the conclusion of several major undertakings

I think it is important to have diverse interests. I do a lot more than just taking pictures.

Over this past weekend, July 18-20, roughly 3,000 computer hackers converged on the Hotel Pennsylvania in Manhattan for The Last HOPE conference. The event happens once every two years and represents an unusual subculture's version of a family reunion.

When I say "hacker" I mean it in the way Stephen Levy meant it when he wrote "Hackers: Heroes of The Computer Revolution" in 1984. In the "2600" hacker community are some of the most talented, intelligent, and creative people I have ever met. I get fairly frustrated with the negative image of hackers perpetuated by the mainstream media.

I only attended four of the 100+ presentations at this conference because I was fairly busy being one of two projects coordinators working around the clock for four days. In fact, for three of the four talks I did get to attend, I was giving the presentation.

Most of my time was occupied by three specific projects: The Attendee Meta-Data Project, Radio Statler!, and something called The NOC NOC.

The Attendee Meta-Data Project, for which I served as Project Manager, has gotten quite a bit of press attention. Hack-A-Day, Boing Boing, CNET, and many other tech news outlets have taken notice. Using a web survey, my team collected information on many of the conference's participants, and we gave 1400 RFID tracking devices to attendees and recorded their movements in relation to the conference schedule. In the process, we collected a very interesting combined database which will be released in the near future for study and experimentation by the global hacker community. During the conference the attendees saw a bit of what we were doing displayed on plasma screens and on a special web site set up for the event. To the corporate technology world what we did will probably seem rather insignificant, but in reality there was a monumental task accomplished, and an invaluable resource for future research was created. I cannot express how much effort my team put into getting this project to function in the last four months from a weird little idea I'd had kicking around in my head since January of 2007. I wouldn't have considered myself an installation artist before this project.

Radio Statler! (the exclamation point is part of the name) was an Internet radio station set up specially for the conference. I served as the station/project manager and an occasional producer on the project, but mostly the station was run by the Chief Engineer, who goes by the hacker handle Nikgod, and our Programming Coordinator, journalism student Bill "Arca" Peters, who stepped in at the last minute when another team member got stuck working on another continent. These guys, along with a host of other contributors, did a truly fantastic job under conditions from which anyone in commercial radio would likely go insane. While Bill Peters did the good journalism on his "All Hacks Considered" format, I worked on a couple of more eccentric programs during the conference, including the as-far-from-NPR-as-you-can-get "Welding Hour" call-in show, which involved more than a handful of members of the infamous Phone Losers of America (PLA) group, including Murd0c, Enamon, Gonzo, and Johnny X(mas).

The NOC NOC, along with a diagram for a much larger normal NOC, was an idea born from the previous conference, HOPE Number Six. NOC is IT industry shorthand for Network Operations Center. At the sixth conference the NOC was incredibly cramped, and the network itself inaccessible to people who wanted to share their computer systems. I had the idea for the NOC NOC while trying to work on a security turret camera and noticing the difficulties faced by attendees who wanted to share videos from other conferences and a group with an Asterisk telecommunications system. NOC NOC means Not Our Concern Network Operations Center. It was a large steel equipment cage enclosing a network switch and power strips with a formidable padlock. The stainless steel German ABUS Diskus 20/70 padlock was graciously provided by Deviant, an expert lock picker from TOOOL, so the chance of someone picking the lock before being noticed by security was negligible. I and Nick Amento, a senior network engineer at Harvard University and member of the network team, had keys to unlock the cage to get servers in and out. Not as many people as I had hoped took advantage of the service at this conference, but now we have the cage and people know it will be available, so I think at The Next HOPE people will bring more servers to plug in.

HOPE was an incredible experience, yet again. Now, I get back to fashion photography for a while with not so many distractions.