Portal

Author: Naivy Pérez & Revell Altunaga

Title: Portal

Year: 2008

Genre: Net Art

STATEMENT

Portal was a website designed with the intention of being recognized as a work of art on Cuba’s national internal network, better known as INTRANET. Portal had only one link, which functioned as a proxy to redirect users to Google and Yahoo search engines. This practice was already common among Intranet users to access spaces BLOCKED by our “National Security” for “Our Security.”

With Portal, Rewell and I aimed to provoke reflection on the paradoxical relationship between the Internet and Intranet spaces, both being structurally the same, except the latter is a limited and FILTERED version.

Part of our effort involved requesting a host from the Ministry of Culture to place the artistic proposal, anticipating it would serve as a precursor to free and open internet navigation, allowing users/viewers the possibility to access the World Wide Web through the piece.

We never received a response from the responsible entities. As an alternative, the work was shared on an Open Source website so that anyone with the ability to activate the piece FROM INTRANET could develop it with the freedom to make any changes to the programming or design, EXCLUDING its use for profit.