mehack

At ETech this year, Kati London (of ITP and now of area/code), put together a great panel discussion entitled Artistic Experiments in Revealing Invisible Networks. Somehow I missed it, but at the finale of the talk was a reference to one of my favorite final projects from Every Bit You Make, Generative Social Networking by Andrew Schneider and Christian Croft.

Every Bit You Make, as a class and as the topic of my next book, explores the intersection of our ever increasing digital lifestyles, the infrastructures needed to put that in all place, and the architectural decisions and choices to help create that infrastructure. For example, we analyze the market need to create a wireless protocol to inter-connect devices, study the introduction of Bluetooth to consumers and the first few devices that showed up with support, and then begin to exploit their vulnerabilities. The duo looked at cellular phones and gave birth to Generative Social Networking:

How does it work? Unbeknownst to the phone owner, her device will betray its list of saved phone numbers to a nearby laptop … [who] will generate a “conversation” with each number in the list. The first number on the list is called and receiver’s response recorded. The next number on the list is called, the first number’s initial response is played back to the new number … This continues for however many phone numbers are in the contact list.

(listen to the project in action).

Their final project absolutely it speaks to the title of this essay — everything about our digital lifestyle exposes some form of API, whether it be intentional or not. In fact, people found and sell startups on the notion that they are exposing an API to items that were previously un-API-able. Andrew and Christian expose this information/vulnerability, and then extrapolate it to larger concerns of the meanings of social interconnection (e.g. courts have ruled that privacy, in so far as the telephone is concerned, only extends to the content of the conversation, and not the number that was dialed) to make it immediately disgestable to anybody.

For more information on GSN, read their final project writeup and view the presentation they delivered at Eyebeam.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 29th, 2008 at 1:16 pm and is tagged under art, bluetooth, cellular phone, etech, every bit you make, itp, nyu.