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Air Poems #144

Closed leoneckert closed 7 years ago

leoneckert commented 7 years ago

Air Poems

Name : Leon Eckert Location : Manhattan, NY Email : leoneckert@mailbox.org Twitter : @eckert_leon GitHub : leoneckert Url(s) : leoneckert.com

Speaker Bio

photo I am a German programmer, researcher and artist focusing on the critical discussion of technological progress and its impact - sociological, political and psychological - on society at large. In the past I contributed to the open source privacy tool AdNauseam as well the Brooklyn based human rights organization Witness. For the next academic year I will be a research resident at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunication Program (ITP).

Type of proposal

artwork

Description

Title: Air Poems

Description: Our devices are extremely sociable and - when they are not connected to a wifi network - very loud. Then, they constantly shout out the names of their past partners, the networks they have been connected to before, in the hope to reunite: "I have been connected to Starbucks Wifi, are you anywhere out there? I have also been connected to nyuguest, are you anywhere out there? I have also..." Not only is that a very private and sensitive kind of information about their user (a list of network names can say a lot about a person), but - in my opinion - it is also a very poetic one. Air Poems is a program that listens to devices in the surrounding and forms poems using their words in real time.

Example output:

            |           
           #160514136
            |
                |

                    bluehaze-5G
                    GORILLA PIG 5.0
            Poutyandbubbles5g
          Siren Wireless Network
                    ChinaUnicom-SPIA        

            |

              [a] blue
            GORILLA
                    bubbles
                    less [in]
                    China

            |
                    |

For Radical Networks I imagine this: On a monitor or projector appears a constantly updating stream of poems like the one above. It’s nicely formatted on the fullscreen command line, presenting the SSIDs as well as the words retrieved from them - it just keeps scrolling as the new probe requests come in (if there is a shortage I’ll include a tweak in the script to use old ones). Lucky visitors will be surprised by network names familiar to them (“Oh look, I know tempelhofNet !!”). In addition I envision a smaller screen that allows to query for MAC addresses to see all the poems that contain SSIDs captured from a particular device.

Duration (not needed for artworks)

Workshop technical requirements and materials list (if applicable)

Artwork installation requirements (if applicable)

Table space and power. A projector (or a wall to project on) would be great, but I could also organize a monitor as I am sure space is limited.

Performance requirements (if applicable)

Et cetera...

Here is the project page with some more examples: http://leoneckert.com/projects/air-poems/ and the GitHub that should be cleaned up: https://github.com/leoneckert/air-poems/tree/master/v2