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Welcome, Julian.
Thanks. Thanks a lot.
Children is from New Zealand,
currently living in Berlin, and
he started out as a new media
artist, rich and credits
social say, as a full blown engineer
due to his work.
And he's doing
arts, engineering, arts, arts that shows
the the complexity of
the world and in a way that only
someone who can actually understands
the complexity of the world or is fully
involved in this complexities
can show and.
You will socialists us today, stuff like
transparency, grenades or Newsweek,
which I actually saw myself
as electronic in 2011, and
even though I didn't know you, then I
became a fan. Oh, cool.
So I'm looking very much forward to
that. Excellent. Thanks very much.
OK, so it's been a long day
for for everyone,
of course, and particularly
me, I'm not going to say I've had the
longest stable I've had at least the
second longest day.
I've had about two and a half hours sleep
coming in from Paris and
and just seeing some amazing, amazing
lectures, particularly one on
supersymmetry, which I actually
had to leave in order to actually stop my
brain turning into a
kind of fruit salad so
that I could give this talk.
But I wanted to continue into the fruit
salad status and had to retract
amazing. Well, anyway, I'm going to be
talking about mostly critical
engineering. I'm going to
give some sort of background to
to the movement, if you like.
I mean, it has certainly taken off in the
last couple of years, and I'm going to
probably use about a third
of the of the lecture covering that,
that sort of that substrate, that basis.
And then I'm going to go and show you
a whole bunch of projects that I think
represent critical engineering,
both as a sort of a as a as as
an ethos, if you like, but as a as a
as a as a techno
political political practice and very
much as an as an engineering practice of
its own.
So out of the exploit, what do I what I
mean by this?
Well, first of all, I'll just start
talking about the art, the art part.
There was a really nice
piece of neon artwork
or neon signage on the outside of the
Ulta's Museum in Berlin for
quite some years, and it it said all art
has been contemporary, and I think that's
a very, very important thing to
to to remember when we are looking at the
relevance of a given artistic or critical
practice in relation to the now,
you can in fact go right back to human
history and find work that now, of
course, would look traditionally old or,
you know, antiquated.
But at the time was was was
was the most rigorous expression
available to artists at that time without
having their heads cut off.
One very, very famous work was
was was by Bruegel the elder,
and this was painted in 15 59.
This was the the
the the club was for many
years and in fact still is now
really the closest
depiction of what medieval life
was like.
Well, life, at least in the 1800s,
it depicts it depicts a
non idealized representation
of of of reality.
In those times.
Naturally, drunkenness was the
predominant activity it looks like in
that time. But but also, you know, people
engaging in the marketplace in the
chaos of the marketplace, playing with
chickens, admittedly
like soccer balls.
But but yeah, it's
just a general madness of that time and
and also a sense of rivalry,
a sense of of of
of decay, of suffering is all represented
in that in that singular image.
And I found this
very fascinating in that that
the singularity, if you like, of that of
that image containing what
anthropologists agree
is a very, very stark and coherent
representation of a representation of
life. In that time, it would be extremely
difficult to do today.
I mean, to, for instance, we are just to
focus on on a couple of people walking
inside the scene.
We see this this character here, the
one's got some sort of odd growth on his
back of some sort, I don't know whether
he's sort of smuggling a small child
or something like that, but this is a guy
with a lantern and walking arm in arm
down the street and the the having an
intimate conversation.
What would be the equivalent of that
today in a European city, maybe
even in Ghent or, you know,
Antwerp or somewhere in the Netherlands
or Belgium?
That kind of intimacy could be a guy on a
on a brick phone like this talking to his
mate.
The actual movement of people itself
would need to be coordinated by
by
a system of signaling and
an infrastructure of signaling, if you
like. In this case, we have the classic
red light green light, you know, walk,
don't walk.
The monetary aspect itself, you know
where people actually get cash, you know,
maybe rather than trading a goat for a
bag of rice
or some other form of property at that
time, the cash
itself can actually be pulled literally
out of the wall.
And and that itself represents also
an inability for us to coherently
and singularly represent
the flow of forces.
If you like the network of forces that
comprises what we understand to be
contemporary European life today.
Then of course, behind that that ATM
machine behind that gold ultimate we
have.
We have, we have
trading. We have the we have the broader
financial marketplace.
Of course, now we understand that that's
heavily impacted by
high frequency trading, which
itself is built atop
of a bedrock, a substrate of of
of algorithmic inputs
and modifiers, parametric and
and disruptive and in other ways,
even the food itself.
I mean, if we to represent that
marketplace scene of people purchasing
food from someone that's sitting on a
barrel
in order to do that now, we would have to
talk about these weird things, these
indoor
representations of that market with these
with these repeating products,
sitting in boxes with expiry dates,
which of course for much of our food
system depends heavily on this thing
called refrigeration.
The Center for Disease Control in
the United States has covered extensively
the impact on human life and in
contemporary human life of
of refrigeration just ceasing to exist.
Huge numbers of us would be dead in a
couple of weeks due to food poisoning.
But of course, we know the fridge is
something like this, so we're heavily
dependent upon upon all sorts
of forces
and networks of forces as inputs
in order to to to
maintain, if you like, even support this
thing that we call every day
urban urban life.
Now what we deal with
now, as opposed to
back in the time of Bruegel, the elder,
is this increasing problem of the
diametric of invisibility and
invisibility. We have this.
We have this running problem of the
inability to see the inner workings of
our of our technologically
engineered and mediated environment,
bring on a tour of a very smart man said.
When a machine runs efficiently, when a
matter of fact, a set of one one
need focus only on its inputs and outputs
and not on its internal complexity.
Thus, paradoxically, the more science and
technology succeed, the more opaque
and obscure they become.
So, so, so the better running
of a system of a machine, the more it
actually increases to become what tends
to become closed and become opaque.
Bruno was very
polemic at the time for introducing,
among many things, the network theory, et
cetera, et cetera, but also this
idea of the black box.
He really brought it into a lot of
critical remarks at the time, looking at
the problem of of opacity as regards
systems.
And here we have an interesting
representation of a black box.
We have the input coming in on the left
and output over here.
But in the middle, we have a hidden
feedback control loop.
And that, for me, is a very, very
interesting starting point for for
looking at some of the techno political
challenges of our time today.
And of course, things things
become increasingly problematic when we
start talking about this thing called
infrastructure.
When we look at the
internet of representations of of the
internet as, of course, a network of
networks that wasn't ever so much
designed as as just sort of emerged
as an ongoing attempt for networks to
connect to other networks, you know, the
Tree of Stars phenomenon we have
with IPv4 and and
and this sort of clustering around that.
But to to that to an end user,
I like a quote. I heard earlier that the
only people that refer to users are
software designers and drug dealers.
But yet when we are talking
about users, you know, we're pushed
into this field of surfaces in
themselves much of the time.
Thankfully, Mozilla
Firefox is not playing that game
of opacity, but we have pushed
into into this kind of a black box again,
a kind of scanning over, at least as
regards the world wide web, not the
internet itself, but the web,
which which provides, of course, many
conveniences but comes with the cost of a
lack of a lack of visibility
of transparency, engineered
infrastructure, as is as a part of
our environment.
I mean, I grew up in New Zealand, where I
couldn't see another house surrounded
by beautiful indigenous forests that had
never been cut down.
That's where I grew up.
And now I live in cities and I'm
regularly aware still to this day.
Having spent 10 years living here in
Europe of just the presence of
infrastructure, and it always
makes me nervous. It always it always
has.
But the idea
that we can actually have an environment,
an urban environment and talk about it as
a singular thing is
problematic, not just
not just for reasons of wanting to be
able to depict contemporary life,
but in order to be able to understand
how that environment shapes
shapes us on
a small scale, we can look at an object
like this.
This is obviously the gramophone, which
was the shit hot.
MP three player of its time.
And and I like to think of this
actual object. It's very much a social
object, very much an extroverted object,
and it's in its own sense.
If you look at it, all of its inner
functionality is expressed.
Outwardly, we see the horn where the
sound comes out and if the
if the record is actually playing, we can
put our ear to that horn
and we and we can confirm with our air
that that is in fact where the sound is,
is very much being amplified
and pushed out into the room.
Structured air pressure effectively.
And if we actually look at the crank, we
can see this is our energy inputs and we
can we can wind that, that crank.
And in doing so, we see an immediate
response with the platter itself
actually spinning. And if we look close
enough on the record itself, we can see a
little needle bobbing up and down as
it winds around the spiral of that of
that record.
So the inner workings of this object are
expressed outwardly.
It's a it's a highly porous, transparent,
we should say, less translucent objects
in that regard. Compare it to the iPod
Nano, which just represents or
is represented by a field of surfaces
that presents itself as a as a skinned
object of metaphors, you know,
fast forward and rewind.
My girlfriend, Crystal, told me how
she was trying to explain to her to a
young boy the phenomenon the
the the the the
the experience of of of rewind.
And fast forward from her experience
growing up with tapes with cassettes.
And he just could not fathom the
the concept in our head to actually pull
out a cassette, put it into a machine
and show and what it was to fast forward
and rewind naturally.
Now we skip, Oh, I'm
so already we start to see these,
these sort of metaphors themselves
playing into the way that we use
technology and also informing
back into the into the design.
But if you take this field of surfaces
and you're really interested in
understanding how it works and what
it does, you have to open it up.
And almost almost no
one you or I know could tell
you precisely exactly
how an iPod nano works.
I wouldn't be able to.
Most people wouldn't be able to tell you
where the DSP chip is.
They wouldn't tell me the digital signal
processor was on this board.
They might not even recognize the power
interface to the battery.
They might not even recognize the lithium
battery itself as being a
as being a power source.
So, so the opacity is
also expressed sort of inwardly.
And this problem of of of ever retreating
scale.
Most of us, at least, I mean, maybe not
here this is the C3, but most
of us can say that we don't.
Really, no, the devices in our pockets,
you know, these things that we sleep,
sleep right next to and walk around with
and and speak
and to hear, for instance,
as the as
the wireless radio
part of an iPhone, an iPhone, iPhone
four.
So the right to deconstruct, modify and
ruin our rights that that actually come
with ownership or at least should.
This is something that that's very, very
important to me personally.
The right to open those things that we
own, even just to study them,
is increasingly contested.
Now there's this.
There's a wall of lawyers between
us and and an object
that we have in our pockets, you know, to
open that object, they actually open
it up and inspect and study.
It is already trading
on legal territory.
This is why we should stop talking about
we should we should start talking about
lawyers in a new plural.
I would like to start referring to a
murder of lawyers.
You've got a murder of crows.
You know, black, those beautiful black
birds, but a murder of lawyers.
I think it's better.
What we need is the right to
read, write and execute
as regards the objects that we
that we own.
And this is something that needs to be
not just pushed in the
form of policy reform and that kind of
thing. It needs to be actively upheld
through through the daily practice of
studying that which we
that which we hold near to us, that
infrastructure and that which
we depend upon us personally.
Most importantly, what's at stake?
Of course, we have that. Yes, we scan
problem that charismatic
man.
This is my album, by the way.
Smell it.
But yeah, we have this, we have this
incredible stuff like, for instance, you
know, when I read on scene it a while
ago, Senate bill rewrite, let us feds
read your email without warrants.
If you were to, if you were to ask.
But this just gets down to the problem of
education. The problem very much of
language. If you were to ask just about
anyone, you know how the postcard that
you sent them arrived in there
in their mailbox.
They would be able to give you a
relatively coherent description of the
process or the the set of processes
that resulted in that postcard arriving
in in a mailbox.
And I would talk about the van,
the Postcards Island postcodes, you
know, the fact that there is this
combination of street numbers and
and names recall addresses,
you know, but they
if you would ask that same person how the
email that that you sent them arrived
in their inbox, very few people, you
know, would be able to do so without
without leaning on and relying on
high surrealism and extremely
imaginatively rich poetry in order
to and they still wouldn't even get
close.
And this is precisely why this
kind of thing can happen
again. If you were to tell people that
speaking of data retention and the like,
if you were to tell people that all of
the all of the the letters, the physical,
you know, snail mail letters that they've
been sending for years using the
postal system have been
taken into a special room that no
one can see inside.
They've they've been steam opened
carefully. The letters have been taken
out, they've been copied and
then the sender and recipient of that
envelope has been then been copied and
will put into a database.
Probably be a lot of old people in the
streets, burning cars and protest.
But but but instead we have this thing
called data retention.
So we have again another layer of opacity
there where language and the technical
complexity, the abstraction is
coming between us and having a meaningful
conversation about the techno political
challenges of the world that we live in.
And this is where assholes like this can
have a free hand.
They can just come and play poker with
with with a flip of a sneaky dime.
You know, one sided coin
and and and and then,
yeah, we're all we're all
sleeping next to the NSA as they stroke
our hair while we sleep.
Engineering is complex.
It's terms abstract.
That's that's that that's that
that other layer of opacity I was just
referring to. Then, for instance, what
does a computer network?
What is the internet? Very few people can
can answer that question with any
with any degree of realism.
This is my definition of the internet
based on my questions
going out to people and the feedback I've
got back. It's a deeply misunderstood
technology.
The smart ass at the party who's whose
brother is a brain surgeon will say it's
a series of tubes, of course, other
people will just refer to it as a
magical, powerful reality.
Of course, The Matrix is the first point
of call. You know, there's reach for
that. It's the first thing
because the internet is somehow
everywhere. Now, you know, this is in the
air itself. It's a subatomic particle,
the internet, I think,
or it's this highly centrist model
in a throbbing, you know, sort of
dark star in this case of purple, dark
star of sentience and awareness.
And you get humanities guys that
at the future of the internet and the
internet belongs to the people kind of
debates.
Talking about the internet as an entity,
as a living thing and also talking about,
you know, the internet is a something
that truly belongs to the people.
And again, the lack of awareness as to
the real infrastructural reality of
the internet doesn't
afford them the insight that they need in
order to to to to
to, you know, to inform those claims.
The internet is, in fact, as
many of us here know, a highly privatized
space right from the physical layer,
right up to even the application layer.
Where am I on the internet?
Few people can can say, you know, if
you're you're here, you know, very few
people can actually do that.
I mean, you know, GOP.
Yeah.
In fact, where people's data is is, of
course, in these things called data
centers. I mean, as I've said in a
few talks this last year,
your drunken tweets and Facebook
wall buried underground, surrounded
by dirt, machine guns,
lawyers and tax.
I mean, that's where it is, actually, you
know, it's you would you would find it
very, very difficult to have the right
of access to see that
hard disk containing that file system
that has that drunken tweet on it
that you wish you never you never sent.
Instead, we pushed this children's book
representation of of the Technical
Reality, The Cloud, the height of every
dangerous reduction, and it was an
absolute pathetic, patronizing
reduction of of
of that thing that we call the internet
the cloud. I mean,
there was a big survey done in the US.
I wish I could cite it directly right now
on this. Many of you remember it was
quite famous.
It was a large proportion of Americans
believe that cloud computing was affected
by bad weather.
Now there is.
There are some.
There's a little something in it.
I mean, if there a if there's a, you
know, typhoon and you've got your
power, you've got your power grid knocked
out, then yeah, the clouds down.
But but I don't think they
were they were reaching quite quite that
far, those guys.
So we need to see the land through the
clouds. This, for instance, is
as on Apple's data centers.
This is where a lot of people's iTunes
profiles are stored.
And as I've also said in a couple of
talks, it clearly doesn't have the
genesis of an Apple product.
I mean, it's just doesn't, you know, and
the way the trees are lined up, then if
you look really closely this, there's,
you know, really, really high
heavy duty fences.
There is definitely four or five guys
walking around there with submachine
guns. You know, it just is probably two
two layers of passport checks, you know,
so. So when we talk about ownership and
the internet and and
our our political
relationship with this thing called
the internet, we need to get down to the
middle.
Instead, we're pushed this again.
Field of surfaces, the iPod nano
effect.
Our fear of this is an ideology of
shamelessness, the expectation that
things should always be seamless.
In fact, I like to
to get back, at least in my practice and
those of my colleagues, this thing called
sinfulness of bringing the ages into the
picture.
It's time now actually how much of a go.
Half an hour.
Cool, great. So the submarine cable map
is, for me, an excellent example
of of the kinds of initiatives that
admittedly it was intended for the
for the investor market, for people to
invest in this thing called submarine
cables. But it's had a really interesting
spin off effect in the critical
community, talking about the problems
of talking about the internet as a
as a thing that belongs to the people.
And look at the submarine cable map on
submarine cable map dot com.
You can you can click on the cables
that that connect countries and in fact,
envelop and wrap around countries and see
the owners you find very, very quickly.
Then when you're clicking on these submarine
cables that very few of them even
have public ownership of
any sort, even as a share, it is hardly
any government ownership of these cables
entirely privatized.
And now, as we've seen with
with with
HQ and the and the NSA and of course,
black boxing and tapping these submarine
cables that that right of access
is just as effectively a financial
transaction.
There is. There isn't the public
ownership in order to to to represent
the rights that we expect on this thing
called the internet at it, even the
physical layer.
So critical engineering is really getting
up, getting away from this definition of
engineering as the practical application
of science to commerce and industry
and really looking at how
we can forget about the utility and
forget about industry and application
industry. Forget about, you know,
the economics of it all and just actually
look at how can we use this?
Think this this collection of languages
and concepts around engineering
and the many different disciplines of
engineering?
How can we use them critically in order
to open up public
dialog about this infrastructure
that we depend upon?
It's a critical engineering as a frame
for applied research and development that
positions engineering rather than art or
design as primary within the
creative and critical process.
So it's about it's about turning
engineering from being a discipline
known to the
known to the how to know
these clichÃ©s are really boring, but the,
you know, sandal wearing Bryans of the
world or something like this and
actually, you know, saying that it's
now's the time that we all need to
develop a basic vocabulary
interface to this thing called
engineering, such that we can
meaningfully describe and therefore
critically engage the world that we live
in.
Critical Engineering Manifesto was
written in 2011 by this
guy.
This guy.
And and myself.
And it was quickly translated into 14
languages, and it can now be found in
labs all around the world in the
so-called Hack Labs maker spaces and
things that's made its way into
university programs is now part
of curricula.
Even recently at the MIT, thanks to
Governor Levin.
And it's
it turns out that we did had a bit of a
nerve. Positively
critical engineering seeks to answer
questions surrounding influence and
control in the world of integrated
systems and closed, opaque technology.
And the first points in
the manifesto is this critic engineer
considers engineering to be the most
transformative language of our time,
shaping the way we move, communicate and
think. It's thus the work of the critical
engineer study and exploit this language,
exposing its influence.
The first work I want to talk about as
regards representing this thing called
critical engineering is in
fact this is my favorite work from 2012.
It's by Gordon Savage,
one of the coauthors of the of the
manifesto. You saw his face before end up
being stolen.
Very talented.
Sweet, who is who was
my studio partner in Berlin
and Packard Brook was developed
for big exhibition that we did in the
House of Culture and developed in Berlin
that opened on the day of transmedia.
We were given a nice big room and we were
asked to come up with 10 works
for the exhibition.
And the one that that Gordon and Banks
came up with was was was, was very
special indeed.
What they did was it was
in the studio.
Well, who here is familiar with with with
with Mac addresses, link layer.
Yeah.
Beacon Beacon frames just the
quick.
So here we have a whole bunch of
different stations around us right now.
Obviously, these we have this
is Mac addresses here.
We have that represent our access points
basis IDs.
We have pro requests over here and we
have these things called beacons.
And these beacons are really the
management layer of of wireless
wireless networks.
It's another representation of this.
I mean, there's a huge number of these
beacons flying around the around the room
right now, and these are vital for
for the inner functioning
of of wireless networks
at the at the at the link layer.
Now, as far as
packet workers are concerned that they
were really interested in the fact that
they're these location services, what
they call fine grained location services
versus coarse grain like jeeps
that many of us are highly depended upon,
on a on a on a on a so-called
smartphones or or spying
spying devices you can make calls on, as
Jacob said a while ago.
And what they wanted to do was, was
to was to show it was perfectly possible
to intervene on that, on that,
on that geolocation dependency,
for instance.
Obviously, we all knew about
the carrier IQ scandal, where
people were inadvertently on their
smartphones, capturing
beacons that were then being pushed back
to the mothership and then be used to
build comprehensive location,
fine grained location maps, if you like,
built around access points
all around the world.
And and now when someone
is dissatisfied with GPS, they can,
of course, switch to this fine grained
location services.
They set up a tree of
of ED 11 radios in
the studio, which is in Liqun and
in Berlin, and then down the house to
culture and develops, which is
right on the other side of town.
They had the equivalent sister tree of
these ed ed L1 radios.
Each one of these represents a different
chunk of the of of the of the
of the ED 11 spectra.
So we have we have a channel represented
by each one of these antenna.
You can say the captured
beacon frames at
at the studio and then sent
them over a tunnel to
to to the House of Culture and developed
where they were launched back into the
air.
And you had we had 2000 people
come through the door of
our of our exhibition in the House of
Concerned developed two 2000 people came
in just just in to our room alone and
huge numbers and walking out into the
night around the house to turn into
vaults with their phones blowing up
on their faces, looking for hotels,
bars and restaurants that didn't exist
around the house to capture and develop.
They existed and the curtain around the
studio, so they they had entirely
folded the map.
People were genuinely confused.
You know, there's this they say, I
swear it was here. You could see people
walking out to this weird little forest
opposite the are just really, you know,
friends loyally following us.
Just.
And this is this is for me, really
important because it uses
this, this this and
leverages this implicit trust that we
place on technology, uses it
as a as a vulnerable surface,
intervenes on that and then throws the
whole infrastructure back in your face
and says, Look, you know you, you
are depending on something that that
itself puts you in
a highly volatile and vulnerable
position.
It's all about that belief.
And I'll stick a really neat piece made
made very recently by Dennis
Paul.
He's probably here is probably the one
clapping just saying that you, Dennis
Clifford, your and stuff. And it's just
that too.
I'm joking. That's a really neat space.
It doesn't need to be complex, you know,
a work of critical engineering.
Here's a good example now stick a.
You get its goals destroyed, a great.
So, of course, you know, you have you
plug that into the wall and and a fuze
blows and you take out the you take out
the, you know, effectively
a large scale version is would do this.
But you know, you can wear it as a
necklace. I really like it as a poetic
inversion. You know, take the just fold
that back and create a loop.
And then Blown Super
is a piece made by me this
this year with a lot of help
from my girlfriend building the tank.
It's called No Network. No Network is a
GSM jammer in the form of a battle tank.
So I just.
Yes, just as just a little it's a little
object that that that, you know, just
plays with cyber warfare and this this
whole, you know, kind of metaphor of
cyber war.
But but when you when you flip the
switch, it knocks,
it knocks you off the network with the
sphere sphere of around about six meter
radius around the actual object.
So people can it can experience in
a in a in a in a controlled environment.
You know, ideally,
you know, being off the off the grid if
you like, you know, in that regard, and
this is this is something that is
increasingly rare.
I mean, I love going back to my home
country of New Zealand and just simply
being at the family farm and not being
able to receive calls, make them or,
you know, dismiss as, I'm just I'm really
I'm contactable because
there just simply is no network there.
There are no cell towers, was that.
I guess that's the next one.
I really want to do that. Actually make
it remote controls. Just send it off down
the street. Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, just be a really bad neighbor.
Yeah. Oh my German immigration.
Yeah, yeah.
And you could just see the little the
German side, the transparency Grenada's
project that that I made for the
exhibition in the House of Culture and
developed that that again looks at this
metaphor of cyber warfare and the cyber
weapon and tries to create
a kind of an iconic handheld, fully
functional package that that that
that that deals with some of these
questions we have around opacity and data
and transparency, particularly
in the government and corporate sector,
where we're fully aware that that these
these very powerful entities are
making decisions increasingly behind
closed doors. And I wanted to come up
with a hand-held iconic solution to that
and came up with with this,
it's based on the Soviet one hand
grenade and it's just around about the
same size.
It's got all lovely silver work made by
a very talented metal worker.
Suzanne Stark also lives
in Berlin.
It's got a it's got a little microphone,
quite a powerful microphone, a little
a gum sticks overstock.com, a little
little tiny, a little tiny iron based
board on the inside, and I'm running
a division on it, my operating system
of choice wherever possible, and
it has a little bar back there.
And when you pull the pin on this
on the subject, when you pull the pin, it
captures all of the all of the wireless
traffic it possibly can, and it's in
its in its proximity and then tunnels
it up to my server, where
a pill script goes through and then pulls
out html, jpeg, gif,
PNG fragments and
then does the TCP stream following and
then shows in real time on a map
what people are doing.
So someone can, for instance, be,
you know.
So I'm going to be checking their email
or something like this, and obviously
when I've shown this in public, I've
shown to the Nemo Museum and in
Amsterdam, you know, huge museum in
downtown incident and many other big
places showed it right next to the
Pentagon actually at the Corcoran Gallery
there. And and and
people have to be warned.
You know, when you entering the room, you
know, be aware that your you know,
that you need to have you have you have
you should lock down, you have to be had
to be secured.
And and that itself that the terror
of the object and representing itself as
a violent weapon
gets people talking.
And so you see you see mother and
daughter and grandpa having a chat
about the phone and the grenade, you
know, and just trying to work things out,
you know, just just trying to reduce
that, that they're sharing
that, that that unintended emission
prism, the bacon frame is just
a little project that Daniel and I,
Daniel Vasilyev and I again
coauthor of the benefits of Manifesto Put
Together in two days for Art Hack Day in
Berlin.
This is a very,
very little project that
is intended as intended to
to.
It's a speculative
proposal of what?
NSA.
Wireless network forensics equipment
might look like, but also
obviously with the joke of having a big
prism in the middle of it.
And and when this thing
runs, I'll show you a video in a second,
the PRISM spends.
When someone is merely in the room
and there's there's a network
that they are associating with, and when
they ask for a DHC place,
you know, they ask for ask for a lease
on that network, ask for an IP,
that boot pay packet that goes out.
We capture it and we show inside the
prism, the host name of
the device. And if it's an iPhone, it's
almost always Cyrus iPhone, Tom's
iPhone, you know, Tim's iPhone.
And then underneath it, the Mac address.
This looks like looks like this.
Hopefully, we got some audio.
Um, Prisma, does you know?
Susie was iPhone.
And look, it's the.
Angela, Miss Angela Merkel's iPhone
Plus BlackBerry.
The how she doing there, anyway.
So you and this is just the again, it's
just one of the wonderful things
about working in a
free software environment from a credit
perspective is you can just cobble stuff
together. I mean, what what banks,
Danya, Gordo
and I do all the time as we just we just
glue everything together with shell
scripts, you know, it's just it's
fantastic. You know, this firehose
and piping and Unix pipelines, you know,
you can really rapidly prototype in this
context. I would never, ever dream of of
working outside of the service
domain. You can really get good work done
fast against a two day project
at a transient medium to
this next one, 2014.
I'm going to have a really sinister
version of that project when it comes to
mountain houses is a very important
developer, artist, engineer in this.
In this scene, he made
it to work that I think is is
very, very important.
The Earth boot computer he's really
interested in and in the fact that
our our our hardware is,
is it sort of detached,
at least conceptually in our mind from
the Earth in which those those
minerals are in fact found?
You know, much of what we actually have
in our pockets comes from a vast,
diverse array of of geographical
locations and is a huge number of
different hands and minds and processes
involved in producing that thing that we
call, for instance, a motherboard or
something like that.
He made a computer for an Earth boot
computer that this machine only boots
if you actually stick it in the ground.
And and, yeah, it's
beautiful, it's a beautiful project.
You stick it in the ground and it
actually uses the the the
very fine electricity running through the
soil of the Earth itself
as a as a literally a programing
interface and programs directly the
computer and and and effects directly.
It's its runtime function.
And it's sticking in the ground.
And here's one here. Just sort of stuck
in the ground over here.
I mean, this is a very, very poetic, you
know, philosophical representation of,
I think, another way of approaching
critical engineering. You know, imagine
if, for instance, you're you're on
the phone in your pocket,
needed contact with the ground from
where it actually came, arguably
in order to function.
I'm not going to talk about broadband
because I'm out of time.
I think I've been doing a lot of work on
cell tower research, and I'm very
focused on the cellular network
infrastructure at the moment.
But just very briefly regarding
infrastructure and hidden infrastructure.
Opacity takes other forms.
You know this this this removal from view
of of of the engineered reality
of the world that we live in,
particularly in the form of these things
called stealth cell towers.
There's a bizarre design practice
of of disguising cell towers
as other things like
the almost always bad.
I mean, this one here is a cell tower
badly disguised as a tree in
a place called Braun home in England.
There's an archive put together
by Chris Pensione, who
who? Who went through countless
examples of stealth cell towers that
people have found. The ones that I myself
have found and put it into some PDFs
for me, for my research.
And and what we see here
is is a is a growing community
of radio enthusiasts that
are going around and finding these these
things. He's one disguise as a street
lamp, and it was only found
I was told it was only found because
people in this absolutely horrible,
gloomy part of England were were
trying to walk home to their houses,
obviously in the world's worst weather.
And and there was a street lamp that
never functioned ever.
And I mean, all they had to
do was to apply power
to the put a bulb
in it and apply power, and no one would
have investigated what this thing was
and found out that it's actually a cell
tower.
This is the best one of all.
I mean, some, some some
really poor, poor sod
had the job of trying to disguise
cell towers as as bricks.
And so they obviously went up there on a
ladder and took it, took a photograph of
those of those of those bricks.
And then and then, you know, loyally went
down to the print shop, I suppose, and
printed out some some vinyl
onto adhesive vinyl, but didn't use UV
resistant adhesive vinyl.
So as time goes on,
the disguise effect fake, shall we say,
is sort of, you know, it's an attrition
that wears off and they become more and
more visible.
Um, anyway, this is this is an
example of of of the corporate
level and the physical infrastructure
world, individuals actively
working to ensure that that that
cellphone, you know that you are not
aware that there's a cell tower going up
next to your kindergarten.
You know that your kid goes to or
something like this because people don't
like that idea.
I'm going to talk about
finally trusted engineering.
And to conclude here with a project
called On Tweak that was made by
by Daniel, the city of Dunia and myself
in 2011, we were lucky enough to get the
Golden Nikka for this ad as electronica,
which was certainly a great honor, and
we've been showing this work around a
lot. It comes in the form of a
of a that's that's
one of the posters
comes in the form of of a small wall wart
like a little matchstick, a kind of
thing. Plug it into the wall.
It attacks the local wireless network,
just using it in the first version, just
acacia spoofing attacks.
A local wireless network roots
all of the traffic through itself and
allows the owner of that of that of that
that the book called this one
right.
The owner of that of that box to go to
Madagascar, Kuala Lumpur, Auckland, New
Zealand and manipulate the news.
Read on that wireless network.
So they plug it and walk out
and then jump on a plane and in the
comfort of your of your two star hotel,
you can then stop manipulating the news
that's actually on that network.
So you could tell people, for instance,
that you could cancel flights at an
airport, you know, manipulate
the the sights there.
Or you could tell people that in fact,
on BBC that an
asteroid storm is imminently on way
to to Earth Solar System
and that now's time to crack open
the whiskey.
So I'm just going to show you show you
the video now, and I think we'll I think
we'll call it a day and open up for
questions. Here we go.
It's not like people think they're being
subject to propaganda.
If people don't think that they're
looking for that, they're much easier to
propagandize.
And that's the genius of our media
system.
I'm
of.
I.
I don't.
It's a real bakery.
Really, this
media is the nervous system
of a democracy, if it's not functioning
well, the democracy can't function.
Thanks, guys.
OK. Question time.
Thank you very, very much.
Yes, any questions, please?
Yes, please line up in front of the
microphones.
Shall I just go ahead?
OK, we'll start with questions from
I.R.S.,
So the main question
and I see three, where can
I get one of these devices?
Well, actually we had a how to
up and running for about two years.
And that and the page
is currently as currently broken because
we lost some images, but many people
have made them.
They've been used all over the all over
the world. We're currently doing an
upgrade for some new new
boards. But if you go to Newsweek.com,
slash how to you can
you can see that it is a bit broken
there at the moment. But in about a week
or two, we should have a whole new
How-To there for people to be able to
make their own using some modern hardware
because at the moment is a couple of
years old and we want to push, push
out a new release or the firmware and
stuff we've we we have
freely available, of course, all the
shell scripts themselves.
You can read and study.
Yeah.
Number two, please.
Hi, there.
So thanks for
bridging the new media community with the
hacker community, there isn't enough
overlap, in my opinion.
But the main question that I have
is basically how do you deal with the
fact that a lot of art
that also bridges activism to a
certain degree anyway often
ends up as a sort of like gesture
in a gallery like you showed us a lot of
work that is exhibited at
transmedia, etc.
and so on. But like, how
do you actually bring it into
your practice? How do you see it
deployed in the world?
Like, how is that?
Not just the gesture?
Oh, absolutely. This is this is really
important. It's important to break away
from the from from the black box of the
art world itself. You could even argue,
you know, for many people, it's opaque.
Those that that have some
contact with the kinds of conversations
around art as a as a
as a sort of a in some ways, you could
argue, a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy
much of the time as especially as regards
the market now, it's just really closed,
you know, so. So the way that
that we do it is, for one thing, we
we show that it works.
We do it in big public museums.
Secondly, we we build workshops
around around the projects that
have that have a general public.
And we've been very lucky to work with
organizations all over the world,
cultural organizations that bring general
public and they they have zero
zero skill base to get up and go.
But then we take them through to
to having real contact with some of these
ideas through the actual engineering,
through the material itself.
We do a lot of that.
The other thing to do is to just is to
upload how to so other people can make
their own and then freak the friends
and family out, you know?
And this is definitely what happened with
Newsweek. Many, many people were making
these making these little wall plugs.
It ended up pissing people off all around
the world, actually.
Thanks. Yep.
Please address the question from number
four.
Yeah. Have you ever thought of
applying those new
streets to cars,
taxis, things like that, so you only
get a distraction for a moment?
You know, I have my new site and I
read something and I click reload
or maybe go back to an article and it's
different.
So it's a little bit static
the way you do it with the wall plugs,
and I think the structure would be even
greater if things moves
move. So just put a solar cell
on it or may be mounted on some taxi or
something? I don't know.
Yeah.
Well, most people, when they're reading
the news in a taxi, they're going through
the 3G, you know, two, three,
four now 4G networks.
So it's it's a totally different
opinion. Yeah.
I'm not talking about taxi to distract
the guys in the taxi, but in a densely
populated areas.
Yeah, you could use taxis because
they have
yeah, they have a lot.
You have a lot of beacons around there.
So from here, from that works
from the houses.
Yeah, for sure. I mean, I suppose if you
could, if you could do that, if you could
change the network topology fast enough,
you'd have to. You couldn't use something
like optic spoofing.
It would be too slow and too unreliable.
You need to this.
But yes, that's an interesting idea.
Maybe trams would be good because that
sort of speed would be enough for you to
be able to go around and and and,
you know, really work with a whole bunch
of open wireless networks.
Many cities have open
open access points now that opens
up the territory a lot, and so you're
getting out into the street is maybe a
more interesting direction.
Sure, good.
We might have time for about three more
questions. Number four, please.
Yeah, I've heard yeah,
I've heard about Newsweek, but I didn't
know that you were the guy behind it.
One of two you?
Yeah.
Are there any other projects you
did recently?
Um, do you have?
Yeah.
Well, I'm
really focused on on on
GSM cell tower infrastructure at the
moment, but I can't really talk about
that. And it was I need to talk to my
lawyer a bit about.
He's one of the good ones, actually, as
to what I can and can't do and how
I represent it.
But Dan, you and I are working hard
on some upcoming
intervention and in Berlin
that we're going to test out and transmit
Theola and then take it to the next.
Take it to the next level after that.
Yeah, lots of lots of stuff, really.
I'm also interested very much in
and looking at more rapid
prototyping, low, low tech solutions,
a bit like the now sticker.
You know, projects like this that can you
can drive the point home with
with a bang and not necessarily need to
go quite so, quite so hard all the time.
But you just, I guess, follow
you can follow what we're doing on
online.
I'd love to tell you about the same
stuff. I just can't. Sorry.
OK. Yeah.
So on your website, you yeah, keep
it up. We'll be pushing some stuff.
The upshot cosmetics.
One more question from I.R.S..
So some people are interested in the
firmware and the source for the
transparency grenade as well, which
doesn't seem to be on the website.
Well, the the the
transparency grenade itself is extremely
simple. It's on that level.
It's just basically it's
tcpdump capturing
with it's
running Debian on a
on a over a
come from Game six
and and then GCP dumpers
running with a set of zero.
And it's just capturing everything it
possibly can. And then it tunnels, it
tunnels it over VPN to
my server. So the actual the interesting
stuff that I'm working on publishing at
the moment is really on the server side.
It's all the Perl.
That's the stuff that's interesting that
does the TCB stream following and formats
that an interesting and useful way on the
grenade. It's really just a case of
a few shell scripts that
that work meaningfully
with with a target network, for instance,
you might want to supply a key
or if it's it's an open net where you
don't need to, of course. And then it's
just, yeah, if you
going to utilize.
Nothing too exciting, but I will publish
it soon, I promise.
No one, please.
The work you showed was very disruptive
and destructive.
Would you ever consider a more positive
approach of engineering?
Positive examples of technology?
I think lots of people are sort of doing
that already. I'm really interested and
dangerous too. And and
productive inducing, productive,
healthy paranoia and fear.
Fear is a good is a good way to that, you
know?
It's like when?
Like when you actually changing changing
stuff on someone's phone because they
don't make a distinction between between,
you know, where that you know, the
network service, they're using all the
time. But if you can change what happens
in the in that and that little
rectilinear bounds on their phone, which
which they they are inherently dependent
upon that being a consistent
relationship with with a trusted
provider, it could be a new source or it
could even just actually be the your
data plan. Or it could be, you know, the
wireless networking using Starbucks.
If you can manipulate that that space and
introduce fear and paranoia
into that space, then already you're
beginning what I would describe as a
healthy healing, positive
process of of change.
Yeah.
One last question from IOC.
Last question from IOC is, are
you worried about the repercussion
in particular from Newsweek?
Yes. If we I mean, we had we had we
had a lot of people writing to us wanting
to buy hundreds of these, these
these little boxes we
had. We had a very, very bizarre one from
from a Chechen source
that didn't seem to realize that Dungy
himself is from St. Petersburg,
which has been unusual. But the moment
that we had to sell any of these
things, we are immediately
in a very, very different legal category.
And so we prefer to work, you
know, as as in a research like
sort of territory applied nonetheless.
But but we're not in the market of.
Of of of actually
pushing this stuff out into the world is
a product that that then
would would, according to my
lawyer, at least put us in a very
different legal domain
at the moment. We're quite OK.
Again, disclaimers are really everything.
You know, if you just write on the if you
write on a on a site, this
is intended to scare your sister,
you know, not people at airports, then
then yeah.
What can a lawyer say?
Thank you very much for your talk.
Pleasure. David.