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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 intimat
e 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 bein
g 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 ter
ms 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 practi
ce 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 ap
plied 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 clichés 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 wi
th 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 equiva
lent 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 ful
ly 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 t
hat 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 bad
ly 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 Duni
a 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 b
een 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 peo
ple 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.