An Overview of Alpha 3.8 Translocation

Leveraging on the partnership established by Fragnetics and Tsunamii.Net in Alpha 3.5 Crush, where a web server committed suicide by crushing itself in front of a live online and offline audience, Fragnetics has been selected as the technical team to work with Tsunamii.Net for their next project, Alpha 3.8 Translocation, which was commissioned by the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA.

Starting from March 2003, Tsunamii.Net will take a yearlong journey through cyberspace, translocating its main website across servers situated in different geographical locations around the world. Settling itself into more than 40 countries over the expedition, the Tsunamii.Net website will locate itself in each country for a period of around 8-10 days before moving onto its next destination.

Transforming the Tsuanmii.Net website into one that also generates textual and graphical trace route data, visitors will be able to experience first-hand the disparity of web connections throughout the Internet. By situating the Tsunamii.Net website in different countries on popular service providers there, visitors will experience why the Internet is not the "free for all" domain people say it is, and that geographical location, together with a combination of other factors such as culture, infrastructure, legislature and politics, keenly affect the experience of each visitor.

The Internet is theoretically a network that has self-healing capabilities from the use of multiple links that are routable and a routing scheme that can theoretically support a grid topology. In practice however, data is routed through a relatively small number of physical links due to economical and political reasons. Part of the task at hand is to document these links and explore the underlying conditions.

To the casual surfer, the routing of Internet data is largely transparent, the only hint being that of connection speed. Data is downloaded and presented at the click of a link. The data however passes through a number of nodes, more commonly known as routers. These routers allow data in packet form to be multiplexed over common lines, enabling the Internet to function on an economically viable scale. Levels of protocol abstraction make this process transparent and links seem like point-to-point links to the user. Little does the user know however that the transmission of data is often concentrated amongst certain favoured lines, often for economic, social, and even political reasons.

The most common reason for this practice is often economical. By concentrating data into few lines, a service provider can save money by reduced maintenance costs. A single 155MBps line costs less to maintain than 3 54MBps lines going out in different directions. Often the Internet signal is routed through the United States, as most service providers take advantage of its excellent connectivity and large amounts of bandwidth.

This practice is not without its disadvantages. By concentrating traffic through a small number of links, the system is vulnerable to failure as there is far less redundancy should any of the links fail. This problem has often occurred in sporadic instances around the world.

Alpha 3.8 exposes this practice to users, and attempts to document the Internet routes of various countries around the world. Technically, this can be no better displayed than a visual trace route that shows how data is routed across the Internet to the visitor's terminal. The time it takes for the website to load on a computer will vary from country to country, and results from which are generated on the visitors computer and sent to the main Fragnetics server for processing. This allows for a routing map based on the world map to be generated and presented to the visitor.

A back end task of the Fragnetics server is to log the submitted traces. These traces will be then used to produce a map of the commonly taken routes and their relative quality. This data will then be used to document the proof behind the idea that the Internet is not a flat, homogenous space as commonly believed.

While the common impression of the Internet is that of cyberspace, the fact that each location in cyberspace corresponds to one or more physical locations is a very important theme in the alpha series. Alpha 3.8 focuses on the influence that different locales have on their corresponding cyberspace locations, including the physical data connections, social factors in acquiring web space, local policies in determining access to server functionality, and economic costs of maintaining web space and bandwidth.

Web space may not be easily available, or continuously available. In some communities, web hosting may be available for selected periods during the day, or to selected users within a service region. This practice goes on despite the Internet being a global phenomenon that does not sleep. Web space may also be limited to a small number of service providers in a single location, and not the active competition that is present in a well-developed region. Such factors will impose various constraints on the project, all of which reflect on the differences among the different locales that access the Internet.

As web space is often rented from shared servers, policies will vary from country to country. Certain servers may allow free-for-all CGI access and full scripting features, while some may be restricted to serving only static pages. As such, the means in which Fragnetics process trace route data and how the data is generated will also vary from country to country. At times, we anticipate that visitors may have to download a trace route program and run it on their computers to generate trace route data not generated by the web server on which the Tsunamii.Net server resides due to restrictions to web server access placed on Tsunamii.Net.

Part of the experience is also the community. Alpha 3.8 will include a discussion forum for users to post their comments and views on the differing standards of services, connection speeds and routing information.

The Internet may be very clearly defined in various technical documents, recommendations, RFCs, but such specifications only serve to define the hardware behind the Internet. Beyond that hardware is the human factor that nevertheless remains a potent driving force behind the Internet. Various decisions that determine the capabilities and limitations of each server, each link, and the quality and level of service in each locale are all dependent on the human factor. It is with Alpha 3.8 that we attempt to document the human factor, and show that the Internet is not a homogenous free-for-all network, but rather one that is uneven and largely dependent on the human factor.

The combination of culture, infrastructure, legislation and politics raise questions that are seldom proffered by proponents of the Internet. Tsunamii.Net and Fragnetics will uncover these differences and reveal the true nature of the state of the Internet in developing countries attempting to tap the potential of the Internet.

Related Links

• Frequently asked questions about Alpha 3.8 Translocation