Lieutenant John Pike Memeorial Browser Extension

Describe your idea and concept of your work in relation to the festival outlines:

The Lieutenant John Pike Memeorial Browser Extension (http://pike.memeorial.org) is virtual intervention designed to memorialize both the 2011 UC Davis Pepper-Spray Incident, and the "Pepper Spray Everything" meme that followed. If a user installs the extension into her web browser, former UC Davis police officer John Pike will occasionally walk across her browser window and casually pepper-spray everything in sight. We hope that this experience engenders an unexpectedly (and perhaps radically) intimate experience with the pain of others, and with the playful virtual communities that produced mimetic responses to the original event. Further, we hope the extension can rekindle the once-vibrant dialogue that surrounded the UC Davis Pepper-Spray incident, when we officially release the extension on 18 November 2014, the third anniversary of the event.

What kind of communication approach do you use?

In this case, our approach is to offer a means of opting in to a memorial. This approach was inspired by our own realization that we had somehow forgotten about the UC Davis incident, despite our active participation in the Occupy movement, as well as our familiarity with the meme that followed. It seems most other people have forgotten about the incident, too -- though when we have informally reminded people of it, and especially of the meme, they exhibited signs of nostalgia, renewed empathy, and a self-motivate desire to talk about it with one another. Mimetic communication on the Internet is a relatively new phenomenon, and we feel too little thought has been given to how virtual communities can remember and commemorate virtual events (i.e. memes), as well as events which most people experienced virtually (i.e. the Pepper-Spray Incident).

What are in your opinion concrete benefits to the society because of your communication?

This is perhaps not for us to say, especially since we have only demoed the Pike extension a few times, to largely sympathetic groups and crowds. That said, one of the benefits that has clearly and consistently suggested itself to us is the benefit of collective, cathartic laughter -- and how this laughter has so often revealed an until-then invisible bond amongst the audience members. Memes are usually experienced privately, but when shared publicly--especially in meat-space--they can become a beginning-point for meaningful dialogue. We hope our project can remind people of this bond, and of the bond they shared with the non-violent protesters at UC Davis.

What did you personally learn from creating your submitted work?

When we created the work (which is still a work-in-progress until Nov. 18th, it should be noted), we had serious doubts that people would "get" the project. How would people feel? Would they understand our communicative intent? Would they be inadvertently offended? Frankly, we have been nervous about releasing the project, because we want to feel sure that the piece will have a positive effect on our audience. But lately, we have shown the work at a few events, and to audiences of upwards of 200 people, and (to our great surprise) the response has been overwhelmingly positive. This has been particularly true among groups of young people, i.e. students ages 18-30, but even older groups seem to "get" the work -- and to laugh almost as heartily as the younger audiences. If nothing else, we have learned that we over-worry about how people will react to our work, and that in the future we should be a bit braver, and more willing to share our work with others, so that we might actually hear their thoughts, instead of simply worrying and speculating about them.

Why is your work, GOOD communication WORK?

This is a provocative question, perhaps more provocation than question, but that seems fitting because we see our work as a useful provocation. In other words, this work is less about a direct, closed communicative act, and more about provoking viewers to feel something about the event, of seeing Lt. John Pike suddenly saunter into their browser windows and pepper-spray them in the face. As you state in the outline section, dialogue often fails. We hope our project can resuscitate that dialogue and--whether or not it succeeds--we think that's a good thing.

Where and how do you intent do implement your work?

Our project is designed to live on its website, so that it might be as widely accessible as possible, but we also intend to continue introducing people to the work via other meat-space means, e.g. artists' talks, political events, gallery installation, stickers, emails, etc. Once the piece is fully complete and released in November, we also intend to travel to UC Davis to support that release (but these plans are far from finalized at the moment). The piece is almost fully implemented, but has yet to be fully user-tested. In addition, there are a few small bits of functionality that we hope to add before the release, the most important of which is the ability for users to change how frequently (or infrequently) Lt. Pike walks across their browser windows. Preliminary testing suggests that the desired frequency varies widely between users.

Did your intervention had an effect on other Media. If yes, describe the effect? (Has other media reported on it- how? Were you able to change other media with your work- how?)

Though we have not formally released the project yet, we have seen an effect in a few specific circumstances. We have already detailed its effect upon audiences in general, in an earlier answer, but we have seen this effect across a variety of audiences, from large lecture halls at USC, to smaller classrooms at Univ. of San Francisco, to conference audiences at NYU, UCLA, and elsewhere. We have been interviewed about it in a variety of alternative media venues, and we have written about it in Leonardo Electronic Almanac, but we have no direct means of evaluating how that reportage has impacted or changed other media. That said, our experience with media around other extensions we have released, such as Buzzfeed's article on our extension "Mark Ditto Mark", suggest to us that browser extensions are fertile ground for artistic interventions. And because of the nature of browser extensions, we believe that they can influence users to take a more active, hands-on approach to their media, by encouraging them to more directly control their view of the Internet, i.e. their browser windows.