www_hack
Rui Guerra (2008)
www_hack by Rui Guerra is a creative intervention onto Arnolfini's web site. A script installed on the host site allows all visitors to a single page to observe each others mouse movements at any one time. On a technical level, the work is based on a javascript that contacts a server where all the individual mouse positions are stored, displaying all the cursors in 'real-time'. Users experience the virtual presence of others, as controlled by a server. The project demonstrates that the server-client relationship is not open as such, nor free from power structures. Indeed, all clients are subject to the 'dictatorship' of a server which is intrinsic to web architecture. The source files are distributed with the project under GNU GPL.
Rui Guerra has been writing software with a critical view on communities for several years. Besides working and collaborating with several institutes in the Netherlands like V2_, Virtueel Platform and the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, he is involved in open culture by initiating and organising open events. In 2007, he initiated a self-organised, uncurated and open festival - unDEAF - as a satellite event of the Dutch Eletronic Art Festival.
