First shot.

Freda with her TLR. Mine is red and she got the yellow one.

There is a hot shoe on the side of the camera for a flash, so I started messing around with a little Canon flash I usually attach to my G9.

My favorite coffee shop is also called Blackbird.

The NYC 2600 posse headed to dinner after the September meeting.

Murd0c and Gonzo slinging hooch.

Neo ponders.

“The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

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.

click to read

In the early 90’s it was Wired. Kevin Kelly was driving the content and the world was changing. It was the multimedia revolution and each issue was a first class ticket from my east coast view of a lighthouse to the changing landscape of silicon valley. Every Nicholas Negroponte editorial changed something about the way I thought about the way things work or can work or should work. The first three years of Wired issues were really incredible.

After Wired I became an avid reader of Video Toaster User, which was a technical journal dedicated to the products from a company called NewTek. NewTek made 3D computer graphics affordable with Lightwave 3D. Through most of high school I was obsessed with computer animation and spent a lot of late nights setting up 5 second scenes that would take four or five days to render from small bitmaps and wire frame models to near-photorealistic clips. Video Toaster User was great for helping you figure out how to pull off complex looking effects with simple solutions.

When I was a freshman in college, I started reading 2600: The Hacker Quarterly quite a bit. Most media approaches the subject of hackers as if they’re all one thing or all another thing. In reading 2600, I learned about hacker culture, how complex it is, how diverse the community has become. From the humble beginning when a model railroad club at MIT started referring to modification of their models as “hacking” to the bizarre misconceptions portrayed in films and television to the modest gatherings of offbeat technology enthusiasts around the world every first Friday of the month. The magazine brought be into contact with the hacker community and I have a lot of great friends because of that association, but today the publication seems far less relevant and I now recognize what a small slice of the larger hacker world it represents. Am I a hacker? Yes. Do I know a lot about computers? Not really. All artists are hackers, and all hackers are artists. It’s just another name for explorers.

Then I found ArtByte. I think this was around 1998. Artbyte was about the crossover between art and technology. It talked about circuitry and robotics and multimedia and all those wonderful technological tools, but cross referenced those topics with the legitimate art world. There were reviews of light shows at the Guggenheim, long essays about where cinema was going, and just all sorts of exposes on how technology was being jammed together with culture all over the world. It ceased publication abruptly in late 2001. I don’t know why for sure, but I suspect their offices were near ground zero. That magazine was extremely content rich. The way the writers spoke about ideas was uniquely inspiring. I think of all the magazines I’ve subscribed to in the last decade and a half, it was the one I most looked forward to reading.

For a couple years in between there I subscribed to Weekly Variety, the distilled outside town version of Hollywood’s favorite trade publication, Daily Variety. I learned a lot reading it, but got busy and the back issues started to pile up without being even skimmed. It’s a very dense magazine, and getting it on a weekly basis, when it has to compete with The New Yorker for eyeball time and the subscription price is around $250, it just wasn’t worth it anymore. Like Wired though, since the Indie revolution played out, Variety seems less relevant, at least to me personally. Instead I just watch Sunday Morning Shootout on AMC every week.

Now I get a lot of fashion magazines. Italian Vogue, Exit, and Icon are my favorites. Exit was what I picked up the week I decided to leave grad school to become a fashion photographer. I subscribe to a bunch and pick up others on the newsstand. I like Oyster, which is an Australian fashion magazine. I also subscribe to Surface, which is more of a design magazine, but the articles are pretty good. There are quite a few that I follow. They get expensive when you pile them up, so I’ve taken to flipping through before buying to make sure there are innovative images.

There is a magazine called Make, which is all about personal technology empowerment. The do it yourself bible for the 21st century. My friend Ryan O’Horo has had his creations published in Make a few times.

I don’t really have a favorite magazine right now. I keep waiting for the next early Wired or the next Artbyte to appear. Who couldn’t use a monthly dose of mind blowing inspiration?