“FloodNet” by Carmin Karasic, Brett Stalbaum, Stefan Wray

Title:

FloodNet

Artist(s) and People Involved:

Exhibiting Artist(s):

Symposium:

ISEA2015: 21st International Symposium on Electronic Art
More artworks from ISEA2015:

Venue(s):

Simon Fraser University

Creation Year:

1998

Medium:

Web

Artist Statement:

By the Electronic Disturbance Theatre:

FloodNet is the first global online political protest software that successfully implemented electronic civil disobedience, launching a new era of hacktivism. FloodNet disrupted traffic to a specific web server and wrote messages to its error log, successfully bringing attention to Chiapas, Mexico. This first FloodNet strike had over 8000 global participants, and made history on June 10, 1998, when the Mexican government implemented a countermeasure that caused any browser running FloodNet to crash. The Mexican countermeasure shows that through popular electronic civil disobedience, FloodNet participants forced the Mexican government to acknowledge global Zapatista solidarity, making the work a historically significant example of hacking for a political cause.