Last weekend (23rd and 24th of June 2006) another Dorkbot was held in Nieuwpoorttheater in Ghent. Dorkbot is a global festival with “People doing strange things with electricity.” ‘De Ambassade’ (the embassy) is a place in Nieuwpoorttheater where artists and students collectively research the relation between art, society and the balance of power. This time an ‘RFID embassy’ was set up as a research project by the collective nMn (naarstige Media nijverheid).
Friday night’s theme was RFID. I was invited to do a lecture on my experiences in my research project on RFID. I especially talked about the evolution I found in the way RFID is applied. My presentation “Evolving RFID Devices” can be downloaded here:
Presentation Dorkbot Gent 23rd of June 2006.pdf
That same night Rob van Kranenburg spoke about ‘RFID and Pervasive Computing”. An interesting lecture on the consequences of RFID and the way it is entering our lives. He was followed by Melanie Rieback of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, creator of the RFID virus. She’s researching the privacy issues involved with RFID from the context of Computer Science. Although she did mention the virus, a great deal of her talk was about her RFID Guardian, a mobile device protecting your privacy. Later that night Tilman Runge and Christopher Hirschmann were supposed to talk about their RFID Zapper. Unfortunately their presentation was cancelled that night. nMe itself built the RFIDude: a robot driving around the room autonomous. Visitors were handed out RFID badges with their hobbies associated to them. A built in reader allowed the robot to scan people’s badges and show their relationship with other people on a big screen.
It was an interesting night, with interesting talks. Later that night some lively conversations arose. Unfortunately I was unable to attend the next night, missing out on the RFID zapper and the other interesting projects like Johannes Taelman’s DIY touch screen. A nice day in Ghent with lovely weather slightly made up for that.
Although I expected an audience focused on RFID I was positively surprised that uninitiated people came by, interested in learning about this new technology. Also my compliments for the organisation. Some photographs were made. If I can get hold of some of them they might show up here later.
Read the announcement e-mail:
+++ copy, paste & send i t out (plz) +++
so yes yes yes, dorkbot will sweat it out after a year of silence and hard work doing nothing. with a two-day program, that regulars from earlier times know to be called – echo –
DorkFest
no less
Friday and Saturday June 23 and 24 will see a new parade of shiny people and pets (electronic or other) doing weird things with RFID, life systems and other (de)generative upstarts. Spring sucked, but this Dorkfest will reveal a blossoming bouquet of bits ! Get those nostrils waxed and skate on over ! It’s free and we all smell great.Come sniff it up at the fully renovated and stylishly refurbished inner dwellings of the Nieuwpoorttheater at its original spot. [Nieuwpoort 31 – 35 BE-9000 Gent] Nothing but the best for you, yourself and your parade of charming side-kicks. Please remind each other to give a warm welcome to
on friday
– Melanie Rieback – RFID Security and Privacy
– Rob van Kranenburg – RFID and Pervasive Computing
– Patrick Plaggenborg – RFID Devices
– Tilman Runge – RFID Zapper
– RFIDudeon saturday
– Tom C – processinghacks.com
– Heiko Hansen – HeHe.org
РI̱igo and Julio Fernandez Ostolaza РLaFabricaDeCosasBonitas
– Frederick de Bleser & Tom de Smedt – Nodebox
– Johannes Taelman – Finger Price
– Sven Koenig – sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ!#……………//……………?/
RFID Security and Privacy (friday)
by Melanie Rieback – NLRadio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags are tiny remotely-powered computer chips that augment physical objects with wireless computing and data storage capabilities. RFID tags augment all kinds of personal and commercial goods, including partially assembled cars, frozen dinners,ski-lift passes, clothing, public transportation tickets, pets, livestock, and unruly teenagers. But the pervasiveness of RFID technology unfortunately brings associated security and privacy threats. People can be tracked by correlating “sightings” of RFID tags attached to their belongings, or criminals could steal supermarket products by modifying RFID tag data. Hackers and criminals can even use RFID tags to aunch traditional “hacking” attacks.
This presentation will explore the security and privacy threats that RFID technology faces. The tour guide will be Melanie Rieback, a Ph.D. student at the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam, who has spent the last ~3 years obsessing about the subject. After providing the requisite background material, Melanie will discuss some of her personal experiences in the RFID security/privacy domain, including providing a few anecdotes about the RFID Guardian and RFID malware projects.
http://www.rfidguardian.org
http://www.rfidvirus.org#……………//……………?/
RFID and Pervasive Computing (friday)
Rob van Kranenburg – NLRob van Kranenburg will speak about RFID and Pervasive Computing, i.e.how computer technology increasingly permeates our everyday life. He sees RFID as an unavoidable logistics technology that poses the question of social control.
*Rob van Kranenburg* is senior lecturer Ambient Experience Design (HKU, KMT) and program manager at the Virtueel Platform. He is a longtime critical follower of the developments around ubiqitous computing and RFID. Rob will explore which attitude is necesary towards the next (expected) big issue around RFID: electromagnetic pollution, or EMF.
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RFID Zapper – DE (friday)
by Tilman RungeThe RFID-Zapper is a small project that had been started in November 2005 after an inquiry about an RFID-Tag disabling device to the Chaos Communication Congress Crew which was answered with deadline and lecture registration information… So we built a device out of a disposable camera to destroy RFID-Tags as a prove-of-concept and a measure to safe privacy.
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RFID Devices – NL (friday)
by Patrick PlaggenborgSteeds meer bedrijven zijn geïnteresseerd in de steeds populairder wordende techniek genaamd RFID (Radio Frequency Identification). De interesses lijken vooral uit te gaan naar het gemak en de extra controle die RFID brengt in de logistiek. Extra controle over goederen maar ook extra controle over de consument. Nog niet veel consumenten weten van deze techniek af, maar de mensen die er vanaf weten spreken al snel van ernstige privacyschending. Niet zo heel vreemd als je nagaat wat bedrijven en overheden over burgers te weten kunnen komen zodra ieder object zijn eigen tag krijgt en dus informatie over zichzelf of zijn eigenaar uitzendt.
Het aantal testprojecten met deze techniek op het gebied van logistiek en het volgen van identiteiten is groot en blijft groeien. Jammergenoeg maken deze privacygevoelige projecten het grootste deel uit van het totaal aan experimenten met RFID. Deze experimenten hebben voor het grote publiek een vooral negatieve tendens. Het is van belang dat er ook positieve experimenten gedaan worden zodat RFID tags niet alleen worden geassocieerd met doemscenario’s. De techniek maakt namelijk zo veel meer mogelijk dan alleen het stroomlijnen van
logistiek en het identificeren van mensen.#……………//……………?/
RFIDude – B (friday)
by nMnnMn brings their social interactive pet. rfidude makes friends not art.
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LaFabricaDeCosasBonitas – ES (saturday)
by Iñigo and Julio Fernandez OstolazaLaFabricaDeCosasBonitas s.l. or Factory of Pretty Things is the administrative form in which Iñigo and Julio Fernandez Ostolaza deliver their work. The company was started in 2002 and, since then, it has not yielded benefits nor has gone to bancarupcy. This is a delicate balance that authors hope to be able to sustain for a long time.They will present two projects: RACISMOMATON & ANA
www.racismomaton.org (2004-2006)
A computarized booth on the street will tell you in less than five minutes –and for free– about you attitudes with the inmigrants. Would you try?In RACISMOMATON the human being is replaced by a machine capable of interaction with the person to reflect his/her most intimate non-reasons. At this time, reasons for racism. The installation consists of an autonomous computarized implementation of the Implicit Atitudes Test developed by psychologists at the university of Princeton and washington.
www.anaproject.org (2005-2007)
TheFabricadecosasbonitas plans to take 20 robot-demonstrators to the next G8 summit, to be held in Hamburg in the summer of 2007. This project is a clear allusion to a controversial news article published in early 2005 on the Pentagon’s intention to send ‘robot soldiers’ to Iraq in March of that year. It took many years to separate the genus Homo from animals, but many fewer to witness the evolution of human beings into machines. The ANA
(or Autonomous Non-violent Agent) project satirizes about the terrible consequences of dehumanizing armed conflict and mechanically systematizing the solution of political disputes. Human identity wobbles in the face of progress when progress and peril appear arm in arm. Given the amount of cynicism we seem able to assume, robots can replace people in some of their tasks, including killing. They might even become the actors in the new millenniumps protest movements.#……………//……………?/
NODEBOX – EVOLUTION – B (saturday)
by Frederick de Bleser, Tom de Smedt & Ludivine LechatThe Evolution project is a game of life inside a computer. Creatures struggle for their survival in a virtual arena, where they get to fly around, flock together and hunt down enemies. Predators, in search for food, single out individuals from the flock and attack them. Their prey tries to outrun or hide from them. Smart prey works together to beat the attacker.
Both predator and prey get their appearance from a pool of available body parts. Those parts determine their strengths and weaknesses, and influence the outcome of each fight.
After the battle is over, the survivors are crossbred and mutated to form newer, better creatures. Then, the cycle starts all over again.
Evolution is a sequel to Ludivine Lechat’s Graphic Cellular Domestication postgraduate program at Transmedia. She devised a set of parental cells and evolutionary rules with which she could domesticate graphic cell organisms from microscopic components.
Evolution was made in NodeBox, an in-house open-source application for programming 2-dimensional graphics and animation in Python. It’s an open environment for design research.
www.nodebox.net
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HEHE – FR (saturday)
by Heiko HansenHeHe (Helen Evans and Heiko Hansen) reverse cultural engineers the technological systems that surround us: From transport design to pollution monitoring, from public advertisement to meteorology, from architecture to public lightning. Their work seeks to go back in time, re-work past and as a result, re-phrase the existing into a new critical usage, a social function, with the spectator in its epicentre. At a time of ongoing technological expansion, progress starts to fray on its edges. How can we use and re-use, not only as a semiotic resistance against those who prey on the new, but also to return back to original invention, which have become clouded by recursive innovations. In this way, the work of HeHe is a process of reduction and subtraction until they find a point of departure, from which they can develop a usage with a plain functionality.
HeHe is a collective and a non-profit making organisation for production, founded in France by Helen Evans (United Kingdom, 1972) & Heiko Hansen (Germany, 1970). Helen and Heiko’s work has been shown in a range of cultural contexts.
Their installations have been presented at the Centre George Pompidou Centre in Paris, Triennale in Milan, V2 Institute for Unstable Media in Rotterdam, Electrohype in Malmo, ISEA Nagoya, CynetArt in Dresden, the Palazzo delle Papesse Centre for Contemporary Art in Sienna. In 2001 they were awarded the CyNet Art Award for interactive installation.
They have published scientific papers and held research positions in informatics laboratories such as: Frauenhofer in Germany and INRIA Futurs in France (National Institute for Research in Informatics and Mechanics).
Both Helen and Heiko have taught young artists and designers within both art education and artist-run organisations: including masters students at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, both undergraduate and masters design students at ENSCI/Les Ateliers in Paris, and undergraduate media students at the University of Amsterdam.
They benefited from two years residency at the prodigious artist factory Mainsd’oeuvres, a multidisciplinary site for cultural projects based in St-Ouen (Northern Paris), as well as the Pixel Ache residency at NIFCA (Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art) and a residency at Makrolab in Scotland with ArtsCatalyst. HeHe Association has been generously supported by DICREAM and CNAP (Ministry of Culture, France).
HeHe association collaborates with a range of companies such as Beauty Prestige International in Paris, Cluster Magazine in Italy and Interface-Z in Paris.
Galerie Quang, Paris, represents “Collectif HeHeâ€.
www.hehe.org
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sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ! – SUI (saturday)
by Sven KoenigGramophone records, magnetic tapes, vinyl records, digital samplers and computers have already liberated the samples long ago. But still – to infringe copyrights – one has to decide which sample one actually wants to steal. One has to arduously load audio files into sample editors or sequencers. One has to cut, copy, paste and arrange. All that takes precious creative energy and a lot of time.
Enough of that!
Copyright infringements have never been easier than with sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ!
sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ! is a Realtime-Mind-Music-Video-Re-De-Construction-Machine.
It is a conceptual software which makes it possible to work with samples in a completely new way by making them available in a manner that does justice to their nature as concrete musical memories.
www.popmodernism.org
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Tom Carden – UK (saturday)
Tom C develops passenger flow modelling software for YRM Architects, London. He is currently seconded by YRM to pursue an EngD in Virtual Environments, Imaging and Visualisation with the Virtual Reality Centre for the Built Environment in the Bartlett School of Graduate Studies at University College London. His research, supervised by Professor Alan Penn, is on the visualisation and simulation of pedestrian movement, primarily focused on passenger flows in airport terminals. In 2002, he obtained a 1st class BSc (hons.) in Artifical Intelligence with Mathematics from the University of Leeds.
http://www.tom-carden.co.uk/
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Finger Price – B (saturday)
by Johannes TaelmanInspired by the DIY multi-touch interaction screen by Jeff Han, Johannes build his own screen. Fingerprice is a playfull touchscreen-application based on two-dimensional simulated naive physics and cinematic-quality vector graphics, and musical side-effects. _Do_ touch!
http://gamedesign.emedia.groept.be/studentswork.htm
For same info (and archives_), check www.nmn.be
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DORKBOT-GHENT
http://www.dorkbot.org@ Nieuwpoorttheater, Nieuwpoort 31 – 35 BE-9000 Gent
With the kind support of projectsubsidies van de Vlaamse Gemeenschap
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………dorkbot: people doing strange things with electricity……….
……………………..http://dorkbot.org……………………….
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