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Tech

Of Course This Web-Surfing Contest Took Place at a Beachside Surf Bar

I went to the most wonderfully insane internet scavenger hunt. At the beach.
Image: Rhizome

What may well have been America's first-ever web surfing competition to be held at a surf club took place just blocks away from Rockaway Beach this weekend. Rhizome, a nonprofit devoted to exploring the intersection of technology and contemporary art, invited anyone to compete in the digital scavenger hunt, Trailblazers 7. The prize? Glory, honor, and swag from artist Cory Arcangel.

The rules of surfing were as follows: no typing, just clicking. With just a one-button mouse, and without a keyboard or back button, contestants had to navigate from one site to another. They battled it out four at a time, in front of a backdrop of surfboards, their pasty faces lit by Mac desktops.

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Live feeds of the competitors' screens were projected for all to see, and there was a small devoted crowd, but the other bikini-clad customers drinking beers on the patio outside just seemed mildly confused by—and mostly disinterested in—the internet battle.

The first round consisted of an Amazon scavenger hunt: Contestants had to track down as many items as they could from a list of three different descriptions.

There were some close calls. Artist Nick DeMarco, who would eventually end up making it to the semi-finals, had his head on the chopping block in that first round. Whether or not Capital In the Twenty-First Century qualified as a "book about Bitcoin" was put to an audience vote, and he just squeaked through. Other items that proved difficult to find on Amazon included a fake beard and an Andy Warhol print.

Save for one beefy guy in a baseball cap, the competitors looked somewhere on the spectrum between alt and nerd, more net artist than jock. That's part of the whole premise of the competition, I imagine: the incongruity between a surfer and a surfer.

But framing digital work as sport also isn't far from the zeitgeist. Corey Arcangel designed a new sportswear line for surfing the web, apparel from which was given out to the competition's runner-ups.

Artist Brad Troemel coined the term "athletic aesthetics" to talk about social media-induced hyper-production. ClandestineOperation released net art girl trading cards, baseball-like cards featuring artists like Molly Soda and Genevieve Belleveau. And metrics boards like ArtRank™ give net artists a quantifiable way to compete to be number one.

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Rhizome's community manager Zachary Kaplan, however, doesn't think sports are the right frame to think about the web surfing competition. "It's more of a strategy game that rewards those with a sense of how the internet works—how websites are indexed and organized, who allows you to leave and who forces you to stay put, what is open/available and what is closed/metered, etc.," he wrote in an email.

In the next rounds, opponents raced to navigate from one particular website to another, like from Airbnb to RentIsTooDamnHigh or TED to r/MensRights.

From early on it was clear Joe Puglisi, a creative strategist at Buzzfeed one of three of their employees competing, had a strategy. He immediately surfed over to the Twitter directory of Sega.com to get to badsonicfanart.tumblr.com while other competitors scanned through forums.

In the final round, Puglisi's strategy gave him the edge to navigate from facebook.com to myspace.com before his opponent, artist Martha Hipley.

Puglisi was crowned the winner of the Rockaway Beach Surf Club with an original piece of Cory Arcangel art. Although he seemed well-prepared, it turns out he hadn't even planned on competing. He'd just come along to support his Buzzfeed co-worker John Urquhart who'd strategized in advance. "He was looking for a Grand Central station of sorts so that he could always find another page to jump off on," Puglisi explained. Urquhart determined Twitter directories could do just this, but when he was eliminated in the Amazon qualifying round, Puglisi took his friend's method and went on to win.

Puglisi found the first round, the one his Twitter directory didn't give the edge for, the most intriguing to watch. "It was about how you categorize information and find it really fast," he explained. "It was really interesting to see what kinds of paths people took."