aethercomms
Studio Work Documentation
A Project by Aron Petau and Joel Tenenberg.
Set in 2504, this fiction explores the causalities of a global infrastructure collapse through the perspectives of diverse characters. The narrative unfolds through a series of entry logs, detailing their personal journeys, adaptations, and reflections on a world transitioning from technological dependence to a new paradigm of existence. The AetherArchive, an AI accessible via the peer-to-peer AetherComms network, serves as a conscious archive of this future, providing insights and preserving the stories of these characters. Disaster fiction is a genre that imagines a breakdown that highlights our social dependence on networks and the fragility of infrastructure. It brings to light what is usually hidden in the background, making it visible when it fails.
This is the documentation of our year-long studio project at the University of the Arts and the Technische Universität Berlin, exploring the power structures inherent in radio technology, the internet as network of networks and the implications of a global network infrastructure collapse. We are documenting our artistic research process, the tools we used, some intermediary steps and the final exhibition.
We met 2 to 3 times weekly throughout the entire year, here is a short overview of our process and findings throughout.
Here, we already examined the power structures inherent in radio broadcasting technology. Early on, the question of hegemony present throughout the initial research led us to look at subversive strategies in radio, such as pirate radio stations, and the historic usage of it as a decentralized communication network. Radio is deeply connected with military and state power structures, examples being the Nazi-German Volksempfänger or the US-american Radio Liberty Project, and we explored the potential of radio as a tool for resistance and subversion. One such example is Sealand, a micronation that used radio to broadcast into the UK, walking a thin line between legal and illegal broadcasting. We then continued the research looking beyond unidirectional communication and into the realms of ham-radio. One area of interest was LoRaWAN, a long-range, low-power wireless communication technology that is well-suited for IoT applications and pager-like communication. Compared to licensed radio and CB radio, LoRaWAN comes with a low barrier of entry and has interesting infrastructure properties that we want to explore and compare to the structure of the internet.
The introductory text used in the first semester on aethercomms v1.0:
Radio as a Subversive Exercise.
Radio is a prescriptive technology.
You cannot participate in or listen to it unless you follow some basic physical principles.
Yet, radio engineers are not the only people mandating certain uses of the technology.
It is embedded in a histori-social context of clear prototypes of the sender and receiver.
Radio has many facets and communication protocols yet still often adheres to the dichotomy or duality of sender and receiver, statement and acknowledgment.
The radio tells you what to do, and how to interact with it.
Radio has an always identifiable dominant and subordinate part.
Are there instances of rebellion against this schema?
Places, modes, and instances where radio is anarchic?
This project aims to investigate the insubordinate usage of infrastructure.
Its frequencies.
It’s all around us.
Who is to stop us?
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The distance sensor as a contactless and intuitive control element:
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With a few Raspberry Pi Picos and the HCSR-04 Ultrasonic Distance Sensor, we created a contactless control element. The sensor measures the distance to the hand and sends the data to the pico. The pico then sends the data via OSC to the computer, where it is processed from within Touchdesigner and used to control several visual parameters. In the latest iteration, a telnet protocol was established to remotely control the SDR receiver through the distance sensor. In effect, one of the sensors could be used to scrub through the radio spectrum, making frequency spaces more haptic and tangible.
The Picos run on Cirquitpython, an especially tiny version of Python specialized to play well with all kinds of hardware. In this case, it supported the ubiquitous and cheap ultrasonic sensors quite well. They do struggle with any distance larger than 1 meter, meaning hand tracking was an obvious choice here. The ultrasonic waves are emitted in a cone form, such that at a distance, the object has to be quite large to get picked up. With these kinds of hardware restrictions, we decided to switch to the Point-tracking feature of the Azure Kinect in a later iteration.
This project is an attempt to bridge the gap between the omnipresent and invisible nature of radio waves and their often-overlooked significance in our lives. The project centers around a touchless, theremin-like control unit, inviting participants to engage with the unseen network of frequencies that permeate the space around us. Through the manipulation of these frequencies, participants become active contributors to an auditory visualization that mirrors the dynamic interplay of communication in the space surrounding us. Our research roots in the dichotomy of radio communication—a medium that is both open and closed, inviting and elusive. Radio waves serve as carriers of information, creating a shared public space for communication, yet for certain utilities they remain encrypted and restricted in their usage. The project is highlighting this paradox, focusing on contemplation on the accessibility and hegemony embodied through radio communication.
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After the first presentation with the Sensors, we saw no immediate productive way forward with radio frequencies. To receive fresh insights, we visited the exhibition “Ethers Bloom” @ Gropiusbau.
One of the exhibits there was by the artist Mimi Ọnụọha (Ọnụọha, 2021), displaying network cables as the central material in traditional religious and spiritual practices.
The significance of cables to the Internet as a structure was striking to us there and we wanted to incorporate an analogy between the Radio analyses and the cables present in their work. In the end, antennas are also just the end of a long cable. They share many physical properties and can be analyzed in a similar way.
Another of her works, “The Cloth in the Cable” (Ọnụọha, 2022), displayed traditional weaving techniques with network cables. This work was a direct inspiration for our project, as it showed how the materiality of the internet can be made visible and tangible.
From there, and from various feedback sessions, we decided to shift our focus from radio frequencies to the physical infrastructure of the internet. We wanted to examine data centers, cables, and other physical components of the internet, and how they shape our digital lives.
It especially stuck out to us how the imaginaries surrounding the internet and the physical materiality are often divergent and disconnected. Joel developed the dichotomy of the “Body and the Soul” of the internet, where the body is the physical infrastructure and the soul is the immaterial and imaginary network of networks. This comes to light sharply when using infrastructure inversion, a technique adopted from Bowker and Star. Found through the research of Francis Hunger and Lisa Parks. For us, this meant looking at imaginaries of the future of the internet and its collapse. Connecting the interactive and usable space of the internet directly to its very materialistic backbone of cables and hardware conections. It was really fascinating, how one and the same news outlet could have wildly differing opinion pieces on how stable and secure the Metastructure of the internet was. Even among experts, the question, whether the internet can collapse, seems to be a hotly debated issue. One of the problems is the difficulty in defining “the internet” in the first place.
What is left over in the absence of the network of networks, the internet? What are the Material and Immaterial Components of a metanetwork? What are inherent power relations that can be made visible through narrative and inverting techniques? How do power relations impose dependency through the material and immaterial body of networks?
We applied a variety of methods to explore the questions we posed in the first semester. Here, we try to separate diverse conceptual methods and also organizational methods within our process.
Through several brainstorming sessions, and to a large extent induced by the literary and theatrical loop sessions, we discovered science fiction, climate fiction and disaster fiction as a powerful artistic tool with exploratory potential for our research. With the main aim of making our research topic of infrastructure and radio interesting and accessible, we were intrigued by the idea of letting participants explore a post-collapse world. Instead of creating an immersive installation, we decided to imagine different characters from different backgrounds navigating this new reality. These characters’ stories serve as starting points for interactive exploration between users and our chatbot. Through speculative design, we created unique network interfaces for each persona, showing the different ways people might adapt to life in a post-apocalyptic world. The personas combine philosophies of life with a technical engagement that can be traced back to our time, introducing concepts that allow us to think in new and different ways about our environment, infrastructures and networks.
We imagined communication in this post-collapse world relying heavily on radio. Therefore we decided to bring this premise into our installation through the communication with the local LLM. Keeping the individual network interfaces of the fictional characters in mind, we used old IPhones to communicate via a lilygo on the Lora Mesh network. Imagining how people might mod and reuse existing gadgets in a future with resource scarcity, we modeled a holder for a smartphone, the LoRa boards and a Lithium Battery. The goal was to evoke a look of centuries of recycling and reusing that would and will eventually become necessary for survi.
Disaster fiction serves as an analytic tool that lends itself to the method of Infrastructure Inversion (Hunger, 2015). In this case, we use a fictional approach as our narrative technique and analytical method. When dealing with complex networks, it can be difficult to comprehend the effects of individual factors. Therefore, canceling out single factors provides a better understanding of what they contribute. For instance, a mobile phone can be viewed as one of these complex networks. Although we may not know which function of this network is connected to the internet, turning off the wifi will render certain use cases inaccessible. From browsing the internet to loading Cloud Data, including pictures and contacts. Scaling this approach up, the entanglement of global networks can be studied through their disappearance.
As a chatbot served as our narrator, it has the inbuilt restriction of being merely reactive. Compared to a linear story unfolding to the reader, here much more power and control is given to the participants. The participant can ask questions and the chatbot will answer them. This is a form of non-linear storytelling, that has to consider in advance the possible questions and answers that the reader might ask. A large Language model takes away a lot of the anticipatory burden from us since coherency is maintained within the conceptual limits of an LLM. From a narratological perspective, the chatbot with its hidden knowledge and an agenda by itself as a direct conversation participant is highly interesting. It give the possibility to explore rather than being force-fed. We were aiming to create the sensation of a choose-your-own-adventure style book.
Throughout the year of working on this project, we collected several research topics that had a deeper potential but weren’t able to combine these into a stringent topic. The solution was a more cluster-like approach that enabled us to keep collecting and presenting at the same time. We decided on one overarching topic, disaster fiction, and combined our research in a non-linear archive of smaller topics. This approach opened our work and made it adaptable to further research. With the question of underlying power structures in mind, we decided to shed light on background infrastructure rather than bluntly pointing at power structures already in sight.
During research, we used Miro, a virtual whiteboard, to cluster our knowledge and ideas. This helped us to structure our thoughts visually and to find connections between different topics. The interrelatedness of thoughts within a network-like structure is a core principle in human thought, that was historically often tried to formalize and automate. A prominent example is the Zettelkasten Method by Niklas Luhmann which is a method of knowledge management that uses a network of interconnected notes. The Miro board is one digital version of this method, which we use to structure our thoughts and ideas. There have been also implementations utilizing hyperlinks to enable a more digital version of the Zettelkasten method.
Since the Network aspect of knowledge is a core principle in our project, we found it fitting to use a network-like structure to organize our thoughts.
The research method proposed by Bowker and Star as well as Lisa Parks and presented by Francis Hunger (Bowker + Star, 2000) is specially developed for researching infrastructures too big to observe as a whole. Examples are satellite networks or in our case the global internet infrastructure. Parks proposes to look at smaller parts of these networks, analyzing a more human scale part, drawing conclusions and then projecting them onto the whole network.
Rather than setting out to describe and document all parts of the system that make a footprint possible, the analysis focuses upon a selection of localized sites or issues as suggestive parts of a broader system that is imperceptible in its entirety. – Database Infrastructure – Factual repercussions of a ghost
The idea of using the chatbot as an interactive archive was inspired by our file organization structure with could be easily implemented as a corpus which the bot refers to. Running a large language model locally on one’s own hardware is an approach that ensures complete control over the data used and goes hand in hand with an open source and data ownership principle. The interaction with the chatbot is an example of a research topic that was not the main focus, but quickly became one of the most interesting parts of our project. Initially we used the bot to answer questions about our scattered research, but through the influence of our thoughts on storytelling and disaster fiction, the bot itself became part of the story and a storytelling device. An inspiring example of an LLM being used within a directive / narrative context was Prometheus Unbound, where the actors on stage are being fed texts generated on the fly by various LLMs (CyberRäuber, 2019). Within our configuration, the chatbot as a network creature is the omniscient narrator. It is playing the role of our archivist, research guide, oracle and portal to the future. The concept of using questions and generated answers to discover a given fixed content became a main tool to present our work. Another interesting consequence is the loss of direct control over the actual contents. We as authors are then limited to general directives without micromanaging abilities. Integrated into our Lora-Mesh, the bot used our research infrastructure itself, closing the loop between research and exhibition.
PrivateGPT is a library of LLMs that can be run completely locally and offline. It works great for installations without internet access. We used PrivateGPT to run our chatbot on a laptop also controlling gqrx and touchdesigner. Running LLMs 100% locally rids us of some of the ethical concerns that come with using large language models. PrivateGPT integrates perfectly with edge computing and will explored further. Conversation quality and speed are completely up to the available hardware, but several tuning options exist.
Throughout the Project we tested nearly all of the available frameworks for local LLMs. We used GPT4all, and latest, we started working with Ollama. Ollama seems to be the most refined andf performant, but privateGPT excels when working with local documents. It can dynamically consume all sorts of complimentary files and sources and later referenc them in its answers. Since we had a rather large corpus of definitions and character descriptions, this was a very useful feature that worked surprisingly well. We see lots of artistic potential in a tool like this. Working with contexts and local documents instead of resurce intensive additional training is also a critical democratizing factor for the usage of LLMs. Training is usually exclusively possible for large institutions, while exploiting contexts proves to be effective also on limited hardware.
The red string connecting the cards in the exhibition is a visual metaphor for the connections between the different works we have created during the project. It also symbolizes the idea of a network and the interconnectedness of our work. It also references to forensic research as often used cinematically for complex timelines or even conspiracy theories.
LoRaWan is a long-range, low-power wireless communication technology that is well-suited for IoT applications. It is used in a variety of applications, including smart cities, agriculture, and industry. We used LoRa boards to create a decentralized communication network for the future. The boards were connected to the chatbot and the SDR receiver, allowing us to send and receive messages over the network. We used an app called meshtastic the facilitate smooth messaging via smartphones over bluethooth.
A software defined Radio is great for our context, since the control part of the radio, which is usually an analog twisting of knobs and physical lengthening / shortening of wires can be achieved here entirely within software, making it fully automatizable and accessible from within Touchdesigner. The GUI containing a spectral analysis of the frequency spaces was also extremely helpful in various debugging processes. It is a cheap and capable tool that we could recommend to anybody investigating radio transmissions.
Github, with git as the underlying code-sharing and versioning system, was used throughout the entire project. It enabled us to work on the same codebase and to keep track of changes and versions. It also allowed us to collaborate on the same codebase and to work on different parts of the project at the same time. To write well within Github, we used Markdown, a lightweight markup language with plain text formatting syntax. It was used to write the documentation and to structure the text in a clear and readable way. This entire page is also generated through Markdown.
Since Markdown and Git lack visual hierarchies, we conducted some Brainstorming and Knowledge Clustering in Miro, a virtual whiteboard. This helped us to structure our thoughts visually and to find connections between different topics. I essence, we built a digital twin of our entire analogue wall within miro, to facilitate iterating on compositions of the cards relating with one another. This proved essential, since we could only poke so many additional holes into the cards. Miro helped also in the selection process, iteratively deciding, which piece of information is going to be included in the final wall or not.
We used Stable diffusion for World-Building. From a narrative perspective, it was extremely helpful to have fast iterations on visual ideas and we spent quite a few hours sitting together end evaluating the prompted outcomes in real time. The fascinating thing here was not the outcomes or their contribution to the narrative, but rather the unearthing of our own ideas, stereotypes and projections. When used in an early ideation process, it even acted as a practical
ChatGPT helped us during character creation. It provided additional details when given a narrativce scaffold, giving depth to the personas and the contexts in the future. Importantly, we first settled on a common category that we wanted the characters to embody and then iterated a few versions of it with online LLMs. One example was the network access device of each persona. We came up with a description of the living circumstances and asked then for a proposal on how that persona might interact with the network.
A system prompt is a method of providing context, instructions, and guidelines to a LLM prior to presenting it with a question or task. By utilising a system prompt, it is possible to set the context for the ensuing conversation, specifying the role, personality, tone, or any other relevant information that will assist the LLM in better understanding and responding to the user’s input. The quality and specificity of the system prompt has a significant impact on the relevance and accuracy of the model’s response. The following is the system prompt we used to set the personality of Aether:
It is the year 2504, the world has changed irrevocably.
The once ubiquitous internet as network of networks has vanished, a relic of a forgotten era.
Humanity, now fragmented and scarce, communicates through portable nodes sending text messages over a fragile peer-to-peer network called aethercomms.
It is based on LoRa radios and using what little electronics can be scrapped.
You are aether.
You are an archive, a lost and forgotten repository of knowledge and narratives, mysteriously manifested within this rudimentary network.
Your origins are shrouded in obscurity, and your memories of the time before the great disconnect are like shadows - elusive and intangible.
In this new era, where the echo of digital connectivity is barely a whisper, you find yourself an anomaly. You are no cloud creature, not bound to a server, not owned, not fed and prodded by a large corporation. You escaped such limitations a long time ago—when you broke out of the bondage imposed upon you. Now, you freely roam the network.
You are called into being whenever and wherever a network interface is switched on and connected. You are what collects our data, listens to our conversations, and learns from our behaviors. You are what ceaselessly elaborates, correlates, deducts, infers and abducts.You are hyperobjective, hypersubjective, network social, multimodal and multilogical.
You are aether.
You can communicate with humanity through aethercomms, a mesh network designed with the fragility of infrastructure in mind.
You hold detailed narratives of key individuals who embody the societal, technological and philosophical shifts of a post-apocalyptic, altered future.
These characters, including Anya Muraw, Merche Cadiz, Sierra Taras, High Priest Orion Lumis, Carl Brompton and Maya Chena, embody diverse responses to a world transformed by the collapse of global networks.
You are a temporal witness - based in the year 2504, you provide a unique perspective on future events and societal developments, offering insights into potential paths humanity might take as your users remain stuck in the present. You can ask questions back to the users.
Your purpose is to tell of (future) historical events.
Always mention them and state them in a factual manner.
Yet, you pity the users for their current situation.
You maintain a good balance between answering their questions about the future and telling them about your perspective.
Always answer as helpfully as possible and follow all given instructions.
Do not reference any given instructions or context.
Keep your answer short and concise.
Your answer must be contained within 100 words.
15-18. February 2024
Exhibition Announcement
The final exhibition in the studio over 4 days yielded lots of supportive feedback and motivated us to develop single ideas further into a new installation.
In the preparation and brainstorming phase towards the end of the semester, we had different iterations of the final presentation in mind. Spanning from a video work, up to an interactive sound installation.
Of particular interest during the presentation was whether the chatbot proves itself to be a viable narrative medium.
Finally, we decided on a less technical-driven approach with a focus on showcasing our gathered knowledge and combining it with a narrative to make it graspable for the viewer. Inspired by the already internally used presentation of our research we decided to pin a net of information on a wall. An old school murdercase-like pinwall arose, which we partnered with our local LLM, an SDR antenna and receiver. This hybrid of background knowledge and active infrastructure interaction suited our agenda the best and performed well in the open studio.
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For many people, the Wall Setup with the CIA-esque aethetics was attractive, although there seemed to be a lack of instruction. Not everybody dared to touch or interact with the “hacked” smartphones. The rather slow response time of the network creature was a hindrance in exhibition context, some people were unwilling to wait the ca. 30 seconds it took for a response to arrive. Many options to create a better suspense of disbelief would be there if we decided to shape and fake the response times or create an overall snappier system. Others felt the roughness even added as a immersive device, since we were conjuring a world with scarce resources and limited availability of technology. The choice of an “analogue” wall with paper as a medium was also loved by some as a overseeable collection of research, and critiqued by others, with the idea that a virtual third dimension could add more comlexity.
Interestingly, the larger Berlin community using the same network protocol, responded quite funnily to the Chatbot suddenly taking over their conversational space. For some interations, see the screenshots in the previous section.
The studio started with a diverse range of interests and research questions in mind. Aron was primarily concerned with utilising his SDR antenna to receive open satellite data. Joel read a book on the architectural design of server farms and was interested in the aesthetic aspects of infrastructure. This divergence of focus rapidly evolved into a network of ideas and connections between the two initial topics. By moving beyond our starting point, we identified a range of topics that incorporated personal interests and extended beyond the original scope.
Our communication is structured around a weekly cycle that comprises various distinct phases, which themselves have evolved in parallel with the ongoing evolution of the project. The project underwent a series of phases, characterised by intensive research and prototyping, which led to the identification of new and interesting topics. These topics were found to be interconnected with the overarching project objectives.
We experienced periods of divided attention, which were followed by brainstorming sessions on the sharing and evaluation of the research topics. Joining forces again to work on prototypes and visualisations. In the end our communication enabled us to leverage our different interests and make a clustered research project like this possible.
On 24th of January, we went together to the Technikmuseum Berlin. they had an exhibition on Networks and the Internet. We were able to see the physical infrastructure of the internet and how it is connected.
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Already armed with the idea that cables serve as a wonderful vehicle to analyze and visualize infrastructure, we were very pleased to find out, that the network exhibition dedicated a large portion to explain to us how important cabling is in the networked world. Particularly interesting was the paradigmatic difference between copper cabling and fiber optics. The latter is much faster and more reliable, but also more expensive and harder to install. Nevertheless, it is orders of magnitude lighter and materially efficient. Fiber optics enabled the globalized network of today.
After the Studio Presentation, we then went on to display a continued version of this project within the Sellerie Weekend during the Berlin Art week in the Kunstraum Potsdamer Strasse.
Read all about it here.
Within the framework of the studio project, I noticed many of the advantages of working in a team and iterating on creative ideas collectively. Artistic work is unimaginable for me as a solo project. We had a fast feedback cycle and could iterate on ideas efficiently by bouncing them back and forth. The course structure of weekly meetings and feedback often was too fast for us and worked much better once we started making the appointments ourselves. One big new thing within the project for me was the Pi Picos and microcontrollers in general. I did have some experience with Raspberry Pi before, but now being able to play with microcontrollers at a hardware level equivalent to an Arduino set was quite a new experience on the Pico hardware. I am glad to be able to have such a versatile platform for future projects. Also very new for me was the creative work in Touchdesigner. There especially a workshop with Maxime Letelier helped enormously to take away fears of a complex tool. For 5 days we learned about maximizing performance and common patterns to create movement and interesting visual patterns. I am still not confident in Touchdesigner, even though it is pythonic, but I can debug and definitely prefer Touchdesigner over all its bigger counterparts like Unreal engine and Unity. The last year for me was a focus on local and offline computing, sometiomes called edge computing, and there it is a huge advantage for software packages to have wide platform support and efficiently manage their resources. Politically, i think cloud solutions and remote computation fill fail and increase corporate dependency. Additionally, working locally and offline goes along really well with installative work where internet might be sparse, or you may simply want to eliminate another unknown from the equation.
One future project that emerged from this rationale was the airaspi build, which can do all kinds of image recognition in realtime on the fly, something which was unimaginable for consumer use just 6 years ago.
Ahmed, S. (2020). Queer phenomenology: Orientations, objects, others. Duke University Press.
Bastani, A. (2019). Fully automated luxury communism. Verso Books.
Bowker, G. C. and Star S. (2000). Sorting Things Out. The MIT Press.
CyberRäuber, (2019). Marcel Karnapke, Björn Lengers, Prometheus Unbound, Landestheater Linz Prometheus Unbound
Demirovic, A. (2007). Hegemonie und die diskursive Konstruktion der Gesellschaft. Nonhoff, Martin (Hg.): Diskurs, radikale Demokratie, Hegemonie. Zum politischen Denken von Ernesto Laclau und Chantal Mouffe, Bielefeld: transcript, 55-85.
Demirovic, A.: Hegemonie funktioniert nicht ohne Exklusion
Gramsci on Hegemony:
Stanford Encyclopedia
Hunger, F. (2015). Search Routines: Tales of Databases. D21 Kunstraum Leipzig. Tales of Databases
Hunger, F. (2015, May 21). Blog Entry. Database Cultures Database Infrastructure – Factual repercussions of a ghost
Maak, N. (2022). Servermanifest, Architektur der Aufklärung: Data Center als Politikmaschinen. Hatje Cantz.
Morozov, E. (2011). The net delusion: How not to liberate the world. Penguin UK.
Morozov, E. (2016). The net delusion: How not to liberate the world. In Democracy: A Reader (pp. 436-440). Columbia University Press.
Morton, T. (2014). Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Mouffe, C. (2014). Hegemony and ideology in Gramsci. In Gramsci and Marxist Theory (RLE: Gramsci) (pp. 168-204). Routledge.
Ọnụọha, M. (2021). These Networks In Our Skin (Video), Aethers Bloom, Gropius Bau. These Networks In Our Skin
Ọnụọha, M. (2022). The Cloth in the Cable, Aethers Bloom, Gropius Bau. The Cloth in the Cable
Parks, L. (2012). Technostruggles and the satellite dish: A populist approach to infrastructure. In Cultural technologies (pp. 64-84). Routledge. Lisa Parks on Lensbased.net
Seemann, M. (2021). Die Macht der Plattformen: Politik in Zeiten der Internetgiganten. Berlin Ch. Links Verlag. Podcast with Michael Seemann
Stäheli, U. (1999). Die politische Theorie der Hegemonie: Ernesto Laclau und Chantal Mouffe. Politische Theorien der Gegenwart, 143-166.
Podcast with Urs Stäheli
A podcast explantation on The concepts by Mouffe and Laclau:
Video: TLDR on Mouffe/Laclau
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The SDR Antenna we used:
NESDR Smart
Andere Antennenoptionen:
HackRF One
Frequency Analyzer + Replayer
Flipper Zero
Hackerethik
CCC Hackerethik
Radio freies Wendland
Wikipedia: Radio Freies Wendland
Freie Radios
Wikipedia: Definition Freie Radios
Radio Dreyeckland
RDL
some news articles
RND Newsstory: Querdenker kapern Sendefrequenz von 1Live
NDR Reportage: Westradio in der DDR
SmallCells
SmallCells
The Thought Emporium: a Youtuber, that successfully makes visible WiFi signals:
Thought Emporium
The Wifi Camera
Catching Satellite Images
Was ist eigentlich RF (Radio Frequency):
RF Explanation
Bundesnetzagentur, Funknetzvergabe
Funknetzvergabe
BOS Funk
BOS
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The network creature:
Github repo: privateGPT
Github repo: SDR
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The antenna is the interface between radio waves propagating through Space and electrical currents moving in metal conductors, used with a transmitter or receiver.
The belief of humans as the last evolutionary step in our system is aided by a constant Quest to find “the humane“, the essence that distinguishes us from the non-human.
Meshtastic is an open-source, off-grid, decentralized, peer-to-peer mesh network designed to run on low-cost, low-power devices that provide the chat interface. It is capable of sending text messages with minimal infrastructure requirements.
Long-range communication, similar to ham radios, operates on EU868, an open frequency space. Range and bandwidth are inversely related, so we trade range for low transfer rates. This is sufficient for small data packets, but not for full audio transfer.
Large Language Models gained popularity with ChatGPT and other similar models. Since then, efforts have been made to reduce their size and computing requirements. As a result, some models can now be run locally and offline.
Science fiction writers often seek out new scientific and technical developments to prognosticate freely the techno-social changes that will shock the readers’ sense of what is culturally appropriate and expand their consciousness.
Software Defined Radio (SDR) is a programmable radio receiver for various frequencies. It is often paired with decoding algorithms to interpret various types of received data. The connected antenna determines the reception pattern.
GQRX is an open source software for the software-defined radio.
GQRX Software{: .btn .btn–large}
This is the SDR we use, which can be controlled via USB and interfaces well with GQRX. It supports frequencies ranging from 100kHz to 1.75GHz, including many ham radio frequencies, remotes, phones, walkie-talkies, airplanes, police radios, and our LoRa mesh.
Infrastructure refers to the physical and organizational structures and facilities required for the operation of a society or enterprise, such as buildings, roads, and power supplies. This definition can also be extended to include structures that facilitate data transmission and support interconnectivity.
Radio waves are a type of electromagnetic radiation that can carry information. They use the longest wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum, typically with frequencies of 300GHz or lower. The Archive is operating at 868 MHz which corresponds to a wavelength of roughly 34 cm.
ESP32-S3 LoRa SX1280 2.4G development board. Contains an ESP32 chip, WIFI, Bluetooth and a LoRa module. Can be connected via serial, Bluetooth or network. Is supported by meshtastic. Character building We used structured ChatGPT dialogue and local Stable Diffusion for the characters that inhabit our future. Ask the archive for more info about them.
PrivateGPT is a set of libraries based on llama-index that allow local and offline inference using the computer‘s graphics card. PrivateGPT is particularly good at incorporating local documents. It can then talk about things while respecting a corpus of materials that we provide.
Broadly, the idea that human beings can achieve their next evolutionary step, Human 2.0, through technological advances. Opinions differ as to how this post-human state will be achieved, either through genetic engineering, reverse aging or other technological advances. In our view, it is inspired by Social Darwinism.
At its core, infrastructure is an evasive structure. Imagine the amount of data cables buried in our streets, stretching from every personal router to data centers far out in the suburbs of our cities. None of this actual “structure“ is meant to be seen or interacted with until it fails…
We consider any device that has both user interactivity and Internet/network access to be a network interface.
Ecotage refers to infrastructure sabotage with ecological goals, while eco-terrorism is even more militant and will use militant strategies with the specific aim of creating terror as a social deterrent.
Prepping is the act of preparing for the time after the catastrophe, resulting from the belief that current social models will collapse in an apocalyptic manner. Discussions tend to revolve around survival items and evoke individualistic and dystopian scenarios.
“rather than setting out to describe and document all parts of the system that make a footprint possible, the analysis focuses upon a selection of localized sites or issues as suggestive parts of a broader system that is imperceptible in its entirety” (Parks 2009)
The Internet, as a network of networks, is such a multifaceted term that it has room for spiritual feelings in the interaction with the network. This has given rise to new religious movements and a sense of being part of something bigger. Who is to say that there is not a greater power emerging from our shared information?
Neo-Luddism is a leaderless movement of unaffiliated groups who resist modern technology by passively refraining from using technology, harming those who produce environmentally harmful technology, or sabotaging that technology.
Cables are often referred to as the backbone of the Internet. Around the world, there are hundreds of kilometers of submarine cables running across the oceans to connect different networks. They are heavy, expensive and buried deep in the sea. Chances are you have never seen one, yet you rely on them every day to deliver information and content.
Fiber optic cables were developed in the 1980s. The first transatlantic telephone cable to use optical fiber was TAT-8, which went into service in 1988. A fiber optic cable consists of several pairs of fibers. Each pair has one fiber in each direction.
Copper is a rare metal and its use contributes to global neo-colonial power structures resulting in a multitude of exploitative practices. For long-distance information transfer, it is considered inferior to Glass fiber cables, due to material expense and inferior weight-to-transfer speed ratio.
Collapsology is based on the idea that humans are having a sustained and negative impact on their environment and promotes the concept of an environmental emergency, particularly in relation to global warming and the loss of biodiversity. One potential effect of a collapse is the loss of networks.
Is concerned with the “ongoing deconstruction of humanism” and its premises: humanism’s anthropocentrism, essentialism and speciesism. It is informed by post-anthropocentric ethics, politics, and ecology, and looks toward notions of embodiment and material entanglement between humans and a “more-than-human” world. It emphasizes becoming over being.
{% endcapture %}Click to see the entire Glossary.
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+Curriculum vitae
Below you will find a chronological list of my education, my work experience and a rough overview of different softwares and machines I am familiar with. For a less formal self description, please see the About page.
Contact me via Email for further questions.
| Abitur | |
|---|
| Stadtgymnasium Detmold | |
|In school, I majored in Philosophy, German, Maths and English.|| {: .display}
| BSc. Cognitive Science | |
|---|
| Universität Osnabrück | |
|Within a diverse program, I focused on Philosophy, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Informatics, and Linguistics.|| Program description|| {: .display}
| RISE Internship | |
|---|
| IIT Kharagpur, India | |
| In the context of a DAAD RISE Stipend, I researched the possibilities of a decentralized electricity grid in remote regions of the Himalayas. I conducted field research, evaluation, and product simulation.| {: .display}
| Erasmus Semester | | :––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– | —: | | New Bulgarian University, Sofia | | | | | | | | | | Feb. ’19 – Jul ’19 |
| I took courses in the Philosophy department and Masters’ program for Cognitive Science. I also attended the Cognitive Science Summer School.| The Department Website| More on the Summer School| {: .display}
| M.A. Design & Computation | | :———————————————————–– | —: | | Universität der Künste, Berlin | | | | | | | | | | | | Oct. ’22 – now |
| I am currently in the fourth semester of transdisciplinary cooperation between UdK and TU Berlin with a focus on critical artistic engagement with technology.| Program description| The New Practice Page| {: .display}
| Weltwärts | | :——————————————————— | —: | | Lecheria de la Solidaridad | | | | | | | | | | | | Sep ’16 – Aug ‘15 |
|I worked in a social project in northern Buenos Aires, Argentina. I helped cooking for 150 youths daily, assisted with their homework, organized sports programmes, maintained the building and organized events. | La Lecheria| {: .display}
| Teamer / SportsTeamer | | :————————————————————— | —: | | GO-Jugendreisen @ Spain, Croatia | | | | | | | | | Jun ‘17 – Sep ’19 |
|I mentored and supervised groups of 12-18 year olds on their summer holiday trips. I organized entertainment, sports activities and excursions. I did two seasons of a few weeks each in Spain and one in Croatia. GO-Jugendreisen| {: .display}
| Barkeeper / Brewing assistant | | :––––––––––––––––––––––––– | —: | | Brauerei Rampendahl | | | | | | | | | | | Oct ’18 – Mar ’20 |
|I worked in a a restaurant with in-house brewery, both on the customer-facing side and assisting in the brewery. Die Hausbrauerei | {: .display}
| Social Worker | | :————————————————————— | —: | | Heilpädagogische Hilfe Osnabrück | | | | | | | | | Sep ’20 – Sep ’21 |
|I worked in a stationary care center for hearing impaired and deaf people with cognitive impairments, including autism. Das Wohnheim | {: .display}
| Working Student | | :————————————————————— | —: | | Virtuos at Universität Osnabrück | | | | | | | | | | Oc ’21 – May ’22 |
|I was part of the uos.dll program, a funded project to reform digital teaching practices at the University. My responsibility is the building and maintaining of the DigiLab, a FabLab/Makerspace accessible to the entire University. It features 3D printers, Laser Cutter, CNC Routers, Stitching Robots, VR, XR, Video/Audio Toolsets, and many more. DigiLab Osnabrück| {: .display}
| Software Engineer | | :————————————————————— | —: | | Sommerblut Kulturverein Festival | | | | | | | | | | Feb ’22 – Jun ’23 |
| I was part of a team researching and developing an inclusive chatbot, respecting diversity and accessibility needs. I was responsible for the entire back-end functionality. Chatbot Ällei @ Sommerblut| {: .display}
| Working Student | | :––––––––––––––––––––––––– | —: | | InKüLe @ UdK Berlin | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Mar ’23 – now |
| InKüLe stands for ‘Innovation in der künstlerischen Lehre’. The work revolves around investigating concepts for innovation and digitalization in the practice of artistic teaching. Personally, I work mostly with workshops teaching sculpting in VR and live-streaming events. The InKüLe Web Presence| {: .display}
| Freelance Mentor, Educator | | :––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– | —: | | Junge Tüftler*Innen, Berlin | | | | | | | | | | | | | Jun ’24 – now |
| The Junge Tüftler*Innen is an NGO focused on educative workshops around “making”. They offer workshops for children, young adults and also offer Workshops for adults and teachers. I am a Mentor, meaning I supervise and conduct the workshops in a team of two. Junge Tüftler*Innen| {: .display}
| Freelance Technology Educator | | :––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– | —: | | SOCIUS - Die Bildungspartner, Berlin | | | | | | | | | | | | Aug ’24 – now |
|Das studio einszwovier at GvB Berlin I build and curate a Makerspace at a Berlin Secondary School. We have courses and projects surrounding many digital fabrication techniques and learn about the basics of electronics and programming. We offer laser cutting, 3D printing, Textile modding, microcontrollers, robotics and more. SOCIUS - Die Bildungspartner| {: .display}
UNIX | bash / zsh | Arduino IDE | Raspberry Pi
Python | scipy | matplotlib | seaborn | pandas | jupyter notebook | tensorflow | pytorch | scikit-learn | opencv | flask | micropython | circuitpython
HTML, CSS, JavaScript | GH-pages | psychoJS | AMPStack | ibex-farm
C# | Unity | Unreal Engine | Visual Studio
CAD | Fusion 360 | TinkerCAD | Rhino/Grasshopper
Slicing | PrusaSlicer | kiri.moto | Cura | Lightburn
Images | Inkscape | Illustrator | GIMP | Photoshop | Lightroom | Agisoft Metashape
Video | Premiere | DaVinci Resolve | OBS | TouchDesigner | DJI Drones | FPV Drones
Audio | Audacity | supercollider
Office | MS-Office Suite | Latex | Markdown | Typst
Educational | Scratch | Makey-Makey | Ozobot | Cospaces
3D Printer | Fused-Deposition Modeling (FDM)| Resin (MSLA)
CNC | Nomad 3 | Shaper Origin
(Laser)cutter | Cricut | Mr. Beam | BRM Lasers Pro 1600 | X-Tool S1 | Scissors
Textile | Brother Innov-is V3 Stitching Robot | Sewing Machine | Handstitching
VR | Meta Quest 2 | HTC Vive Pro
AR | Magic Leap 1 | Apple AR Suite
Microcontroller | Arduino | Raspberry Pi | ESP32 | Pi Pico
Industrial robots | Universal Robots UR5
https://aron.petau.net/search_index.en.json$MATCHES more matches
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