PROF LEADS “DARPA OF DISSENT”

The place didn’t feel like a radical’s den; there were too many toys lying around. It didn’t look like an artist’s stu­dio; the wipe board was filled with schemat­ics, not sketches. And it sure didn’t seem like an engineer’s lab — espe­cially not with the impos­si­bly cute, white-​​furred bunny gnaw­ing at the cables. But the loft in Manhattan’s West Village was a bit of all three, really: the home to con­tro­ver­sial art and engi­neer­ing pro­fes­sor Natalie Jeremijenko.
For more than a decade, Jeremijenko and her col­lec­tive of tin­ker­ers and artistes, the Bureau of Inverse Technology, have been using tech­nol­ogy to explore the lim­its of social and envi­ron­men­tal issues, from sui­cide to toxic skies. She’s won slots at top uni­ver­si­ties, like Yale and Stanford, and at pres­ti­gious art cen­ters, like the Whitney Museum, for the work. But start­ing this week­end, the machines put together here by Jeremijenko and her cohorts may get their biggest stage yet, by giv­ing a guer­rilla geek’s edge to the protests swirling around the Republican National Convention in New York City.
Months ago, it became clear that the RNC counter-​​demonstrations were going dig­i­tal. But most of the gad­getry involved was house­hold stuff — text mes­sages to report cops’ where­abouts, or web pages to arrange hous­ing. Jeremijenko and her group have gone beyond that, hand-​​crafting devices meant to level, just a bit, law enforcement’s tech­nol­ogy advan­tage over activists.
Their devices include a 10-​​foot bal­loon, for count­ing crowds; a set of pirate trans­mit­ters, for tak­ing over local radio sta­tions; and 1,400 face masks that mea­sure the level of pol­lu­tion in the Manhattan air. Think of the group as a kind of Darpa of dis­sent — with Jeremijenko’s loft as the head­quar­ters.
Check out my other arti­cle at Wired News today for more.

August 27th, 2004 | Dissent Tech | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.