tobi

Last week we had a visit at Mozilla from @tobimcfly [website], who has done what I call “protest” add-ons and artwork for Firefox.  His work can be pretty provocative and has been covered in the press.  He’s also behind the artzilla website that covers art and expression at the edges with Firefox, all wrapped up in a crazy-looking website.  He was at recent NYCResistor workshop on hacking Firefox, which is how I found him.

He gave a demo of the China Channel add-on which lets you surf the web through China’s proxy servers so you can experience the Internet like the people who live in China do.

He also showed us the Pirates of the Amazon add-on that adds “download free” links to amazon if you’re surfing amazon and it’s available for free on a pirate web site.  As one of my co-workers pointed out, this is interesting because it mixes the content from the amazon community, which does reviews for others, and the pirate community, which puts up a lot of stuff illegally.  Two groups that don’t normally mix together, but can with this piece of technology.  (This add-on was taken down by amazon so it isn’t available.)

Tobi certainly pushes the boundaries of what people would consider normal or sometimes even acceptable, something that he shares with a number of artists.  But it’s interesting that he’s chosen the browser as his expression tool of choice.  So much of what we do these days goes through the browser that it’s sometimes important to be reminded that the way that we perceive the web is dictated by the browser itself.  That changing the browser can change the way that we view what’s possible.  And Tobi has been doing just that.  It was interesting and provocative stuff.