in tongues we speak in tongues infiltrating disrupting infiltrating disrupting disseminating disseminating corrupting the discourse corrupting the discourse we are the future cuntwe are the future cunt Manifesto first declared by VNS Matrix Manifesto first declared 1991, by VNS Matrix Adelaide & Sydney, Australia 1991,

Adelaide & Sydney, Australia

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<“Cyberfeminism is neither a theory, a picnic, nor a green crochet placemat. coevolutionary possibilities (N. Shephard) /> between women and technology.” Cyber-Feminism was not, as the first International Conference on the matter delegated, “about boring toys for boring boys.” It envisioned technology as an active playground for artists, an experimental tool that could combine art, communication, and provocation. Some of these enterprises included CD-ROMS such as Linda Dement’s “Cyberflesh GirlMonster” that were distributed through snail mail and downloaded like viruses pricked into new personal computer units, or tinkering with Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) in almost proto-Sim City and Minecraft creations. Art projects took the form of video games, including ‘All New Gen’ 1995, which featured characters in the form of “cyber sluts” and anarcho cyber-terrorists ‘hacking’ into the networks of phallic freudian power and queer gender theory. The log-in screen was no less incendiary, an arcade game asking one’s

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gender with the options ‘male’, ‘female’ or ‘neither’. How apt that the only playable option was the most subversive; only ‘neither’ could move one forward, beyond the structures of a pre-digital era. The afterwaves these artists and activists produced reverberate to this day. Anonoymity on the internet defines the user as its own hivemind. Information is remixed, and often, the personal is a subversive action. “Cyberspace has the potential,” explained the novelist B eryl Fletcher in an 1999 essay Connectivity, Critique + Creativity, “to stretch imagination + language to the limit; it is a vast library of information, a gossip session, and a politically charged emotional landscape. In short, a perfect place for feminists.” ‡

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- - - - - by Danielle Suzanne Smith ◊

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false mystifications1 The site is / plain, black serif-text against white, punctuating paragraphs with grainy gifs. The first moving image holds no qualm with the reader, the beheading brutal and quick, neck against rock against grey cloudy sky. Others follow in a similar pattern, each as focused on the gritted dread of the victims, mercy slipping like whistling wind under the thud of an axe. A snuff site perhaps, the bleeding edge of shock aesthetic too often cultivated in the gloomier channels of the internet? Yet, it ends promptly with a message: share with your friends; Facebook and Twitter icons intact. This is no Gauntlet of Death or Rotten.com, however. Simply a Vanity Fair puff piece of the latest plot developments from HBO’s Game of Thrones.

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Pixel & Spectacle of Slaughter

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The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images. â&#x2014;&#x160; Guy Debord

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This pixel-spectacle of violence clothed in cultural criticism and weekly content-clicks feels almost passe; as the five seasons of Thrones alone heralded more torture, sexual violence and dancing penises on our carefully ◊ / ◊ pirated videos than even their multiple, seemingly era-appropriate beheadings. It’s not real, as the costuming and lighting is - - - artificial and precise. It’s not real, for Sean Bean (spoiler alert) settles into new franchises and talk show rounds, the grainy / ◊ / ◊ gifs of his untimely death remixed in new shades of color and distortion by fans on tumblr, layered with quotes of “mercy.” More jarring, perhaps, remains the images distributed through channels less premium, but far more precise.

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/ “The rise of the Islamic State militant group as both a battlefield force and an Internet juggernaut... has given new urgency to a State Department effort to counter online

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militant propaganda with a U.S. messaging campaign. A U.S.-government-made video that recently made the rounds on social media — with graphic images of Islamic State executions and a beheaded body — is the best known example of the attempt to expose the brutality of

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the Islamist group and undermine its online recruitment appeals…The short video titled “Welcome to ISIL-Land” and others like it aim to counter militant propaganda by producing eye-catching online material that uses the militants’ own words or images against them…[it’s] a

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tricky line to walk, since by repurposing provocative or grisly images to discredit the groups behind them, the State Department also gives them wider distribution.” [Washington Post]

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The Islamic State, known jointly by the acronyms ISIS or ISIL, began as the group Jamaat al-Tahwid wa-i-Jihad (JTWJ), founded in 1999 by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. With connections and experience in both Jordan and Afghanistan, Zarqawi was seen perhaps as the converse of Osama Bin Laden, poor and brutal to Bin Laden’s wealth and leadership from afar. From this tale of two men, and two jihadists, we can see the path of brutality in Zarqawi’s philosophy, engaging on the front lines as well as personally carrying

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Pixel & Spectacle of Slaughter

out beheadings of captives for Al Qaeda. Despite dying in an United States airstrike in 2006, his factional group grew under new leadership as the Islamic State in Iraq (ISI), signaling a particular shift in motivations as well.

“Apart from the power struggle between ISIS and [Al Qaeda], the groups differ in their methodology. [Al Qaeda]

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favors a more gradualist approach that is willing to work with other factions and attempt to build an Islamic state later, whereas ISIS favors a more direct approach, seeking to seize territory, build a state and enforce Sharia [law] immediately.” [clarionproject]

On June 29, 2014, the first day of Ramadan, ISIS declared itself a caliphate and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as Caliph Ibrahim, calling for the immediate loyalty of all Muslims throughout the world. The Islamic State defines no distinction between religion and state, interpreting spiritual law harshly and often incorrectly. If the ‘ideals’ of ISIS are, in some way, ideologically similar to Al Qaeda,then what marks their cruelty as the more unusual? What makes their brutality terrific enough for Al Qaeda to further its opposition through an announcement of jihad? The answer lies deep within the methodology of terror, and most essentially, their methods of dissemination.

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The body had its own cultural forms. It had its own art. Executions were its tragedies, / pornography was its romance. ◊ Margaret Atwood

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branding terror3

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In a great irony, ISIS is the most modern of medieval movements. A terrorism, of the post-internet age. Propaganda is present in all ideologies, the rhetoric rich with pathos and misplaced virtue, plaintive posters of courage and fear. What marks ISIS and their efforts for recruitment is their inherent branding; this is no layman’s approach to the internet. They are a brand, as crafted as social media coordination efforts by Taco Bell, or presidential campaigns. Although not the first to dissimate through twitter or other social-media video platforms, they stand apart in a wrenching way – inherent quality of content. This morbid reality is found in the professional shooting of their “videos”, more so productions than the minutes of vertical cell-phone shots we have grown accustomed to. No more non-descript white rooms with bearded men addressing concerns; there is a script, settings, perhaps even evidence of green screen. The executions and propaganda are spectacles, meant to disorient the victims as much as the audiences, at once instilling fear and veneration with every shock of licking flame or rough-sawn knife. ISIS is a network, of rehearsals, scripts, and video editors. They even have ‘hosts’ and celebrities – Jihadi John, as called by the Western press, is a defected former British rapper turned ISIS member, his English accent disconcerting amid tapes of glorified death, settled against color balanced blue skies and saturated yellow sand dunes.

The extent of this expertise is described in the Guardian in terms that wouldn’t be alien a section over in their review of television and film. “The Clanging of the Swords IV sounds like the latest in a series of Hollywood action movies. It looks like one, too. A feature-length film released online a few weeks ago, Swords IV includes a slow-motion bomb sequence reminiscent of The Hurt Locker, aerial footage that nods to Zero Dark Thirty, and scenes filmed through the crosshairs of a sniper rifle that wouldn’t look out of place in a first-person shoot-’em-up.” Note the language in the title, Clanging of the Swords IV, as if it were a carefully scripted and plotted dvd you’d pick up at the local redbox, regaling the intended message through

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Pixel & Spectacle of Slaughter

carefully modulated imagery. This impact instills a way of looking no media studies or advertiser could misunderstand, yet it betrays the uncanny analogies at play. The lust of violence. The pornography of fear. The strange disconnection of reality and fantasy, as executions are now as false as reality television, joining slowly pushing the war porn industry into a darker mainstream consumption. Is this a product of internet culture?

shock & awe4 The history of shock websites runs concurrent to the history of the world wide web itself – the first images shared among the bare links and forums of 90’s cyber-culture were as likely to be family photos as collected gore, tit for tat taking on a more nefarious significance as each click could collect breasts, or the severing of such, in an instant. Subcultures quickly grew around these sites, including Rotten. com, Bestgore.com and early anime forums such as 4chan, as images from tubgirl to goatse. cx to 2girls1cup grew to a morbidly vaulted form of popularity, memes emerging from a vast, deep-net wasteland of bestiality, scatophilia and war porn. Such enticement can be found in the perverted makeup of human psychology – as we grow desensitized to, or perhaps due to, overwhelming onslaughts of information, we seek stimulation in more hardcore or eccentric means. The appeal of horror films or public humiliation carries over to shock material, our eyes cautiously peeking through fingers in search of new thrills, stomach sickeningdrops, and fresh ways to out-gross our friends. It’s a propaganda of the mind, hardening our expectations as we search the syntax of the web, and fail to retain empathy in the assault of representations. We are, in a sense, tangibly and emotionally removed from the reality, the screen protecting our sensations and masking the horrors into an artificial zone.

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- - - - - crap photoshop5 The artificial jolt of the shock website is among the Islamic State’s most potent, and defining tools. Through its media arm, Al Hayat, hundreds of highly publicized and distributed videos of beheadings, immolations, defenestration and mass-shooting executions are posited by political scientist Max Abrahms as a ‘means of differentiating itself from Al Qaeda’, as well as recruitment and apparatuses of terror. The justification for these beheadings is varied, ISIL claiming Koranic scripture (with passages allowing for these executions in times of war) and lists of grievances against Western Occupation. However, it’s truly an act of mere intimidation, a bullying technique to force control over local communities and the global stage. “With an act of a sword, they manage to force both [American President] Obama and [British Prime Minister] Cameron to react. The two men, who control the world's most advanced militaries, find themselves at the mercy of the sword. Both displayed physical pain and grief when they condemned the way their nationals died." [Professor Ibrahim al-Marash] Come January 2015 then, the fate of two Japanese hostages seemed equally grim, Haruna Yukawa and Kenji Goto Jogo’s lives valued at over 200 million in a video directed at the Japanese government. As a failed businessman who ventured into Syria of his own volition, and his journalist friend who attempted to help him, they had stated previously they take “full responsibility” for anything that happens, the Japanese government unable to negotiate with terrorist demands. This cruel spectacle however, was to be met with a critical deviation: the power of the populace to subvert propaganda and intention through internet culture. Japanese Twitter users, and members of 4chan forums banded together to reframe the narrative, utilizing anime and meme humor to paint the ISIS aggressors as weak, ridiculous

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Because paintings are silent and still ◊ ◊ ◊ their meaning is no longer attached to them paintings lend themselves to easy manipulation. ◊ John Berger

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Pixel & Spectacle of Slaughter

and foolish. The absurdist strains of Kawaii eyes, Naruto head swaps, cross-dressing and a rather powerful exchange of the hostage’s heads with Jihadi John, their would-be executor, fingering a line of poor taste and revolutionary empowerment, all under the sarcastic hashtag: #ISIS Crap Photoshop Grand Prix.

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These mocking images appear imprudent, shocking even, but no less so than the actual violence and brutality on display in Clashing of the Swords IV. As Mel Brooks or Charlie Chaplin noted in their satirical take downs of Hitler and fascism power isn’t necessarily inherent as much as it is imbued by others. The myth and notoriety we afford figures in our history, as well as our present, can fuel their narratives and their power, and yet, it can just as easily disable them. ISIS contains power, but it is as much self-inflated as realistic, a complicated conglomeration of leaders and groups paving executions as currency for nationhood, spreading falsehoods over social media in attempts to control more populations. The Japanese critique dismantles this egotistical, bullying display click by click, flooding social media not with images of terror, but ‘shops of humor and Japanese pride, reframing the final moments of the hostages as something with agency, beyond mere victimhood. It’s a problematic tactic perhaps, borne as much from desensitized minds and the queer gears of internet culture as from patriotic efforts. Yet, it’s a tactic nonetheless, providing the terrorized with the means to combat terror, not through denial or destruction, but amalgamations of pointed criticism, a virtual taunting of playground bullies with tangible implications. Utilizing humor, to resist being controlled by fear. Courage and irrelevancy, a true marker of the humanity lying beneath the artificial divide of computer and user, screen and heart. ◊

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- - - - - by Danielle Suzanne Smith ◊

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Comedy is protest. It's 'I beg to differ' if◊you're fancy / ◊ ◊ / or if you're Jewish, 'Hey, listen to this!' ◊ Mel Brooks ◊

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<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//404//ZINE HTML 4.01 404 Zine//EN" "http://workscited.com"> <title> Works Cited </title> </meta> 1. <Anderson, Lessley> (2012-06-13). "Snuff: Murder and torture on the internet, and the people who watch it". The Verge. 2. <Ashcraft, Brian.> "Japanese Twitter Users Stand Up to ISIS With...a Photoshop Meme." Kotaku. Gawker Media, n.d. Web. 3. <Broderick, Ryan.> "Japanese Social Media Users Are Protesting ISIS With "Crappy" Photoshops And Memes." BuzzFeed News. Buzzfeed, 23 Jan. 2015. Web. 4. <Chen, Adrian> (2013-04-16). "Goatse and the Rise of the Web’s Gross-Out Culture". Wired.com. 5. <Cottee, Simon.> "Why It's So Hard to Stop ISIS Propaganda." The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, 02 Mar. 2015. Web. 6. <Evans, Claire L.> "'We Are the Future Cunt': CyberFeminism in the 90s." Motherboard. Vice.com, 20 Nov. 2104. Web. 7. <Miller, Greg, and Scott Higham.> "In a Propaganda War against ISIS, the U.S. Tried to Play by the Enemy's Rules." Washington Post. The Washington Post, 8 Mar. 2015. Web. 8. <Reynolds, Daniel> (August 2009). "Esthetics of the Extreme in Shock Websites". Applied Semiotics (23) – via Questia Online Library. 9. <Shepard, Nicole, PHD.> "What Was/Is Cyberfeminism?" Web log post. Engenderings. The London School of Economics and Political Science, n.d. Web. 10. <Meta> "SubRosa." Home Page ::: Cyberfeminism.net. SubRosa.net, n.d. Web. 11. <Wood, Graeme.> "What ISIS Really Wants." The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, 15 Feb. 2015. Web. 12.

<Zayadin, Hiba.> "MediaShift." PBS. PBS, 5 Mar. 2015. Web.