As the 2020 election night looms close, Special Special presents F Trump, a highly handy Chrome Extension made by Chino Kim in 2017. Whenever you hover your cursor over any appearances of the word “Trump”, the extension replaces your mouse cursor with a middle finger. The purposely obscene gesture is a playful manipulation of the default black-and-white, cartoonish open hand cursor, which is used to denote any live link on the web page. F Trump replaces the complacent pointer finger with the more pointedly disparaging middle finger, bringing about a cathartic release for the user.
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Kim created F Trump as a part of “100 days of internet interventions”, a series of digital tools that interfere with the user’s everyday web browsing experience. Short, whimsical, and targeted, these extensions act on the Chrome browser, weighing the browser down with each open tab, or turning the browser into an eye that stares at you and blinks periodically.
Although it might be tempting to define them as simply anti-productivity apps, they also defamiliarize habits we have developed in the digital everyday and at the same time highlight the invisible power structure behind this most commonly-used piece of software. At the same time, these daily interventions are also like intimate journal entries, in that they capture momentous events in history in a mischievous way, such as an extension that programs all the avatars in your facebook timeline to “leave their posts” and “march on” to Washington.
“100 days of internet interventions” can be found on Kim’s Tumblr page. Special Special encourages you to download F Trump, and let it do the work for you.
For Show and Tell, Special Special invites a selection of artists to produce or share work that can be viewed in the browser, downloaded, or streamed. The work is presented as a series of digital exhibitions periodically delivered to email inboxes.