Info War Festival

[John Young <jya@pipeline.com>]

http://web.aec.at/infowar/

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Ars Electronica Festival 98 
INFOWAR - information. macht. krieg.
7. - 12.9.1998
Linz, Austria

Presse - Information [Excerpts]
20.3.1998 

Ars Electronica, one of the world's most highly-acclaimed 
festivals at the interface of art, technology and society, 
has been presented annually since 1979. 

INFOWAR, the title of this year's festival, places the strategies 
of data-supported wars - from the Gulf Conflict to the skirmishes 
of cyberguerillas - into the focal point of artistic as well as
theoretical and scientific interest, to thereby shed light on the 
internal logic of the information society in connection with war. 

Numerous events, installations, network projects, performances and 
a symposium make up the festival's program to confront and deal 
with this subject. 

Symposium INFOWAR

September 8 - 9, 1998 New weapons systems and military strategies 
will not exclusively occupy the middle point of these discussions. 
The aim is to elaborate on "information as a strategic weapon," 
the power of the media as political power, the new potential hot 
spots of conflict and new images of "enemy" in an information 
society characterized by global economic and financial markets. 
But this also has to do with hacker myths, cryptography, electronic 
bugging operations, and the serious concerns regarding national 
security versus private citizens' fears of the complete loss of 
the right of privacy. 

This symposium will deploy works of art and artistic responsibility 
as methods for coming to terms with these issues and achieving 
increased sensibility toward them. 

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Introduction

The information society - no longer a vague promise of a better 
future, but a reality and a central challenge of the here-and-now
- is founded upon the three key technologies of electricity,
telecommunications and computers: Technologies developed for the 
purposes, and out of the logic, of war, technologies of simultaneity 
and coherence, keeping our civilian society in a state of permanent 
mobilisation driven by the battle for markets, resources and spheres 
of influence. A battle for supremacy in processes of economic 
concentration, in which the fronts, no longer drawn up along 
national boundaries and between political systems, are defined by 
technical standards. A battle in which the power of knowledge is 
managed as a profitable monopoly of its distribution and 
dissemination. 

The latest stock market upheavals have laid bare the power of a 
global market, such as only the digital revolution could have 
fathered, and which must be counted as the latter�s most widely-felt
direct outcome. The digitally-networked market of today wields more 
power than the politicians. Governments are losing their say in the 
international value of their currencies; they can no longer control, 
but only react. The massive expansion of freely-accessible
communication networks, itself a global economic necessity, imposes 
severe constraints on the arbitrary restriction of information flows. 

Any transgression of a critical control functions in the 
cybertechnologies� sphere of responsibility and influence puts 
central power wielders in a hitherto unheard-of position of 
vulnerability and openness to attack. The geographic frontiers of 
the industrial age are increasingly losing their erstwhile 
significance in global politics, and giving way to vertical fronts 
along social stratifications. 

Whereas, in the past, war was concerned with the conquering of 
territory, and later with the control of production capacities, war 
in the 21st century is entirely concerned with the acquisition
and exercise of power over knowledge. The three fronts of land, sea 
and air battles have been joined by a fourth, being set up within 
the global information systems. Spurred on by the "successes" of the 
Gulf war, the development of information warfare is running at full 
speed. Increasingly, the attention of the military strategists is 
turning away from computer-aided warfare - from potentiation of the 

destructive efficiency of military operations through the
application of information technology, virtual reality and high-tech 
weaponry - to cyberwar, whose ultimate target is nothing less than 
the global information infrastructure itself: annihilation of the 
enemy�s computer and communication systems, obliteration of his 
databases, destruction of his command and control systems. Yet 
increasingly the vital significance of the global information 
infrastructure for the functioning of the international finance 
markets compels the establishment of new strategic objectives: not 
obliteration, but manipulation, not destruction, but infiltration 
and assimilation. "Netwar" as the tactical deployment of information 
and disinformation, targeted at human understanding. 

These new forms of post-territorial conflicts, however, have for 
some time now ceased to be preserve of governments and their 
ministers of war. NGOs, hackers, computer freaks in the service of 
organised crime, and terrorist organisations with high-tech expertise 
are now the chief actors in the cyberguerilla nightmares of national 
security services and defence ministries. 

In 1998, under the banner of "INFO WAR", the Ars Electronica Festival 
of Art, Technology and Society, is appealing to artists, theoreticians 
and technologists for contributions relating to the social and 
political definition of the information society. The emphasis here 
will lie not on technological flights of fancy, but on the fronts 
drawn up in a society that is in a process of fundamental and violent 
upheaval.