Firefox Add-Ons Double as Art, Pranks and Fun

The Internet doesn’t always have to be serious business. Just ask Tobias Leingruber and Jamie Wilkinson, co-founders of Artzilla, an online repository for plug-ins to Mozilla’s Web browser, Firefox. The extensions found on Artzilla won’t help you organize bookmarks or add nifty features. They’re more likely to scramble Web interfaces, inject misspellings or teleport your browser back to the dark ages of the Internet, you know, circa 1996.

Mr. Wilkinson and Mr. Leingruber are members of Free Art and Technology or F.A.T. Lab, a loose-knit group of hackers who tinker with art and technology. “Our mission statement is to pair pop culture with open source,” Mr. Wilkinson said.

The duo created Artzilla at the end of November after noticing that their particular brand of Firefox add-ons weren’t making it into the official directory of Firefox extensions.

Unlike the standard fare available in the official Firefox extension list, most of the Artzilla extensions dabble in media culture and experimental design: Take, for example, two of Mr. Leingruber’s contributions, the China Channel, a plug-in that mimics the Web experience for Internet browsers in China, and Pirates of the Amazon, an extension that made it easy for people who were browsing on Amazon.com to download the same products free through the Pirate Bay, the illicit BitTorrent site.

“That’s when we decided to make a place to put these things,” Mr. Wilkinson said. “They were missing out on the fun.”

In addition to the 10 or so plug-ins listed on their site, Mr. Wilkinson and Mr. Leingruber also created an Artzilla Wiki, with tutorials on installing and creating various types of Firefox extensions.

The main purpose behind Artzilla, Mr. Wilkinson says, is to “make the Web a more interesting experience.” In many ways, he said, the “Web browser replaced the television set as the main way we get content.” Artzilla is an experimental way to “hack the Web and change our experience online.”

Here are some of Mr. Wilkinson’s favorites from the Artzilla collection:

Add-Art: Add-Art takes ad-blocking software one step further. After removing all the advertisements from a Web page, Add-Art replaces them with a spattering of images from an up-and-coming artist, who is vetted by a team of curators. Every two weeks, there’s a new “show” or series of artwork presented through the extension. Previous artists featured include an M.I.T. Media Lab graduate, Ayah Bdeir, who showed a series of photographs depicting a woman undergoing a Transportation Security Administration search and a cheeky group show that imagined the future of online advertising. According to Mr. Wilkinson, there are currently more than 25,000 active users of the patch.

Time Machine: In case you have a hankering for early Web design, replete with animated GIFs, clunky fonts and slow-loading wallpapers, this Firefox Add-on will refresh your memory by warping any Web page back to 1996.

Rolltube: On the off chance you haven’t yet been rickrolled, or duped into watching the YouTube video of Rick Astley’s 1987 hit pop song “Never Gonna Give You Up,” RollTube will cure you of that. This Firefox extension switches every YouTube video with Astley’s masterpiece.

Tourette Machine: This Firefox plug-in will sporadically plant curse words and inappropriate phrases while typing. The extension comes in two flavors: Moderate, which inserts swear words every three to five words and extreme, which injects foul language every other word.

from http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/12/firefox-add-ons-double-as-art-pranks-fun/