Online, Offline and all-over the city
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Bartholl, Aram
Art projects with and about the Internet, computers and society! Aram Bartholl will present an overview of his past, often site-specific works and projects including USB 'DeadDrops' (they caused a lot of alarm lately) , IRL 'Map' marker or 'KILLYOURPHONE.COM' mobile phone blocking pouches.
 So, before we start, I want to recommend for the German speaking audience to watch this video if you know my work already. It's a very good stand-up comedian. He's explaining capitalism in half an hour and what's not working and politics and everything. And this is him at its best. So I really recommend watching this. All the links of the talk and also this link to this video will be here. Also the talk, PDF will be here available for you. So you can go ahead and check what I'm going to talk about. This is a picture Nicole sent me. I gave a talk here too. It's Republica 2007, the first one. And you can see from where Republica came from and today where we are now. Yeah, the talk online, offline and all over the city. So I'm going to go into all the projects and also recent stuff. It's mostly work which touches the city and public space. And for introduction, I have these two pictures. So this is a very old picture. I used to have in my slides at the opening talk, at the opening in the beginning, and talking about the city and talking about technology, how technology is changing the city, how we are changed, certain things stay very much the same as buildings. But here you can tell this picture is from maybe 2002 or something. And some mobile phone advertising on a big building. It's kind of replacing the building in a way. I always thought this was kind of a good symbol for what's going on. So how does it look today? Looks like this. So the advertising is becoming bigger, the phone is becoming bigger, and this is not a car commercial, but it's a phone commercial still. And I kind of find these pictures very symbolic for what's going on. Also I studied architecture at the Udeka here. I started in 95 when the web came up and I was all involved in internet and these questions and games, etc. This is my thesis project called Bits on Location. You might want to check it out. There's a whole research on what's possible with the combination of internet and space. So I've been thinking about this for a long time. A lot of these apps you would say today, I think, already exist. So first piece, map. And I took the title from the conference, Finding Europe. So when you type in Europe and Google Maps, this comes up. It's somewhere there, right, in the Baltic Sea. So yeah, Google Maps is very well known. Who's not using Google Maps? Who's using a different service on purpose? One, two, it's really, I mean, this is like three. This is really the most difficult thing. When we talk about privacy and all these questions, we're just lazy, right? And we want to use these things which work well. I'm also not using Google Maps. I'm using some OpenStreetMap app. It's kind of, yeah, you have to work with it. It's not easy. But yeah, this is the biggest question, the laziness. So it's about the map marker and about the question of the location of the city. Where's the city? Is the city here? Google places, they used to place these markers. It's looking a bit different today. I built these as sculptures since 2006. Google Maps started in 2005 and placed them most likely in city centers, in conferences, shows, museum shows, etc. So this piece has been around a lot in the past almost 10 years. It symbolizes very much that question. So how is the internet coming to the city? Like what's going on now? Coming, thinking from space and thinking from architecture. And while today this is very common, like everybody knows what this is sort of, but it used to be, for me it used to be that moment of irritation. Oh yeah, I know this, but what is it doing here? It belongs here, but it doesn't belong here at the same time. So Google is not building map markers, of course, but well, they're ruling the world with these information. Computer games have been a lot, yeah, very important in my life. I grew up with computer games. I played a lot Counter Strike when I went to school, like 10, 15 years ago. It's like these, I'm just showing like a quick, quickly a couple pieces from, yeah, what I'm working on for you to get a context about what's going on. You need to know these spaces very well to survive in here. And the space itself is kind of the story. I like to claim that this is also cultural heritage. And kids built these maps, for example, dust map in the beach from sand, and just because they know it by heart. So what would it be like to build this as a real life, life-size museum slash sculpture? I made some experiments here at a show in Casa two years ago, and also in a prison yard in Canada two years ago in the summer was a bigger installation, and the prison yard very much was like a gaming map itself. So I like to pose these questions, what happens when this blurs into our world? And obviously, it's like, it's already here. It's like, we can't see it still, right? The other project which I'm showing, yeah, and the idea is to really build this, like, in long term in 100 by 120 meter as a building, actually, for this virtual space which only exists in so many heads, but only on servers. Wow is referring to World of Warcraft, which is also classic old game. A lot of friendships broke up when I, back at the days when people played this excessively. MMOs still are very big, and every character has this tag, this name tag floating above their head, and in here, in this particular picture, it's interesting that this party of people, they just killed the dragon in the back. They solved the quest, and they take a picture for remembrance, because it's really important to them. Like, for parents, it's kind of hard to understand what's going on, or for certain parts of the society, those parts maybe got aware by Snowden and whatever, BND leaks now, but for me, it's always been this question how to communicate what's going on online, and how such a social group is very important to people playing. So I have these workshops where we build our names from cardboard and mount them on plastic strips, and we walk our names in the city as if we were an MMO. Maybe we are, right? I mean, we are kind of. And the thing is, I mean, when I did these projects, and this started in 2007, and this was, I think, the last version in Laguna Beach in 2009 or 2010, today, I mean, the data is there, right? They can do it. I mean, they always try to hide this whole face recognition thing from us, but they can do it. They can pop all the names here. So these projects also, they have a different angle for me today of perception. Yeah, we had a lot of fun there. It's very depending where you do these projects, how people react to it. In Berlin, probably people were like, oh, yeah, nobody cares. It's an art project, maybe. In the US, it was like, oh, it's advertising for political party. In Korea, people were really interested, shouting the names super loud in the street, very engaged. So it's very different. And also, yeah, it's really nice to take these, a lot of fun to take these elements and play the computer game and think about these questions. Okay, so that was gaming. Now, just more recent projects, recent and very old, actually. This is one of my first art projects from 2004. And it's a phone pouch which blocks the signal. Your phone is caught in a third of a cage and you cannot have any calls anymore. No data connection. I did this in 2004. People from the hacking community were always interested and knew, understood what the phone, that the phone is a virus, in fact. When the Merkel phone listening was, what was it, like, one and a half years ago? The story came up, I kind of reloaded that project as a DIY project, killyourphone.com is the website. I did this, ran this workshop last year here at the conference and people were invited to build their own phone blocking pouch. So you have this cloth, which is a metal coated plastic cloth and you just sew a very simple pouch from it with a sewing machine there. These cloths are mostly sold in online shops where it's all about electrosmog and protecting yourself from the radiation. We protect the phone. That's different. This is going on on the website. There's also announcements. The next workshop is going to be in Frankfurt, June 6th, if you want to come and join, make your own pouch. But also there's the call for everyone, just make these workshops. Not only make the pouch for yourself, but there's links for where to get the material and run a workshop yourself in your school, in your neighborhood, wherever, a conference, just go for it. So this has been going on. And also from last year, oh yeah, here's the website. And there's other projects. Adam Harvey is doing a lot of very beautiful projects for protecting privacy. Yeah, the phone handkerchief. That's like a whole range of projects in that field of blocking signals. BYOD, bring your own drive and crush it. Was a performance piece for my last solo show opening in September here in Berlin at Damm Gallery. Visitors were invited to bring the hard drives. And then we had this beautiful machine, the Ideal 101, which is a machine only made to crush hard drives. And this is where we are today. We have all these fancy devices, latest phone. But at the end of the life cycle, you actually need to break the device to make sure the data's not getting somewhere else. And it's probably already in the cloud everywhere. So it just punches a hole in there. People, yeah, there's a whole range of machines in that field. I gave a talk about this at the CCC conference in December. And they're really classy. It's a very sophisticated machine to very brutally archive, just destroy the drive. You can do this much easier. I show you in a second. Here's visitors crushing drives. Also a nice pile of broken drives in the end. It all referred to also the Snowden Guardian incident where the Guardian had to crush the hard drives. So there was a little installation connected to it. This was the original pictures. I think part of these hard drives are going to be in the museum, in the technical museum and fall. And other parts in London in the museum. And of course, on YouTube, you find millions of ways of how to crush a hard drive. And a lot of funny ones and a hammer are still the most simple ones. I built this very DIY device. You can crush a hard drive with that one too. And maybe most important to think about is we still have hard drives, right? And also, even this phone has a hard drive, like a flash drive in there. Still, but maybe we won't have hard drives anymore soon. We still, I'm still empowered to destroy my own data if I want to. But when it's in the cloud, you can. Try to delete something on Dropbox. You can't. It's like it's never going to be deleted. So that's very important to think about. I did a lot of, yeah, as you've seen before, public interventions. This was during a residency at I-Beam in New York City in 2010. And I walked around and I took the bicycle with these two signs, open internet. In fact, I had a phone with me providing open internet as a provider with a 3G connection. But also, this kind of was a protest for the open internet, net neutrality and all these topics are very important topics. And yeah, it's still going on. It's like the whole story is getting not really better. So and there came out these open internet protest signs for different shows in the end. And of course, it's just the classic sign from the shop, but when you combine them in the right way, they have a good message. And here was an Occupy made for a show in Netherlands, custom made. Ope Obama was right after when the first Snow League happened. And this was almost a year ago, two years ago. And Obama was visiting Berlin. And there were small protests going on. It was just two weeks after the first leak. And the first leak was prism and it was all about these programs. So Google Glass, which is kind of already off the record, Google Glass has a prism in the front and the program was called the same time. Obama never wore those, of course. But it was like a good connection because what happens if we film each other all the time? So this intervention for just for one day made its way to the press. I had some successful tweets, Obama visiting the Stasi Museum, stuff like that. And also, yeah, we still hoping to get answers, right? Can we show the list to the NSA when there's a lot of stuff? It's ridiculous what's going on. And yeah, this is one of these interventions. And now I want to come to Dead Drops and revisiting Dead Drops. And probably most of you have heard of that project. It all started like this. In the beginning of 2009, the Pirate Bay trial was starting and Peter was talking here yesterday about that. Since then I was also a member of Fat Lab and we had this idea of having distributed file sharing parties all over the world in support of the trial of the Pirate Bay. And I did make a party, but I made this little drawing and hung it in the cafe and you were able to download the latest Oscar movies. And this was like the night of the Oscar awards. And you were able to download the latest Oscar movies from this flash drive there. So it took off along. There's a little machine in the back. I don't know if Peter is here, maybe he already left. You can pick up this thing. This is for you. It's in my storage. This is really, yeah. And I also like what you said yesterday about you want to make art. Oh yeah, this is like this tiny device in the back copying from USB to USB. So I was thinking for a longer time, how can I do this in public space? I want to plug in my USB key in the wall and I get files, but then you need this thing in the wall and you need power and it's kind of complicated. So till a certain moment, and this is like you never know, an artist in the shower on the bicycle is like, oh wait, let's turn it around. Let's put the USB key in the wall and then I just plug in the computer. And this is how it started. And that started then actually end of 2010, almost two years later, also when I was at I-Deme Artisan Residence and I did these first five dead drops throughout New York City, Manhattan, and yeah. It's an offline file sharing, peer-to-peer network. You can share files on there. You can download files. Everybody seen that video? I mean, who hasn't seen that video? We can maybe when we have time, we can watch it at the end, but probably won't. So yeah, there's instructions how the dead drop was made. So just the USB key, you submit it into the wall. You leave some like readme file and the manifesto file on there and then you can just share any files you want. They're out in the open. They are not online. They're offline. You can't control them. It has lots of implications. And also dead drop is the name for the where spies, when a spy leaves data and the other spy picks it up later. It's a dead drop opposed to the life drop, which is when they're sitting on the bench and you slip over the envelope. So this thing going on for four and a half years now and it's picking up again and again in the press. After Snowden, also there was a peak and especially this spring, there was a big peak again about dead drops, so it's an ongoing participatory project. It's like for me it's also like a world performance sort of thing. And also I think it's better to claim it became a meme. There's 1,524 dead drops being made in four and a half years, which equals more than 10,000 gigabytes. The last ones were made in Colorado a few days ago, maybe yesterday. Just the world map, Europe has a lot of them, Berlin has a lot of them. The black ones are the ones which are out of order. There's Wi-Fi ones, where I'm going to talk about this later. And just like a few examples of dead drops in all kinds of locations. This was in Spain most recently. I did a workshop, but also very early ones in nature. And you always get the three pictures, which are very, I mean, it's this global project from the internet, everybody can do it, but at the same time you get this local view on people, people can leave messages on that website too. And it's really interesting how this project took off and all kind of, it was used in all kinds of ways. For example, the first show was made in Lyon in maybe 2010. Graphic design block had a show and people were invited to look at the art. And you need to go to the places to see the art. The same thing, bands often released music on dead drops. So our new album is on iTunes and you can get it for free here on the corner. And they also threw that kind of system, they got a lot of press. It was back then a lot in the press, but also still today. It was in the show in the MoMA in 2001. People, I invited everyone to come to the MoMA and bring files and share files and also, especially the artists, how to get your art in the MoMA, right? This is what you want. So bring your art and leave it there so you can claim that you had art there. Bruce Sterling was doing an AR augmented reality app back then in the layer browser. It's still working. You should check it out. There's a JSON API if you want to program something for dead drops and interface or whatever mobile app you're invited to contact me. And just most recently this year in February, the wave of dead drops went through U.S., South America and then came back to Germany too. And the Kölner Express, they found bomb making plans on a dead drop. And it's really funny. I mean, the only astonishing thing about this story is that this particular dead drop, I really made myself in 2011 at the gallery show in Cologne and it was still there and still working, which I think is amazing. So these are the bomb making plans, right? Yeah, now, allow you know how to make it, right? It's like very, very dangerous files. In fact, it's the most probably the anarchist cookbook, which you find like with one Google search like immediately. But the X-Kölner Express, they managed to get this picture. And this picture is actually the best. So yeah, policemen like kneeling down next to it and the yellow banana, if you don't know it, it's kind of a label for good galleries. And they wonder what this is. Also the Kriminalpolizei called the gallery through the landlord and got this whole project explained what this is about. And in the end, they took the dead drop and by taking it, they also broke it. So they can't read the data anymore. And now it's at the cyber crime unit in Düsseldorf and they're trying to recover it. And what the gallerist told me that the police told him that in fact the journalists only found a link to the PDF. Well, yeah, we don't know. But it's interesting what's going on there. And this kind of went through the web and went like there was tons of German press about it. And most recently also on Sunday, it just made this little performance and I gave a talk at the Kunstraumkreuzwerk. You should check out the show, Kongras der Möglichkeiten from the H8 Magazine. It's still up to Sunday. And I cemented in a print of the anarchist cookbook into the wall so you can also read the book there as kind of an answer to this whole, yeah, press thing. And then about dead drops, I mean, it's just amazing what's going on. Somebody put together a playlist of 56 videos on YouTube. I didn't even know about this myself since a couple months. And people just make tutorials themselves. They film themselves making dead drops, make other versions of it, use it for poetry festivals, for game festivals, for everything. And this was a show in Cuba in last summer. They also asked me officially and then they used it to show art in Cuba. And they were like, yeah, you know, it's not so easy. We can use this very well. There used to be a dead drop group in Munich. They had these six dead drops. They were supporting all the time, looking what's going on. There's a forum and there's also lots of discussion. Of course, a dead drop is destroyed very easily, so they disappear also quickly. It depends on where you make them. It's, yeah, when you make it more secret, less visible, it'll last longer. But also, yeah, there's like lots of ideas in the forum people discussing. While announcing my talk, people sent me this, someone from It's a Ho. They had an art festival in the city. They were sharing music from this beautiful dead drop there. And he also told me it got vandalized like pretty quickly on the first night. But they, there was like, and then they had all lots of discussion about that. And of course, I mean, if you're into street art and these things, yeah, it's public space, right? And then, I wrote a text about dead drops. Also says when you vandalize them, you're activating them. You're taking part in them. And also, some guy sent me this last week. He's doing dead drops in old tree trunks like dead trees. It's massively, it's going on all the time. I did DVD dead drops in 2012 at the Museum of Moving Image in New York City. Others were invited to burn DVDs there, which I curated content for, for a whole year. And yeah, so the whole building becomes a DVD drive in a way. It's even more older technology. Nobody has DVD drives in their computers anymore, right? And there was like a good collection of shows. I made a DVD with 30,000 viruses on them because this was always the first comment. Like, yeah, this is like the glory hole that you're speaking about. There could be a virus on there. And I'm like, yeah, but just the email I sent you, there could be a virus on there too. Like, oh, yeah, right. But it's interesting how the perception of public space and when you put technology in public space, it's dangerous suddenly. But when I use it at home, it's safe, right? We all know it's not safe at all. Yeah, different kinds of shows there, art shows. And also, the whole project was shown in shows again. And last but not least, I come to Pirate Box, which was founded by David Darts. And it's today run by David Darts and Matthias Struber, very good friends. They, it's the version, it's kind of the file sharing version offline. I hooked up Pirate Box here. You can go to your phone and just check the Wi-Fi for Pirate Box. It's not connected to the Internet. You can upload files, you can download files, you can leave a comment in the forum. Of course, it's less vulnerable, not easy to vandalize. And it's, we did workshops together here in Netherlands, putting them on skateboards and you still came, Chef Rijks, why the guy is skating, on bicycles, in Lempalps, etc. We had a big meeting at Transmedjala and there's a whole range of groups and institutions, but like groups taking this idea further of offline Wi-Fi networks, local networks. Of course, in Berlin, there's Freifunk, which probably most of you know. But there's also all these initiatives and it's all about that question. Well, does it always need to be online? Can we share files locally? How can we use it in neighborhoods or communities? And those, just like a few of these initiatives, you can find all the links in the first link I showed. This is just a selection of Panayotas, a friend who's also organizing this event, collecting all these projects. And yeah, it's about these guys, right? Because Facebook and whatever, they want to bring the Internet to the world and save everyone. But yeah, the Internet will look different to them. Same with Google and the balloons. Net neutrality is kind of like having really hard time right now. Maybe the Internet was never really the free place we thought it was, but it's not looking too good. And I kind of, I like very much this idea. Of course, we need to fight for these, on a political level, for these questions and how we can keep certain things. But at the same time, I also wonder how can we use technology and build separate, will we maybe always be on the one big network? Maybe there's different, more networks, more encrypted networks, and depends on where you go and you don't need access to everything all the time. So I think it's very interesting what's happening there in that field of offline networks. And the metal clock in the wall is really like the, this is also, I don't know, this was like a small project they did in New York and there was no reason why, I had no clue why this in the beginning, where this blew up so much. But I think it triggers very much that connection of like networks and technology and the city, it's very direct, yeah, speaking directly to you and opens up the people's heads. That's what it is. Thank you.
 So, before we start, I want to recommend for the German speaking audience to watch this  video if you know my work already.  It's a very good stand-up comedian.  He's explaining capitalism in half an hour and what's not working and politics and everything.  And this is him at its best.  So I really recommend watching this.  All the links of the talk and also this link to this video will be here.  Also the talk, PDF will be here available for you.  So you can go ahead and check what I'm going to talk about.  This is a picture Nicole sent me.  I gave a talk here too.  It's Republica 2007, the first one.  And you can see from where Republica came from and today where we are now.  Yeah, the talk online, offline and all over the city.  So I'm going to go into all the projects and also recent stuff.  It's mostly work which touches the city and public space.  And for introduction, I have these two pictures.  So this is a very old picture.  I used to have in my slides at the opening talk, at the opening in the beginning, and  talking about the city and talking about technology, how technology is changing the city, how we  are changed, certain things stay very much the same as buildings.  But here you can tell this picture is from maybe 2002 or something.  And some mobile phone advertising on a big building.  It's kind of replacing the building in a way.  I always thought this was kind of a good symbol for what's going on.  So how does it look today?  Looks like this.  So the advertising is becoming bigger, the phone is becoming bigger, and this is not  a car commercial, but it's a phone commercial still.  And I kind of find these pictures very symbolic for what's going on.  Also I studied architecture at the Udeka here.  I started in 95 when the web came up and I was all involved in internet and these questions  and games, etc.  This is my thesis project called Bits on Location.  You might want to check it out.  There's a whole research on what's possible with the combination of internet and space.  So I've been thinking about this for a long time.  A lot of these apps you would say today, I think, already exist.  So first piece, map.  And I took the title from the conference, Finding Europe.  So when you type in Europe and Google Maps, this comes up.  It's somewhere there, right, in the Baltic Sea.  So yeah, Google Maps is very well known.  Who's not using Google Maps?  Who's using a different service on purpose?  One, two, it's really, I mean, this is like three.  This is really the most difficult thing.  When we talk about privacy and all these questions, we're just lazy, right?  And we want to use these things which work well.  I'm also not using Google Maps.  I'm using some OpenStreetMap app.  It's kind of, yeah, you have to work with it.  It's not easy.  But yeah, this is the biggest question, the laziness.  So it's about the map marker and about the question of the location of the city.  Where's the city?  Is the city here?  Google places, they used to place these markers.  It's looking a bit different today.  I built these as sculptures since 2006.  Google Maps started in 2005 and placed them most likely in city centers, in conferences,  shows, museum shows, etc.  So this piece has been around a lot in the past almost 10 years.  It symbolizes very much that question.  So how is the internet coming to the city?  Like what's going on now?  Coming, thinking from space and thinking from architecture.  And while today this is very common, like everybody knows what this is sort of, but  it used to be, for me it used to be that moment of irritation.  Oh yeah, I know this, but what is it doing here?  It belongs here, but it doesn't belong here at the same time.  So Google is not building map markers, of course, but well, they're ruling the world  with these information.  Computer games have been a lot, yeah, very important in my life.  I grew up with computer games.  I played a lot Counter Strike when I went to school, like 10, 15 years ago.  It's like these, I'm just showing like a quick, quickly a couple pieces from, yeah, what I'm  working on for you to get a context about what's going on.  You need to know these spaces very well to survive in here.  And the space itself is kind of the story.  I like to claim that this is also cultural heritage.  And kids built these maps, for example, dust map in the beach from sand, and just because  they know it by heart.  So what would it be like to build this as a real life, life-size museum slash sculpture?  I made some experiments here at a show in Casa two years ago, and also in a prison yard  in Canada two years ago in the summer was a bigger installation, and the prison yard  very much was like a gaming map itself.  So I like to pose these questions, what happens when this blurs into our world?  And obviously, it's like, it's already here.  It's like, we can't see it still, right?  The other project which I'm showing, yeah, and the idea is to really build this, like,  in long term in 100 by 120 meter as a building, actually, for this virtual space which only  exists in so many heads, but only on servers.  Wow is referring to World of Warcraft, which is also classic old game.  A lot of friendships broke up when I, back at the days when people played this excessively.  MMOs still are very big, and every character has this tag, this name tag floating above  their head, and in here, in this particular picture, it's interesting that this party  of people, they just killed the dragon in the back.  They solved the quest, and they take a picture for remembrance, because it's really important  to them.  Like, for parents, it's kind of hard to understand what's going on, or for certain parts of the  society, those parts maybe got aware by Snowden and whatever, BND leaks now, but for me,  it's always been this question how to communicate what's going on online, and how such a social  group is very important to people playing.  So I have these workshops where we build our names from cardboard and mount them on plastic  strips, and we walk our names in the city as if we were an MMO.  Maybe we are, right?  I mean, we are kind of.  And the thing is, I mean, when I did these projects, and this started in 2007, and this  was, I think, the last version in Laguna Beach in 2009 or 2010, today, I mean, the data is  there, right?  They can do it.  I mean, they always try to hide this whole face recognition thing from us, but they can  do it.  They can pop all the names here.  So these projects also, they have a different angle for me today of perception.  Yeah, we had a lot of fun there.  It's very depending where you do these projects, how people react to it.  In Berlin, probably people were like, oh, yeah, nobody cares.  It's an art project, maybe.  In the US, it was like, oh, it's advertising for political party.  In Korea, people were really interested, shouting the names super loud in the street, very engaged.  So it's very different.  And also, yeah, it's really nice to take these, a lot of fun to take these elements and play  the computer game and think about these questions.  Okay, so that was gaming.  Now, just more recent projects, recent and very old, actually.  This is one of my first art projects from 2004.  And it's a phone pouch which blocks the signal.  Your phone is caught in a third of a cage and you cannot have any calls anymore.  No data connection.  I did this in 2004.  People from the hacking community were always interested and knew, understood what the phone,  that the phone is a virus, in fact.  When the Merkel phone listening was, what was it, like, one and a half years ago?  The story came up, I kind of reloaded that project as a DIY project, killyourphone.com  is the website.  I did this, ran this workshop last year here at the conference and people were invited to  build their own phone blocking pouch.  So you have this cloth, which is a metal coated plastic cloth and you just sew a very simple  pouch from it with a sewing machine there.  These cloths are mostly sold in online shops where it's all about electrosmog and protecting  yourself from the radiation.  We protect the phone.  That's different.  This is going on on the website.  There's also announcements.  The next workshop is going to be in Frankfurt, June 6th, if you want to come and join, make  your own pouch.  But also there's the call for everyone, just make these workshops.  Not only make the pouch for yourself, but there's links for where to get the material  and run a workshop yourself in your school, in your neighborhood, wherever, a conference,  just go for it.  So this has been going on.  And also from last year, oh yeah, here's the website.  And there's other projects.  Adam Harvey is doing a lot of very beautiful projects for protecting privacy.  Yeah, the phone handkerchief.  That's like a whole range of projects in that field of blocking signals.  BYOD, bring your own drive and crush it.  Was a performance piece for my last solo show opening in September here in Berlin at Damm  Gallery.  Visitors were invited to bring the hard drives.  And then we had this beautiful machine, the Ideal 101, which is a machine only made to  crush hard drives.  And this is where we are today.  We have all these fancy devices, latest phone.  But at the end of the life cycle, you actually need to break the device to make sure the  data's not getting somewhere else.  And it's probably already in the cloud everywhere.  So it just punches a hole in there.  People, yeah, there's a whole range of machines in that field.  I gave a talk about this at the CCC conference in December.  And they're really classy.  It's a very sophisticated machine to very brutally archive, just destroy the drive.  You can do this much easier.  I show you in a second.  Here's visitors crushing drives.  Also a nice pile of broken drives in the end.  It all referred to also the Snowden Guardian incident where the Guardian had to crush the  hard drives.  So there was a little installation connected to it.  This was the original pictures.  I think part of these hard drives are going to be in the museum, in the technical museum  and fall.  And other parts in London in the museum.  And of course, on YouTube, you find millions of ways of how to crush a hard drive.  And a lot of funny ones and a hammer are still the most simple ones.  I built this very DIY device.  You can crush a hard drive with that one too.  And maybe most important to think about is we still have hard drives, right?  And also, even this phone has a hard drive, like a flash drive in there.  Still, but maybe we won't have hard drives anymore soon.  We still, I'm still empowered to destroy my own data if I want to.  But when it's in the cloud, you can.  Try to delete something on Dropbox.  You can't.  It's like it's never going to be deleted.  So that's very important to think about.  I did a lot of, yeah, as you've seen before, public interventions.  This was during a residency at I-Beam in New York City in 2010.  And I walked around and I took the bicycle with these two signs, open internet.  In fact, I had a phone with me providing open internet as a provider with a 3G connection.  But also, this kind of was a protest for the open internet, net neutrality and all these  topics are very important topics.  And yeah, it's still going on.  It's like the whole story is getting not really better.  So and there came out these open internet protest signs for different shows in the end.  And of course, it's just the classic sign from the shop, but when you combine them in  the right way, they have a good message.  And here was an Occupy made for a show in Netherlands, custom made.  Ope Obama was right after when the first Snow League happened.  And this was almost a year ago, two years ago.  And Obama was visiting Berlin.  And there were small protests going on.  It was just two weeks after the first leak.  And the first leak was prism and it was all about these programs.  So Google Glass, which is kind of already off the record, Google Glass has a prism in  the front and the program was called the same time.  Obama never wore those, of course.  But it was like a good connection because what happens if we film each other all the  time?  So this intervention for just for one day made its way to the press.  I had some successful tweets, Obama visiting the Stasi Museum, stuff like that.  And also, yeah, we still hoping to get answers, right?  Can we show the list to the NSA when there's a lot of stuff?  It's ridiculous what's going on.  And yeah, this is one of these interventions.  And now I want to come to Dead Drops and revisiting Dead Drops.  And probably most of you have heard of that project.  It all started like this.  In the beginning of 2009, the Pirate Bay trial was starting and Peter was talking here yesterday  about that.  Since then I was also a member of Fat Lab and we had this idea of having distributed  file sharing parties all over the world in support of the trial of the Pirate Bay.  And I did make a party, but I made this little drawing and hung it in the cafe and you were  able to download the latest Oscar movies.  And this was like the night of the Oscar awards.  And you were able to download the latest Oscar movies from this flash drive there.  So it took off along.  There's a little machine in the back.  I don't know if Peter is here, maybe he already left.  You can pick up this thing.  This is for you.  It's in my storage.  This is really, yeah.  And I also like what you said yesterday about you want to make art.  Oh yeah, this is like this tiny device in the back copying from USB to USB.  So I was thinking for a longer time, how can I do this in public space?  I want to plug in my USB key in the wall and I get files, but then you need this thing  in the wall and you need power and it's kind of complicated.  So till a certain moment, and this is like you never know, an artist in the shower on  the bicycle is like, oh wait, let's turn it around.  Let's put the USB key in the wall and then I just plug in the computer.  And this is how it started.  And that started then actually end of 2010, almost two years later, also when I was at  I-Deme Artisan Residence and I did these first five dead drops throughout New York City,  Manhattan, and yeah.  It's an offline file sharing, peer-to-peer network.  You can share files on there.  You can download files.  Everybody seen that video?  I mean, who hasn't seen that video?  We can maybe when we have time, we can watch it at the end, but probably won't.  So yeah, there's instructions how the dead drop was made.  So just the USB key, you submit it into the wall.  You leave some like readme file and the manifesto file on there and then you can just share  any files you want.  They're out in the open.  They are not online.  They're offline.  You can't control them.  It has lots of implications.  And also dead drop is the name for the where spies, when a spy leaves data and the other  spy picks it up later.  It's a dead drop opposed to the life drop, which is when they're sitting on the bench  and you slip over the envelope.  So this thing going on for four and a half years now and it's picking up again and again  in the press.  After Snowden, also there was a peak and especially this spring, there was a big peak again about  dead drops, so it's an ongoing participatory project.  It's like for me it's also like a world performance sort of thing.  And also I think it's better to claim it became a meme.  There's 1,524 dead drops being made in four and a half years, which equals more than 10,000  gigabytes.  The last ones were made in Colorado a few days ago, maybe yesterday.  Just the world map, Europe has a lot of them, Berlin has a lot of them.  The black ones are the ones which are out of order.  There's Wi-Fi ones, where I'm going to talk about this later.  And just like a few examples of dead drops in all kinds of locations.  This was in Spain most recently.  I did a workshop, but also very early ones in nature.  And you always get the three pictures, which are very, I mean, it's this global project  from the internet, everybody can do it, but at the same time you get this local view on  people, people can leave messages on that website too.  And it's really interesting how this project took off and all kind of, it was used in all  kinds of ways.  For example, the first show was made in Lyon in maybe 2010.  Graphic design block had a show and people were invited to look at the art.  And you need to go to the places to see the art.  The same thing, bands often released music on dead drops.  So our new album is on iTunes and you can get it for free here on the corner.  And they also threw that kind of system, they got a lot of press.  It was back then a lot in the press, but also still today.  It was in the show in the MoMA in 2001.  People, I invited everyone to come to the MoMA and bring files and share files and also,  especially the artists, how to get your art in the MoMA, right?  This is what you want.  So bring your art and leave it there so you can claim that you had art there.  Bruce Sterling was doing an AR augmented reality app back then in the layer browser.  It's still working.  You should check it out.  There's a JSON API if you want to program something for dead drops and interface or whatever  mobile app you're invited to contact me.  And just most recently this year in February, the wave of dead drops went through U.S., South  America and then came back to Germany too.  And the Kölner Express, they found bomb making plans on a dead drop.  And it's really funny.  I mean, the only astonishing thing about this story is that this particular dead drop,  I really made myself in 2011 at the gallery show in Cologne and it was still there and  still working, which I think is amazing.  So these are the bomb making plans, right?  Yeah, now, allow you know how to make it, right?  It's like very, very dangerous files.  In fact, it's the most probably the anarchist cookbook, which you find like with one Google  search like immediately.  But the X-Kölner Express, they managed to get this picture.  And this picture is actually the best.  So yeah, policemen like kneeling down next to it and the yellow banana, if you don't  know it, it's kind of a label for good galleries.  And they wonder what this is.  Also the Kriminalpolizei called the gallery through the landlord and got this whole project  explained what this is about.  And in the end, they took the dead drop and by taking it, they also broke it.  So they can't read the data anymore.  And now it's at the cyber crime unit in Düsseldorf and they're trying to recover it.  And what the gallerist told me that the police told him that in fact the journalists only  found a link to the PDF.  Well, yeah, we don't know.  But it's interesting what's going on there.  And this kind of went through the web and went like there was tons of German press about  it.  And most recently also on Sunday, it just made this little performance and I gave a  talk at the Kunstraumkreuzwerk.  You should check out the show, Kongras der Möglichkeiten from the H8 Magazine.  It's still up to Sunday.  And I cemented in a print of the anarchist cookbook into the wall so you can also read  the book there as kind of an answer to this whole, yeah, press thing.  And then about dead drops, I mean, it's just amazing what's going on.  Somebody put together a playlist of 56 videos on YouTube.  I didn't even know about this myself since a couple months.  And people just make tutorials themselves.  They film themselves making dead drops, make other versions of it, use it for poetry festivals,  for game festivals, for everything.  And this was a show in Cuba in last summer.  They also asked me officially and then they used it to show art in Cuba.  And they were like, yeah, you know, it's not so easy.  We can use this very well.  There used to be a dead drop group in Munich.  They had these six dead drops.  They were supporting all the time, looking what's going on.  There's a forum and there's also lots of discussion.  Of course, a dead drop is destroyed very easily, so they disappear also quickly.  It depends on where you make them.  It's, yeah, when you make it more secret, less visible, it'll last longer.  But also, yeah, there's like lots of ideas in the forum people discussing.  While announcing my talk, people sent me this, someone from It's a Ho.  They had an art festival in the city.  They were sharing music from this beautiful dead drop there.  And he also told me it got vandalized like pretty quickly on the first night.  But they, there was like, and then they had all lots of discussion about that.  And of course, I mean, if you're into street art and these things, yeah, it's public space,  right?  And then, I wrote a text about dead drops.  Also says when you vandalize them, you're activating them.  You're taking part in them.  And also, some guy sent me this last week.  He's doing dead drops in old tree trunks like dead trees.  It's massively, it's going on all the time.  I did DVD dead drops in 2012 at the Museum of Moving Image in New York City.  Others were invited to burn DVDs there, which I curated content for, for a whole year.  And yeah, so the whole building becomes a DVD drive in a way.  It's even more older technology.  Nobody has DVD drives in their computers anymore, right?  And there was like a good collection of shows.  I made a DVD with 30,000 viruses on them because this was always the first comment.  Like, yeah, this is like the glory hole that you're speaking about.  There could be a virus on there.  And I'm like, yeah, but just the email I sent you, there could be a virus on there too.  Like, oh, yeah, right.  But it's interesting how the perception of public space and when you put technology  in public space, it's dangerous suddenly.  But when I use it at home, it's safe, right?  We all know it's not safe at all.  Yeah, different kinds of shows there, art shows.  And also, the whole project was shown in shows again.  And last but not least, I come to Pirate Box, which was founded by David Darts.  And it's today run by David Darts and Matthias Struber, very good friends.  They, it's the version, it's kind of the file sharing version offline.  I hooked up Pirate Box here.  You can go to your phone and just check the Wi-Fi for Pirate Box.  It's not connected to the Internet.  You can upload files, you can download files, you can leave a comment in the forum.  Of course, it's less vulnerable, not easy to vandalize.  And it's, we did workshops together here in Netherlands, putting them on skateboards  and you still came, Chef Rijks, why the guy is skating, on bicycles, in Lempalps, etc.  We had a big meeting at Transmedjala and there's a whole range of groups and institutions, but  like groups taking this idea further of offline Wi-Fi networks, local networks.  Of course, in Berlin, there's Freifunk, which probably most of you know.  But there's also all these initiatives and it's all about that question.  Well, does it always need to be online?  Can we share files locally?  How can we use it in neighborhoods or communities?  And those, just like a few of these initiatives, you can find all the links in the first link  I showed.  This is just a selection of Panayotas, a friend who's also organizing this event, collecting  all these projects.  And yeah, it's about these guys, right?  Because Facebook and whatever, they want to bring the Internet to the world and save everyone.  But yeah, the Internet will look different to them.  Same with Google and the balloons.  Net neutrality is kind of like having really hard time right now.  Maybe the Internet was never really the free place we thought it was, but it's not looking  too good.  And I kind of, I like very much this idea.  Of course, we need to fight for these, on a political level, for these questions and  how we can keep certain things.  But at the same time, I also wonder how can we use technology and build separate, will  we maybe always be on the one big network?  Maybe there's different, more networks, more encrypted networks, and depends on where you  go and you don't need access to everything all the time.  So I think it's very interesting what's happening there in that field of offline networks.  And the metal clock in the wall is really like the, this is also, I don't know, this  was like a small project they did in New York and there was no reason why, I had no clue  why this in the beginning, where this blew up so much.  But I think it triggers very much that connection of like networks and technology and the city,  it's very direct, yeah, speaking directly to you and opens up the people's heads.  That's what it is.  Thank you.
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