Marcel Mrejen Research Artist

Gone Phishing

Organisms such as epiphytes sustain themselves through a symbiotic relationship with another host plant. The possibility of such relationship implies a surplus of nutriment production by the host organism. In a dematerialized economy, the surplus of energy produced by users of information and communication technologies can be understood as nutriments for a parasite. Transformation and exploitation of the surplus of the bios is made by technology. As a symbiont, the technological tool extracts semiotic excess from its user, this energy is reallocated in specific nodes of the productive ecosystem.

As economical metabolisms mutate to extract and process intangible assets, productive cycles increasingly depend on the symbiosis between the human and the technological. The research process at Overtoon aimed at materializing such relations between machines and bios; as well as their material infrastructure.

During the research residency program at Overtoon, Marcel was focused on materializing a hidden infrastructure of production rooted within our social activity by creating an artificial parasite extracting data surplus on the wifi network and transforming it in a sonic output. Using an ARP-spoofing device, the parasite was used to harvest data packages generated by users will browsing on the network. The harvested data was fed into a generative sound patch, which uses the raw data to synthesize new sounds for the sculptural host.