[spectre] The Thing in trouble

Tue, 24 Dec 2002 05:58:08 +0000 (UTC)

> For those of you that have not seen this yet, The Thing
> needs a new host!

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/23/arts/design/23ARTS.html

New York Times

December 23, 2002

Cyberspace Artists Paint Themselves Into a Corner

By Matthew Mirapaul

In a 1950's horror movie the Thing was a creature that
killed before it was killed. Now in a real-life drama
playing on a computer screen near you, the Thing is an
Internet service provider that is having trouble staying
alive. Some might find this tale equally terrifying.

The Thing provides Internet connections for dozens of New
York artists and arts organizations, and its liberal
attitude allows its clients to exhibit online works that
other providers might immediately unplug. As a result the
Thing is struggling to survive online. Its own
Internet-connection provider is planning to disconnect the
Thing over problems created by the Thing's clients. While it
may live on, its crisis illustrates how difficult it can be
for Internet artists to find a platform from which they can
push the medium's boundaries.

Wolfgang Staehle, the Thing's founder and executive
director, said the high-bandwidth pipeline connecting the
Thing to the Internet would be severed on Feb. 28 because
its customers had repeatedly violated the pipeline
provider's policies. While the exact abuses are not known,
they probably involve the improper use of corporate
trademarks and generating needless traffic on other sites.

If Mr. Staehle is unable to establish a new pipeline, the
100 Web sites and 200 individual customers, mostly artists,
that rely on the Thing for Internet service could lose their
cyberspace homes. In a telephone interview from the Thing's
office in Chelsea, Mr. Staehle (pronounced SHTAW-luh) said,
"It's not fair that 300 of our clients will suffer from this
and I might be out of business."

The Thing's pipeline is currently supplied by Verio Inc. of
Englewood, Colo., which declines to comment on its troubles
with the Thing. Mr. Staehle said that he had not received
official word from Verio, but that the company's lawyers
told the Thing the service would be cut off because of the
violations.

For some digital artists, these are perilous times. With the
Internet's rise have come increased concerns about
everything from online privacy to digital piracy. Naturally
artists are addressing these matters in Internet-based
works. So an online project about copyright violations
inevitably violates some copyrights, and a work that warns
how a computer could be spying on you could very well be
spying on you.

Most Internet service providers yank such works offline
whenever legal challenges are raised, so open-minded
providers like the Thing become an important alternative.
But as Alex Galloway, a New York artist, said, "There really
are no true alternative Internet service providers because
connectivity is still controlled by the telecommunication
companies."

Mr. Staehle has learned this the hard way. The project that
overheated Verio's circuits was probably a Web site created
by an online group of political activists called the Yes
Men. The site, at dow-chemical.com, resembled Dow Chemical's
real site, at dow.com. But the contents were phony news
releases and speeches that ridiculed Dow officials for being
more interested in profits than in making reparations for a
lethal gas leak at a Union Carbide plant (now owned by Dow)
in Bhopal, India, in 1984.

The hoax's supporters said it was a parody. But Dow's
lawyers contacted Verio to complain that the site infringed
on its trademarks, among other sins. Initially it seemed to
be just another fracas over corporate logos and other forms
of intellectual property on the Internet.

What happened next stunned Mr. Staehle. The Yes Men project
had been put online by RTMark.com, a politically active arts
group that uses the Web as its base and gets its Internet
service from the Thing. After Dow complained about the fake
Web site, Mr. Staehle said, Verio alerted the Thing, where a
technician said he was not authorized to act. Within hours
Verio cut off access to RTMark.com, as well as to all the
Thing's Internet customers. These included innocent victims
like Artforum magazine and the P. S. 1 Contemporary Art
Center in Long Island City, Queens. Starting mid-evening on
Dec. 4, the Thing was offline for 16 hours.

Ted Byfield, a Thing board member who teaches a course at
the Parsons School of Design on the social effects of
technology, would not call Verio's action censorship.
Instead he said, "They hit the panic button." He compared
the temporary shutdown to a meat packer who recalls all his
beef products after discovering a small batch of tainted
hamburger.

Mr. Staehle soon discovered that his virtual supermarket
might be permanently closed, too. When he called Verio to
ask why his entire network had been unplugged instead of the
sole offending site, he said, a Verio lawyer told him that
the Thing had violated its policies repeatedly and that its
contract would be terminated.

Verio had shut down part of the Thing once before. In 1999
the online toy retailer eToys.com asked a California court
to stop an online arts group from using its longtime Web
address etoy.com. The Electronic Disturbance Theater, a
Thing client, staged a virtual protest by overloading the
retailer's site with traffic during the holiday season.
Verio blocked access to one of the Thing's computers until
the protest site's owners agreed to take it offline.

These two episodes may give Verio enough cause to bump the
Thing from the Internet. If so Verio would appear to be a
surprising censor. In January the company earned praise from
Internet-rights supporters when it refused to grant a
request by the Motion Picture Association of America to shut
down a Web site containing DVD-copying software.

Mr. Staehle said he had no knowledge of the Yes Men site. "I
am not in the business of policing my clients," he said. "I
am just a carrier."

Although some Thing customers pursue a radical political
agenda, most do not. Even RTMark.com was included in the
Internet-art section of the 2000 Whitney Biennial
exhibition.

One might assume that museums and other cultural
organizations could provide a safe haven for challenging
works. But they are just as susceptible to legal threats and
technical restrictions. For instance, in May the New Museum
of Contemporary Art in New York was forced to remove a
surveillance-theme artwork from the Internet after its
service provider said it violated its policies.

Mr. Staehle said he was considering several plans that would
keep the Thing alive. While he is confident that he will
find another pipeline provider, he said, he is worried that
customers will abandon the Thing during the transition,
financially ruining it.

The Thing is one of the oldest advocates of online culture.
Mr. Staehle, who moved to New York from his native Germany
in 1976, started the Thing in 1991 as an electronic bulletin
board where artists could exchange ideas about how the new
medium would affect the arts. The electronic forum continues
at bbs.thing .net, where artists post projects and review
works.

Charles Guarino, Artforum's associate publisher, said that
should the Thing vanish, "it would be a terrible loss." But
he noted that the Thing's customers would simply find new,
if less sympathetic, Internet service providers. Mr. Guarino
said, "Everyone will still continue to exist, probably even
the people who got them into all this trouble in the first
place." He added, "Poor thing."