Parasites, Splinters, and Thieves:

The Work of Carbon Defense League

The theme of “Technology in the Arts” takes a subversive turn in this plenary lecture by Nathan Martin, founder of the Carbon Defense League, an arts collective dedicated to creating debate where it had previously been suppressed.

In his multi-media lecture, Nathan presented four Carbon Defense League projects that demonstrate how satire, media manipulation and good old-fashioned DIY practices can encourage participation in alternative media production. The work has drawn both praise and criticism in the international media for its tactical position in the gray area between legal and illegal. He will also outline the formation of an arts collective, the difficulties and successes of maintaining collectivity, and the role of technology in activism and art, as well as his personal transformation from activist artist to university researcher to corporate CEO all in an effort to broaden access to communication tools.

The projects discussed in this lecture were "Child as Audience," "Re-Code.com," "FtheVote," and "Flashpoint."

Notes: Gutter-tech, using the fastest and cheapest tools possible, is a good word to know. The Institute for Applied Autonomy is a technological research and development organization dedicated to the cause of individual and collective self-determination

Child as Audience

The Carbon Defense League's first child audience/participant device was constructed through the reverse engineering of the Nintendo GameBoy. Rewiring a cartridge with a programmable ROM chip (an EPROM) allowed CDL to upload their own game onto the system. The first game developed was called Super Kid Fighter which was a role playing game based loosely on the writings of Wilhelm Reich. Players were asked to navigate a school boy as he skips school, helps prostitutes, steals from the police and eventually makes his way to a public brothel for people of all ages. An essay about the project was written with Critical Art Ensemble who also aided in the conceptual development of the project. In 2001 the project was released as a development kit featuring book and CDROM and translated from English into German, Dutch, and French. The release was distributed by Autonomedia and AK Press as well as numerous underground music distributors. The release contained spoken word by CAE and music by Nathan’s now defunct band Creation is Crucifixion.

Re-Code.com

Re-Code.com was a web site that allowed users to enter information about products they purchased into a database that was then publicly searchable. It used the UPC number of the product to generate a bar code in real time on the user's screen. The web site itself was made to look very similar to Priceline.com (known as a ream). A step through visual guide and a commercial that dramatized the act of switching UPC bar codes were shown on the site. The site was shut down after mounting legal pressure from Wal-Mart, Kellogg’s and the Federal Trade Commission. The video documents of the project are licensed and shown by FreeSpeechTV.

FtheVote.com

FtheVote.com was a website that encouraged non-Bush supporters to trade sex with republicans for votes against GW Bush in the 2004 US Presidential election. The site claimed that liberals were hotter than conservatives and invited users to register on the site promoting themselves and what they were willing to perform in exchange for a signed pledge to vote for anyone but GW Bush. The site was attacked by the Board of Elections and numerous talk show hosts and was finally taken down but only after extensive “use,” a promotional bus tour, and a pornographic documentary produced by an unaffiliated group in San Francisco called FtheVote West.

FlashPoint

FlashPoint demonstrates the modification of a disposable camera to produce small projectors (or tazers). The website showcases two methods to recycle disposable cameras. One requires no additional parts and another requires only simple soldering skills to produce an automatically deployable flash camera. Using transparency, stencil, or a marker, the camera can become a miniature projector. This project was performed as a workshop by CDL and others extensively across the US and Europe promoting the radical appropriation of consumer goods for media production. Everyone that participated was engaging in the act of reverse engineering – generally assumed to be a hacker concept.