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Art, Tech & Culture

Working the Stack: Exploits, Topologies, Ontologies

Art, Tech & Culture
02 Nov, 2015

Working the Stack: Exploits, Topologies, Ontologies

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Julian Oliver discusses his work as a provocateur who uses engineering to explore questions of privacy, government and corporate transparency, and threat mitigation. His most recent projects provide the public with opportunities to directly confront these issues. “The Deep Sweep” centers around the design of a low-cost aerial signal intelligence platform the public can send into aerospace to probe for otherwise out-of-reach signals between land and stratosphere, with special interest in UAV/drone to satellite communication. “The Transparency Grenade” takes the form of a Soviet F1 Hand Grenade and makes it as easy as pulling a pin to leak information from closed meetings. Capturing network traffic and audio at the site, and securely streaming this information to servers where it is mined for information (such as hostnames, IP addresses, email fragments, and webpages), the data is presented online with the location of the “detonation.”

Julian Oliver is a New Zealander, Critical Engineer and artist based in Berlin. His work and lectures have been presented at many museums, galleries, international electronic-art events and conferences, including the Tate Modern, Transmediale, the Chaos Computer Congress, Ars Electronica, FILE and the Japan Media Arts Festival. Julian has received several awards, most notably the distinguished Golden Nica at Prix Ars Electronica 2011 for the project Newstweek (with Daniil Vasiliev).

Julian has also given numerous workshops and master classes in software art, data forensics, creative hacking, computer networking, counter-surveillance, object-oriented programming for artists, augmented reality, virtual architecture, video-game development, information visualization and UNIX/Linux worldwide. He is an advocate of Free and Open Source Software and is a supporter of, and contributor to, initiatives that promote and reinforce rights in the networked domain.

Articles about Julian’s work, or work he’s made with others, have appeared in many news channels. Among them are The BBC (UK), The Age (AU), Der Spiegel (DE), El Pais (ES), Liberation (FR), The New York Times (US), La Vanguardia (ES), The Guardian Online (UK), Cosmopolitan (US), Wired (DE, US, UK), Slashdot (US), Boing Boing (US), Computer World (World) and several television stations worldwide.

Seating is available on a first-come, first-serve basis. We will be opening the doors at 7:15pm.

This lecture is co-presented with the Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Surveillance Democracies and the Art Practice Department.

Berkeley’s Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium is an internationally recognized forum for presenting new ideas that challenge conventional wisdom about art, technology, and culture. This series, free of charge and open to the public, presents artists, writers, curators, and scholars who consider contemporary issues at the intersection of aesthetic expression, emerging technologies, and cultural history, from a critical perspective.

The ATC series is produced by the Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM), with support from the Office of the Vice Chancellor and Provost, the Center for Information Technology in the Interest of Society (CITRIS), Meyer Sound and Theo Armour.

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