MAICgregator

Nick Knouf

Artist's Statement

MAICgregator is a Firefox extension that aggregates information about colleges and universities embedded in the military-academic-industrial complex (MAIC). It searches government funding databases, private news sources, private press releases, and public information about trustees to try and produce a radical cartography of the modern university via the replacement or overlay of this information on academic websites. This is a necessary activity in light of the contemporary financial "crisis".

MAICgregator works by searching for the relationships between a particular US academic institution (college or university) and government grants and contracts, mentions of the school in private business sources, and relationships between school trustees and business interests. This information is presented to the user in a variety of ways:

• On school pages, MAICgregator searches for particular locations on the page that already showcase school “news” and replaces them with the aggregated data.
• On pages where MAICgregator is not able to find these news areas it displays the result in a window on the page.
• Additionally, MAICgregator works to aggregate images of the school trustees (as well as searches on their names), partially as a means of showing the (lack of) gender, racial and ethnic diversity in the makeup of the governing boards of US schools.

Installation Instructions:

Download the extension to your computer (click on the download link or right click on the extension's install link and select "Save Link As.."). Firefox extensions end in .XPI.

With Firefox open, hit Ctrl+ O (or Cmd+ O on a Mac) > browse to the extension > double click the extension (or select Open) > Install Now.

::: DOWNLOAD MAICgregator :::

::: VIDEO: MAICgregator in action :::

Sample MAICgregator Pages

More details on the MAICgregator project, and update reports, are available at «http://maicgregator.org/».

Biography

Nicholas Knouf is a PhD student in information science at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. His research explores the interstitial spaces between information science, critical theory, digital art, and science and technology studies.

Ongoing work includes MAICgregator, a Firefox extension that aggregates information about the military-academic-industrial complex (MAIC); Fluid Nexus, a mobile phone messaging application designed for activists and relief workers that operates independent of a centralized network; robotic puppetry projects that engage with psycho-socio-political imaginaries; and sound works that encourage the expression of the unspeakable.

Past and current work has been recognized by a number awards, including an Honorary Mention by Prix Ars Electronica in [the next idea] category (2005), the Leonardo Abstracts Service (LABS) for his master's thesis (2008), a memefest Award of Distinction (2008), and a special transmediale "Online Highlight" (2009). Additionally, his work has been discussed in print and online media, including ID Magazine, the Boston Globe, CNN, Slashdot, and Afterimage.

He can be contacted at nknouf [[|(!at*}}] zeitkunst |@*$dot*($) org.