n 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.