MAICgregator
- App URL
- http://maicgregator.org/
- Source URL
- http://maicgregator.org/download
- Description
MAICgregator is a Firefox extension that aggregates information about colleges and universities embedded in the military-academic-industrial (MAIC) complex. It searches government funding databases, private news sources, private press releases, and public information about trustees to try and produce a radical cartography of the modern university via the replacement or overlay of this information on academic websites. This is a necessary activity in light of the contemporary financial “crisis”.
Recently there has been a flurry of Firefox add-on development both poetic and serious. We would be remiss to ignore the work of Michael Mandiberg who was involved with two important early extensions, Oil Standard , a project that would replace dollar amounts on pages to their equivalents in barrels of oil, and Real Costs , an add-on that shows carbon for alternative forms of transportation on major airline websites. Similar in this vein is the recent Add Art plugin by Steve Lambert that replaces advertisements with curated net.art shows; Track-me-not , that floods Google with fake searches to descrease the efficacy of data mining; turkopticon that allows people to see and respond to shady Amazon Mechanical Turk employers; and China Channel that lets people surf the web behind the Great Firewall of China. Besides these there are add-ons for “censoring” text on a page using black blocks as well as returning us to the heyday of mid-1990s web design . This brief list of add-ons shows the extent to which artists are re-purposing the web browser for radical artistic purposes using technology that is (potentially/oftentimes) much easier to work with than in earlier net.art times.
While there might have been other ways to develop and release MAICgregator, it seemed most appropriate to develop it as a Firefox extension, especially given the ability in many places to (at least temporarily) install these plugins on public machines at colleges, universities, libraries, or internet cafés. The ease by which extensions can be installed—and the ability a programmer has to modify pages at will once the extension is installed—makes them an ideal vector for the propagation of radical or alternative perspectives to those that are fixed on the web page itself. This is especially the case within the modern university, where schools carefully control what types of information make it to their front page or internal portals, or where students consume their news in computer-generated chunks via Google News, absent marginalized or alternative voices. Add-ons provide one way to break open this lock on web-based media, combining disparate sources together in a montage that is at once both serious and poetic.
Obviously a plug-in like MAICgregator is not going to immediately alter materially the construction of the military-academic-industrial-complex. Nevertheless, in just the short time we have been developing it, we have come to a much better understanding of the links between these major actors, as well as some of the more strange players in the mix . Part of our intent is, yes, to provide carefully selected “facts” about the relationships between universities, the military, and the corporate world. But just as equally our goal is to perform an alternative, to show how so-called “news” sources can be recombined in new ways to create novel connections. This is a performance that additionally re-opens the consideration of exactly what the “web” is, given its continued atrophy into staid configurations of a media-controlled semiotics. And it is finally a performance of what we might call a “poetic austerity”: the use of whatever means are available to us—absent the possibility of funding through traditional sources, given their decrease in this time of focusing on the “essentials”—to respond to power on our own terms. While it might be feeble, while it might seem utopian , it is certainly necessary nevertheless to do what we can, with what we have, against that which oppresses, by creating that which we want.
For more information about the MAICgregator project, please see the full statement and FAQ.
This application was submitted by Nicholas Knouf on June 22, 2009