Category Archive: telephony

Shanzhai Archeology: defying our standardized technological imagination

Over the past couple of years, Maria Roszkowska, Clément Renaud and Nicolas Maigret from DISNOVATION.ORG have been quietly smuggling odd-looking phones from China to Europe. They’ve got a phone that doubles up as a stun gun, one that’s shaped like a big strawberry, one you can use to light up your cigarette, one that will assist you in your religious rituals, etc.

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What would you say to the NSA if you could send them an anonymous message?

Christoph Wachter & Mathias Jud have installed WLAN / WiFi mesh network with can antennas on the roofs of the Academy of Arts and the Swiss Embassy, both located in the heart of “NSA’s Secret Spy Hub in Berlin.” The particularity of the network is that it is open and at the disposal of passersby to communicate anonymously and even send messages to operatives of the NSA and GCHQ intelligence who might lurk inside the nearby British Embassy and Embassy of the United States

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Meme Junkyard: Technoviking

Technoviking became a Youtube hit in 2007, accumulating tens of millions of views across the original upload and the countless reposts, remixes, take-offs and fan films that followed. Recreating Technoviking as an airfilled avatar that will inflate and deflate according to the buzz it generates on Twitter (use #technoviking), Meme Junkyard asks us to consider what it means to ‘go viral’ and, be it a cat playing piano or David After Dentist, what becomes of an overnight YouTube sensation months or years after the fact