Natalie Jeremijenko & The Bureau of Inverse Technology

“Sniffer” (2002)
Rewriting robotic toy dogs (Sony’s Eibo) to work as detectors of radioactive sources over a certain threshold. The virtual real estate of a company or institution can easily be copied (‘cloned’) and reinserted into new contexts, a tactic that many artists, net activists, or hacktivists have pursued.”
“While art constitutes a cultural value in itself and does not need to fulfill a purpose, it certainly has a function in that it can be an open-play field for aesthetic, emotional, or political explorations. Perhaps this role will be more important in a future that confronts us with new questions that profoundly challenge how we define ourselves and the world around us.”

BitPlane 1990
Taken from Art Fag City

Attaching a camera to an RC plane and flew it over the secretive high-tech compounds of Silicon Valley, recording the video as well as broadcasting it onto local television frequencies. Most of the video consists of military-looking aerial landscapes of parking lots and nondescript office buildings, but occasionally on-screen text reminds us of the techno-utopian public face of the valley – “Prestigious think-tank Xerox PARC, birthplace of the modern mouse & home to the slogan ‘The Best Way to Predict the Future Is to Invent It’”, “AS SEEN FROM THE AIR THE SILICON VALLEY DELIVERS THE FUTURE”. This is all accompanied by the weight of the area’s numerous no-photography areas: many of the buildings photographed require elaborate security procedures to enter, and photography is often specifically prohibited in any capacity to protect both government and trade secrets; BIT broke numerous laws in recording these images at all.

Statement from the artists:

Cameras are not permitted into the corporate research parks in the Valley on the logic that visitors could steal intellectual property by taking photographs of it. This reveals an assumption about what information is – that it is something that you can take a photograph of, a thing – not the product of a community of expertise or social network of shared discourse, but something you could go in and steal with a camera.