Breaking the black box Interview by Simone O'Donovan.
“Step into my cave,” Julian Oliver jokes, referring to his intimidating work space on Weisestraße. This cold, dimly lit room with cement flooring, decorated only by bizarre technological contraptions, is the lair of the 38-year-old media artist. Oliver came to the cyber-cauldron of Berlin from an antipodean forest farm. He remembers his native New Zealand as an independent country where “people learn to do a lot with a little.” Little did he know that fooling around with gadgets and machines during his early years would lead to Oliver and his partner Danja Vasiliev winning the 2011 Golden Nica award – “Pretty much the Oscars in my world!” – for Newstweek, an innocuous wall plug that can alter the news read by other people at a wireless hotspot. It’s here in his Neukölln tinkering hole that Oliver also built his latest brainchild, the Transparency Grenade, a device that can leak all the network activity in its surrounding area to a linked server. This piece is currently on display in Amsterdam at the Transnatural Festival. Oliver nonchalantly describes it as a “hand-held solution to the problem of a lack of transparency... a tangible, functioning cyberweapon in the form of a traditional weapon.” more… http://www.exberliner.com/articles/breaking-the-black-box/ _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
