Redirect Art
Redirect art is a speculative software performance piece situated between the attention economy and embodied (un)learning. Entering the conventions of a website, the piece focuses on the potential of a technical url redirect protocol in its counter appropriation as a performance method, counter appropriating. The url redirect-art.xyz takes the visitor into a potentiality of directions through their interaction choices, slowing down the experience of html redirection in order to make it visible, while incorporating in it an invitation for embodying the act of redirection with intent. In this way redirect art works as a gesture of redirecting attention, through redirecting urls within the narrative of contemporary user experience interaction
Hinting towards a genre of performative executable art, the piece is based on the implications stemming from feminist practices, inspired by works such as How to suppress women’s writing and Data Feminism and in the net art tradition of art as a space of cultural intervention. The act of inscribing, displaying, reinforcing, erasing are taken both in their connotations of epistemic violence (Spyvak), as well as practices of unlearning and reinscribing erased, discarded and marginalized narratives. Redirect art works as a gesture of redirecting attention, through redirecting urls. It reflects on and employs the sensitivities that lie in the space of redirecting as both a space of suppressing and a space of creating anew. It is a space that acknowledges the politics of naming.
Technical redirection is a form of control of access, it speaks of the executable power of tools at hand (Galloway), ones that amplify and organize already existing societal dynamics through language that is both executable and performative. The process of redirecting and substituting intention and attention is conceptualized between a reminder and a check in around orientation (Ahmed). The current state of the project can be accessed on http://redirect-art.xyz/, using a TLD that intentionally refers to identity fluidity.
