Opening Up The Web
The era of hacker superheroes — NASA crackers, alpha geeks, young web millionaires — is going to be history soon.
As the internet user base is changing the web will be taken over by you, coming from outside, from the real life.
The Machine is (Changing) Us
Hasan Elahi, Tracking Transience
Mr. Elahi is a media artist researching surveillance, borders and frontiers. He has nothing to do with technology — just running a site as many others do today.
But the way he understood internet made him famous for the media and unfortunately infamous for the FBI.
No insider — internet venture capitalist, startup founder, hacker, cracker, rockstar programmer or MIT student — could ever distantiate the essence of the internet from the technology in such way he did.
Elahi opens up the web by understanding it perfectly from a different, non-technical angle. He is the first who created an art of using the internet.
Netochka Nezvanova, The Most Feared Woman on the Internet
“Technical skills are less important than creative thinking. The epoch of the generalist has arrived — again. Any fool can program and most do. Software engineers are emotionally inept. In today’s unstable + dynamic environment they do not stand a chance.” – Netochka Nezvanova
She is an identity enigma, contrary to Hasan nobody knows who she is, whether she is a person with multiple alter egos or a collective international project. However Netochka released admired video and music software, a music album, she was awarded and left many traces even offline as a real person.
Since unknown in real life she could do freely anything and everything on the net. And she ranted, started many flame wars building and destroying communities, playing with people’s emotions, acting as a dictator, making real life prejudices for people trusting her … like a real dostoevskian character.
Hasan Elahi had to provide full online transparency of his every action and whereabouts to be let live the offline life he desired. Netochka fooled everybody about her offline identity so she could live any online life she wanted without consequences.
Merging Digital Into Real
Both artists were used internet as an extension to their lives. They have realised the digital life is in the same way important as the real life, no one can live a complete life without considering the digital.
They’ve opened up the web from a set of tools meant to enhance the human life to an ecosystem embedded organically into, and determining, our lives.
Artists are taking the pulse of times. They are living on the edge, feel the horizon, show us the future. As the internet opens it will make the producers invisible and you, the creative user of this new reality a star.
