Hardware Hacking Workshops
Workshops conceived and led to promote communal computing through squatting and hacking hardware.
Rationale
As a technologist, I see and am concerned with our global ability to produce tons of electronic waste. Mounds of hardware, quick to obsolete, filling landfills, shipped around to countries subject to being burned in toxic sites for the recovery of critical minerals. Obsolescence of electronics is a capitalist strategy. Increasingly our hardware is not owned, but rented. Yet, we are stuck with it when it gets bricked, as a result of hardware manufacturers going bust or deemed too old to upgrade. Hacking, reverse engineering and volunteer, grassroots, open source efforts to support these pieces of abandoned hardware abounds and exists.
When abandoned, we should have a right to break into the disused hardware sitting at the bottom of our dresser drawers or closets or filling up the e-waste recycling containers. Inspired by these re-use communities, I had a vision of form of re-use of old electronic hardware that was analogous to squatting movements.
What would a very punk data centre look like? Could one cobble together shared computing resources out of a pile of electronic debris? How can one squeeze the most out of these materials? Even if the original use, as a web camera, mobile phone, smart speaker, or IOT crap gadget, no longer makes sense. This material is computational, and has processors, power management units, memory, storage, networking and wireless capabilities.
This brought me to present the concept as a lighting talk at Art Meets Radical Openness (AMRO) 2020
Horgesbord - an Experiment in Communal Computing (AMRO 2020)
Horgesbord is a call-to-action for experimenting in communal computing a la squatting the data center. The word Horgesbord - a portmanteau of three words. 1) “Hording”, the condition of amassing and collecting resources whether being resourceful or at a scale of the absurd. 2) The “Borg”, the totalitarian hive-colony-like alien species from Star Trek the Next Generation. And finally “smorgasbord”, the Swedish Buffet meal spread which celebrates a casual cosy, open, abundant dining experience.
Horgesbord is the concept that one has many compute devices hanging around in landfills and kitchen drawer, that perhaps can be bootstrapped and re-purposed for a collective computing experience. Induction. Boot camp. Assimilation. On-Boarding. Orientation. Bootstraping. All of these words describe the process of preparing a future member to the processes of the collective. While our devices lack free will, ourselves as owners of these devices do. So with this is the principle of consensual giving up our device to the communal computing environment. We no longer own the device and but we do free-willingly allow our device to be „owned“ by the compute collective. This is to contrast the unwilling and unknowing in habitation and ownership of our devices via malware installed by shadowy networks of hackers and state-sponsored security agencies.
This presentation described my vision of the Horgesbord and perhaps build connections with the Radical Openness Community to being this project to fruition.
Workshop: Building the Zombie Cloud (2021)
As part of the Camping with Computers exhibition, I ran a workshop which introduced hardware hacking and the concept of re-purposing hardware through the example of hacking a WIFI camera.
Photo by Sara Piñeros Cortés.
The world is becoming littered with old mobile phone discarded as “upgrade” culture entices us to the shiny latest thing and obsolete Internet of Things (IoT) gadgets which turn into useless plastic bricks when their dependent cloud services go dark as the start-up fails and goes bankrupt. In addition, while manufacturers are increasingly locking and securing the devices we have “purchased”, the right to repair movements aim to re-use these electronics in new and surprising ways. The first step towards this culture of circular use is to be able to re-purpose a device for general purpose computation. In this “hardware hacking” workshop, we will look at a typical IoT internet security camera and discover how to talk to it and re-program it for our own customised uses. The spirit of this workshop is to also to generate ideas for an eventual system for combining discarded electronics into a re-usable general purpose computational system.
Workshop: Conversations with Cameras (AMRO 2022)
At AMRO 2022, I ran a workshop that focused more on the creative re-use of used WIFI cameras.
Web-cams, home cams, pet-cams, refrigerator cams… Internet-connected cameras (IP Cameras) are increasingly ubiquitous. These commodified Internet of Things (IoT) gadgets are often closed, propriety, security dumpster fires and quickly become obsolete IoT bricks when their cloud-based services fail hard and fast through corporate bankruptcy. However, they also become a creative material once hacked and opened up for general use. In this workshop, you will play with a hacked IP camera, and through the command-line learn how a video stream is set-up can be modified for re-purposing. We will experiment with modifying the steamed image from our cameras, and attempt peer-to-peer streaming to potentially produce strange re-mixed video loops.
This workshop is for beginners with a little technical patience, and those who are comfortable with using a Linux terminal shell. For those interested in learning, we will support each other and get you started with command line hacking. Experts are welcome, as there is technical depth to explore with compiling video streaming software for an IP camera.