Creating Art Via Webcam, Secretly

CREATING ART VIA WEBCAM, SECRETLY

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/20/nyregion/at-2-apple-stores-creating-art-via-webcam-secretly.html

This article questions the authority of the law in cyberspace. This expanse, “ungoverned by any power except brute force or ingenuity, and then only fleetingly,” was forcibly censored in the case of an art project detailed in the article. The artist, Kyle McDonald, collected 1000 pictures from webcams on computers in two Manhattan Apple stores, where he had installed an app which shot a picture a minute and later played back these pictures on computers in the store which had used the app. His project, “People Staring at Computers,” was posted on the Web, and two days later his laptop was confiscated by Secret Service agents.

The site that hosted McDonald’s art project, Free Art & Technology, was forced to censor the project, and did so by photoshopping Steve Jobs’ face onto each of the “People Staring at Computers.”

What are the laws and ethics in this invisible global playscape? I was surprised by the rapid involvement of the Secret Service, and, as further research led me to discover, the fact that the charges McDonald could allegedly be accused of are almost completely related to national defense or finance fraud. For a country that preaches individual freedoms, it seems like huge overkill that the government would get involved at such a level with an art project that used property which was open to the public---or even, as McDonald claims, a project he was given permission to carry out thanks to the store guard.

The official restrictions on Web content are mostly nation-specific, as can be seen in the January 2011 case of Mubarak and an “unprecedented Internet block.” Other countries, like Germany and France, have censored Neo Nazi-related sites in their national Google indexes.

The author dwelled on current patches of no-man’s land between the long arm of the law and the Internet, citing pirates, big businesses and parody-removal efforts, and the case of the Murdoch papers. He never detailed the grounds for government involvement, the laws that might have been violated or any further details of the Internet-censorship debate, and this bothered me into doing my own research. I was glad it did, because although the U.S. is nowhere near the top-listed Web-thought-controllers, there are far-from-isolated cases of large-scale censorship, especially cases concerning artists and political statements and protests, with the Internet acting as the most extreme form of mass media. American opponents of Internet censorship, like those in the ACLU, have managed to rule some censorship laws (such as the Children’s Online Protection Act) unconstitutional on the basis of violating the First Amendment.

So, is Internet censorship justified? Did Kyle McDonald misuse what was available to him?