THE MOUTHS OF THE THAMES

AN INTERVIEW WITH MONGREL AND
SOME OF THEIR COLLABORATORS

Matthew Fuller: The Natural Selection project at http:/Avwww.mongrel.org.uk is an internet search engine that works in ex-
actly the same way as any other one of these vast pieces of software that find data on the web, but that adds its own twists.
it is clear that search engines have acquired immense positional importance in the network, acting as a gateway (both in
the sense of allowing and blocking access) to material on the web. As a technical and media context it is one that is riven
with the most inexplicable density of political and cultural machination. Can you tell us something about the project?
Harwood: Well basically, it's the same as any other search engine. The user types in a series of characters that they wish
to have searched for. The engine goes off and does this and then returns the results. If you're looking for sites on monocy-
cles, that’s what you get. If you're looking for sites on elephants, that's what you get. As soon as you start typing in words
like ‘nigger’ or ‘paki’ or ‘white’ you start getting dropped into a network of content that we have produced in collaboration
with a vast network of demented maniacs strung out at the end of telephone wires all over the place. The idea is to pull the
rug from underneath racist material on the net, and also to start eroding the perceived neutrality of information science
type systems. If people can start to imagining that a good proportion of the net is faked then we might start getting some-
where. And as a search engine, from Europe it runs faster than most US based search engines. Enlightenment and a cheap-
er phone bill - you can't loose

Richard Pierre Davis: Natural Selection started off as part of the project National Heritage and was conceived as a re-
sponse to all the hype surrounding the internet and in particular far right activity on the net. It snowballed into it's own

identity with input from various artists collaborating on the project with Mongrel steering the ship into a one finger salute
to the PC clones and all them fronting fakers worldwide.

Mervin Jarman: Natural Selection offers an added value to critical work on the internet which is unequivocal in that it al-
lows practitioners to plug their work into arenas that would otherwise be inaccessible. This is particularly because of its
constructural texture and its ability to redefine and redirect search strings to specified locations, commonly termed aiding
and abating - luring the unaware into a spate of awareness that they may not have voluntarily wanted to realise.

H: One of the hidden things about the project is that it’s based on a harmless hack on one of the mainstream internet's most
popular sites. We corroborate our searches with other search engines. They don't necessarily like us doing this. So we are
engaged in a running battle with the site managers of various engines who keep trying to lock us out, trying to stop us re-
verse engineering their workings and using it to our advantage. Presumably they think we're some kind of commercial
competitors. If only...

MF: That's an example of a technical conflict going on in the work, which is obviously a very live one since it messes so
heavily with control of proprietary culture masquerading as social resource. (Something extended in the cracked software
projects in Natural Selection such as HeritageGold: http:/www.mongrel.org.uk/HeritageGold)

Echoing this, like most of Mongrel's work, Natural Selection doesn't shrink away from difficulty. If people are going to
check it out, they need to be looking for more than a punchline, or a nice neat ‘anti-racist’ or ‘multicultural’ solution. The
nineties has seen a near complete homogenisation of language around race. A fait accompli which trivialises the deep tex-
ture of language, culture and racialisation

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