* an edited version of this review was written for and published in Rhizome.
“Social Networking, we’ve all heard of it, we all hate it… but now you can let your contacts work for you!”
Generative Social Networking (GSN®) is a brand developed by artists Christian Croft and Andrew Schneider. It is a software and performance piece which presents the company’s main product—a service that facilitates the dormant centralized social network you hold in your pocket and makes it’s members basically ‘talk to each other’. This centralized network is your cellphone’s contact lists and to make it less centralized GSN® does a very simple thing—simply take the network’s hub (you) out of the picture.
How do you subscribe to the service? You don’t. All you have to do is leave Bluetooth open on your cellphone and GSN® will find you, download your contact list using a Linux Bluejacking software, and… we are ready to do some social networking! GSN®‘s Astrisk VoIP telephony server lets your contacts work for you (video). It starts by calling the first person on your contact list which picks up and hears nothing. “Hello?… Hello?…… Hello?….. Goodbye.” When Alex (contact #1) hangs up GSN®‘s software calls Andrea (contact #2) and plays her the recording of Alex (#1): “Hello? Hello?… Hello? Hello?… Who is that? Hello?… HELLO!? Goodbye.” and then plays Andrea’s voice (#2) to Anna (#3): “Hello? Hello?… Hello? Oui?… Who is that? It’s AnnaHELLO!? Yes. Who is it?… Who is it?…………” and so on through your whole contact book. Your contacts are in contact, isn’t that great?!
A practical joke? Maybe. A cruel, sick prank? Probably. GSN® manages to extract some rare moments that range from absurd-parody to absurd-terror. Six calls into this invasive cycle and the experience is like aggressive tickling—you can’t stop laughing but you just want this nightmare to stop. GSN® reveals the terror of communication breakdown—it aggregates these moments of fear that every wrong call introduces, but this time you can’t dismiss it as a system malfunction, since you are in on the secret—system malfunction is this system’s intent.
GSN®‘s first public presentation at Eyebeam took place in an Upgrade! New York event titled “We Passion Power and Control: The dark desires of art under surveillance”. Croft & Schneider claimed they created GSN® to inform people of the privacy loopholes they carry in their pockets. As often is the case with surveillance-art, it is not always clear—does it attempt to inform of a possible privacy abuse or does it simply seize that possibility and abuse it?