Browser Extension

Lens for the Internet

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100. Melanie Hoff's Decodelia (2016) uses principles of color theory to transform the way a web browser renders pages, making their content legible only to those wearing red-tinted glasses.

Brief

A browser extension is a software add-on that alters the behavior of a web browser application. It can serve as a jumping-off point for creative intervention in the online realm. Extensions can change the appearance of specific online content, add additional information layers, redirect a viewer to different URLs, or change browser behaviors. Popular extensions serve to block ads, obscure the user's identity, circumvent censorship, fact-check politicians, and provide dictionary definitions.

In this assignment, you are asked to design and build a browser extension that alters the appearance of (a part of) the Internet, or that augments, defamiliarizes, or estranges a viewer's browsing experience in a poetic or critical way. Publish your extension to a public platform, such as the Chrome Web Store or the Firefox Add-ons site.

Learning Objectives

Variations

Making It Meaningful

As a window mediates a view of the physical world, the browser mediates the online world of the Internet. Altering this quotidian equipment with a custom extension is a key opportunity for creative play and disruption at both the system level and the content level. Doing so requires direct engagement with the infrastructure and protocols of the browser, a favorite topic of “software studies” scholars like Alexander Galloway, Matthew Fuller, and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, who aim to lay bare the means by which the Web is constructed and how it shapes our experience of the world.

Some experimental extensions that manipulate the display of everyday content build on ideas from the history of conceptual art, such as the Situationist strategies of defamiliarization and détournement, which estrange the mundane and enhance perception of the familiar. Browser extensions can also be vehicles for culture jamming, activism, critical design, and parody, by explicating and revealing otherwise obscure relationships, or by calling attention to or strategically editing political doubletalk, newspeak, dog-whistles, and spin.

Releasing tools can be a form of critical and contextual creative practice. Outlets for the publication of browser extensions, like the Chrome Web Store or the Firefox Add-ons site, powerfully amplify the author's ability to enlist the participation of the public in shaping new power dynamics. That said, these spaces are tightly controlled sandboxes whose terms of service are ultimately aligned with their owners’ business model. Projects that challenge the terms of their gatekeepers, such as AdNauseam (which falsifies advertising engagement), may be removed or disabled.

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101. Jonas Lund's We See in Every Direction (2013) connects all of its concurrent users in a collaborative browsing experience.

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102. Steve Lambert's Add Art (2008) plugin for the Firefox browser automatically replaces online advertisements with art.

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103. Newstweek (2011) by Julian Oliver and Danja Vasiliev is a custom Internet router that enables the artists to alter how news websites appear to other people on their WiFi network.

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104. Us+ (2013) by Lauren McCarthy and Kyle Mcdonald is a dystopian add-on for Google's video chat software. Using facial analysis, speech-to-text, and natural language processing, the Us+ software analyzes the users’ conversation and attempts to offer suggestions for improving their interaction.

Additional Projects

Readings

  1. Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolman, “A User's Guide to Détournement,” trans. Ken Knabb, Les Lèvres Nues no. 8 (May 1956).
  2. Alexander Galloway, “Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization,” Rethinking Marxism 13, nos. 3–4 (Fall–Winter 2001): 81–88.
  3. Joana Moll and Andrea Noni, Critical Interfaces Toolbox (2016), crit.hangar.org, accessed July 20, 2020.
  4. Rhizome.org, “Net Art Anthology,” accessed April 11, 2019.
  5. Aja Romano, “How Your Web Browser Affects Your Online Reality, Explained in One Image,” Vox, May 3, 2018.