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Sculpture to Reflect Campus Wireless Traffic
prostoalex writes "Ball State University, the top unwired school in the nation according to Intel survey, is set to unveil a sculpture that will reflect the wireless traffic on the campus network. From the article: 'Beginning Tuesday night at 8 p.m., as people log onto the Internet via Ball State's network, their online activity will appear as sound, color, patterns and images projected onto giant screens set up around the base of Shafer Tower, located in the middle of campus on McKinley Avenue.'"
I've never thought of a set of projection screens as a sculpture before..but I guess they haven't created an amorphous blob that's supersensitive to wireless transmissions yet :( One day!
Damn that's a cool idea, wish they'd made it open source though :(
Have you metaroderated recently?
...how patterns projected on a screen could be qualified as a sculpture. Still it'd be nice to see it going all noisy and red on the next worm attack.
FTFA:
See, officer, I told you she's not a hooker. She's a Performance Artist!
-ELfSi tibi te corpus pulchrum habere narrem, habeasne id contra me?
I go to Ball State and this is the first I've heard of it.
I'll see if I can borrow my folk's digital camera and take pictures.
A former "Teachers College" (Now more business and Medicine these days) Is showing that a decision made in the early 80's to make a computer available to every student is paying off big time. Kudo's to the Cards!!
Now if you could just convince the alumni to fund a football stadium *grin*
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
i don't see any P2P or streaming porn data...
If the NSA can get usable info from blinking LEDs, what are the security risks of this scultpure? Nearly everyone knows that radio communications can be freely spied upon, we've all seen scanners that let you listen in to police band radio, but other methods of intercepting communications rarely come to the mind of Joe Average. TEMPEST and NONSTOP attacks have been well-researched for decades, but the closest they've gotten to general public knowledge is Neal Stephenson's use of the concept in Cryptonomicon .
If they make it so that it shows what exactly people are downloading, they can probably relabel it as a XXX cinema...
I hope that they're not sampling images from the wireless data streams, though it might be interesting to watch the Pr0n on their "sculpture".
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
how does a port scan or packet flood show on the sculpture?
It would be interesting if they made it a wall of sheep (like at Defcon), but I imagine the backlash from said sheep (administration, professors, etc) would be significant.
Wow. What a stupid article. Art 'met the digital age' a REALLY long time ago.
Wireless technology, often known as WiFi, allows users to access the Internet with a wireless card -- often built into the computer -- that eliminates the need for cables or wires to connect online.
Almost Ric Romero quality there.
I pretend to know more than I really do by mooching off google and wikipedia.
How long will it take the student body to figure out how to make the sculpture draw obscene pictures or play gansta rap.
Knowing some of my friends, we'd probably have at least some sort of disturbance going on it within a couple of days...
Digging further I find. That even though the entire sculpture is made possible by Apple computers and software the dang this is only viewable via Microsoft Media player!. Talk about frustration city. Less effort on their part would have resulted in greater market penetration. Funny too how the sculpture done on Mac G5's celebrates an Intel award.
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
Jesus. Dumb ass.
Yes, i'm pretty sure it will look really nice.. but to me, this is a complete waste of time and money that could be used in other -useful- things (more books, better education, bigger student loans, etc.)..
From my experience as a network engineer at a college, let's hope they have some creative use of imagery NOT direct network stream grabs. We had a short downtime for router maintenance, and the first traffic on the network when it came back up was porn.
Campus tour guide: "Ball State believes in maintaining a clean campus."
Mom: "Can you explain this photo?"
And heaven forbid these kids discover myspace and facebook.
Not original. I remember hearing about a sculpture for Steve Gibson's office. It would use motion detectors to convert motion to sound.
Fight Spammers!
Taking goatse to whole new level!
because it's important that digital art look very digital... lots of streaming numbers, the overlaying of translucent geometric shapes... very techno and it fits right in with what we know about how future art will look like.
Welcome to Crystal Corp. Starting from what once started on giant screens in Ball State University, we have made our technology assume the form of 3-dimensional Crystal balls, where you can gaze into to see sights you would never see otherwise. Some of our latest Crystal Balls: The Mind Ball: Tiny transmitters carried around by people in your office/university detect and transmit the most dominant thoughts they are having. See this collectively on our Mind Ball! The World Ball: Events in the world, translated directly from five major news channel's sites, encoded into images and sounds, and put into the World Ball! See what is going around in the world, by gazing into the ball (it takes practice, but you really can!) The Basket Ball: Every major game going on in the world, every player, the number of baskets scored, the team formation, boy this was a tough one! Give us in your ideas for other great balls and we will make you part of our ball testing program, access to our latest and greatest crystal balls, and a chance to become part of the Crystal Corps Beta testing team.
Now you just need a really good micrphone and a camera array along with some software to analyze the sound and images and revert that data back into packet data (or what ever they are representing) and you have a network sniffer.
It sounds like this will be best viewed at night, and if people are going to be bringing lots of laptops out to play, I think the theifs might be out as well...
On the other hand, will we see spikes in the images when a device is forcibly removed from its owner?
[All Your Fish Are Belong To Us]
... what would streaming pr0n look like?
Interestingly, while MSFT software is sold and supported out of the Robert Bell building, where the CS department is, Apple hardware and software is sold and supported out of the Teacher's College building.
I don't know about anyone else, but this is just cool. How long before we can have something like this attached to our own at home networks?
Amazingly not everyone in the world is a networking expert!
Yeah, I was truely surprised myself.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
Tomato, Tomato Potato, Potato Art, Crap... I guess the way you pronounce these depends on where you come from.
So guys.... What was with the almost-daylong outage? Are we gonna get a description? I mean, we're a bunch of geeks here, so whatever it is that froze out slashdot for half a day is gonna be of some interest to us.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Sorry, I just had to take a chisel at this one.
I put the 't' in electrical engineering.
Is this supposed to be modern art? It just looks like naked chicks to me.
... but does it run linux?
All I see now is blonde, brunette, redhead.
:-/
I don't even see the code anymore.. I just see blonde, brunette, redhead...
Hey! Don't stand in front of the screen!
Clarifications/corrections drom a former student government president at BSU:
Ball State has nothing to do with medicine at all. It's nationally ranked/acclaimed programs include architecture, telecommunications, teaching, and entrepenuership.
Also, despite an abyssmal all time record, the administration just raised $12M to expand and improve the football stadium.
"wireless traffic on the campus network" - "projected onto giant screens"
Yay, college!
http://www.bsu.edu/web/jfillwalk/wireless/ - half-hidden on the news article. A much more educational page as to how exactly they're doing it, which (call me crazy) -might- be of more interest to a "News for Nerds" site.
Stuff.
I wonder if people on the campus' WAPs were watching the webcast, would it generate some weird feedback on the "scuplture"?
Actually, one of the signs of a good school is one where there isn't enough interest in the student body to even get enough people together to play varsity football. Other fitness activites and casual sports are fine. Football? Surely you jest!
Turn the stadium into a place to play concerts. Turn the 'coaches' into groundskeepers.
I guess we wont be seeing a cure for cancer out of this campus anytime soon.
2 questions though:
1) what does this have to do with wireless network trafic? Are they implying that this increasing traffic? Or are they simply boasting about their use of wireless networking? The former would be an interesting claim (but doubtful), the latter certainly isn't interesting.
2) what is preventing the "artist" from just randomly displaying colors and such? Where's the artistic and technical oversight? This could be a coverup in the making. Hmmmmmm.
Good to see my Alma Mater get a little into the public eye. Sometimes people ask if I'm just joking around when I say I went to school there. They did have some good computer labs (supported by me for a while too), which were fairly useful. They also then gave up RB labs on the second floor for network gaming on Friday's and Saturday evenings back in the mid to late 90's (think Quake CTF over a 10mbit lan).
And I supported the new football stadium with a bit of a gift. And I go back down there every now and then and support the community and the school by being a consumer. Not that anyone really watched the game while in the football stadium. Usually, we weren't sober enough.
Bah
Does anybody else remember a little Mac utility that came out of one of the hacking conventions, probably about 6 or 7 years ago (not that long after Apple brought out the first Air Port Base Stations -- so maybe more than that) that would grab and display JPEG and GIF images that were being transmitted over an unencrypted WLAN?
I think I recall reading about it in Mac World or MacUser, although it was a pretty quick-and-dirty app, it won some sort of award at whatever conference it was presented at. I've never heard about it again, but I've always thought it would be funny to use it as part of some kind of installation: hook it up to a big projector and just let it run.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I can see it now...
The United States Supreme Court today refused to hear a case brought by students of Ball State University against the National Security Agency for recording their network activity on the university's active art installation depicting the activity of the network. The refusal leaves in place a lower court ruling that the National Security Agency has the right to record and decode network traffic that is displayed in public locations, no matter how the information is encoded.
We are the 198 proof..
The hardest part was choosing the right sounds to represent each type of packet. It's interesting that the Ball State artists chose bells, because we also used deep tubular bells for WiFi beacons and high glockenspiel notes for data packets - you can hear what it sounded like here (20MB mp3).
If I was at that school I would be more interested in the school NOT spending all the money on such a device and, instead, lower tuition.
Love sees no species.
Just to note. The word sports should have been placed in front of the word medicine. BSU is the world leader in this feild and has been for a very long time.
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
There is a grain of truth. However the joke in it is one that goes back into the 70's with BSU. Oh and you might like this link
https://addons.mozilla.org/addon.php?id=444
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.