Electronic Disturbance Theatre - Politically Motivated "Non-Matrixed" Performing

“We abolish the stage and the auditorium and replace them by a single site, without partition or barrier of any kind, which will become the theatre of the action. A direct communion will be re-established between the spectator and the spectacle, between the actor and the spectator, placed in the middle of the action, is engulfed and physically affected by it.” - Antonin Artaud

The performative avantgarde has long had connections to a political or critical social agenda - from Dada to Situationism to Punk. Working in the gap between art and life, or perhaps in such a way as to render this gap non-existent, the nature of theatrical representation is critiqued from within a performance space. Techniques & deceptions associated with theatre are avoided, by way of creating what Micheal Kirby describes as a ‘non-matrixed performance’ – that which is folded into/inseparable from life.

In 1998, Ricardo Dominguez and a group of collaborators engaged in online civil disobedience actions, in support of rebel activity in Chiapas, Mexico - the Zapatistas, a revolutionary cell fighting against generational government oppression, and are collectively known as the Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT). Combining artistic and political agendas, the group utilises virtual networks to promote its activities - encouraging supporters to download and run a Java applet called FloodNet.

Akin to hacker-tactics, or hacktivism, this applet continually attempts to open nonexistent Web pages at specifically targeted websites. By constructing fictional or "bad URLs" (Web addresses of pages that don't exist on the targeted server). For example, participants were asked to input the names of Zapatistas killed by the Mexican Army in military attacks on the autonomous village of Acteal, forcing targeted servers to return an error message each time one of these "bad" URLs was requested.

Aligning the project with conceptual or idea-based art, the fictated URL becomes inscribed in the server's error log as a way of virtually (symbolically) returning the dead to those responsible for their murders. Presumably if enough people run FloodNet simultaneously, the server would overload - so if a regular user tried to access the site, pages would load extremely slowly or not at all.

As Michel Kirby describes, “The materials of Happenings – performer, physical element, or mechanical effect – tend to be concrete. That is, they are taken from and related to the experiential worlds of everyday life. Within the overall context and structure, the details in Happenings relate to things and function as direct experience." EDT's virtual sit-ins operate like a happening (connect to performance/theatre), however with a more direct political resonance, analogous to sit-in demonstrations in which protesters block the entrance to a public building. Projects of EDT tactically utilise existing virtual-actual media networks and structures, Dominguez explaining their goal is to "disturb - and not destroy."