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Sculpture to Reflect Campus Wireless Traffic

Posted by Zonk on Sat Apr 15, 2006 07:23 PM
from the six-kinds-of-cool dept.
Wireless Networking Toys Hardware
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.'"
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Sculpture to Reflect Campus Wireless Traffic 25 Comments More /

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  • 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!

  • I fail to see... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Gobelet (892738) on Saturday April 15 2006, @10:15PM (#15136178)
    ...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.

    • Re:I fail to see... (Score:4, Informative)

      by robson (60067) on Saturday April 15 2006, @11:04PM (#15136473) Homepage
      I fail to see... how patterns projected on a screen could be qualified as a sculpture.

      This project could probably more accurately be filed under "installation", but it's not uncommon for sculpture to be a catch-all for anything that's not painting, video, photography, or craft work.

      You can find some good contemporary installation coverage here [we-make-mo...ot-art.com].
    • "...how patterns projected on a screen could be qualified as a sculpture."

      Depends on what the display looks like, I suppose. I mean if it's just a big screen with imagery, well then yeah I see your point. But if the screen is mounted on a sculpture then.. well you've got a sculpture.

  • Toldja! (Score:4, Funny)

    by TheTrueELf (557812) <thetrueelf@hot m a i l . c om> on Saturday April 15 2006, @10:18PM (#15136206) Homepage

    FTFA:

    "It should make everyone's surroundings more interesting because that's the purpose of public art," he said. "To exist and engage the people who are passing by."

    See, officer, I told you she's not a hooker. She's a Performance Artist!

    -ELf
  • 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*
    • Digging further I find. That even though the entire sculpture is made possible by Apple computers and software [bsu.edu] 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.
  • If the NSA can get usable info from blinking LEDs [com.com], 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 [wikipedia.org] 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 [amazon.com] .
    • Anyone who considers unencrypted traffic passing over the internet as 'private' is naive. If the RIAA can look at your downloading habits, then there is little reason to expect the CIA, FBI, or your neighbor Alice isn't also looking at them. If people are worried about privacy then maybe this will help them realize they are not doing things in secret. There are things you can do to mitigate this, like using encrypted chats or proxy servers, so if it is really important there are things you can do to avoi
    • If you set it up so that LEDs are on in 10ms bursts, then there should be no real problem with sucking data out of them. If you leave them directly connected to the data flow, then yeah --- you're asking for trouble..

      As for the comment about "who considers unencrypted traffic public", it's one thing to whisper 'cute' things to your girlfriend at a public phone. It's another to have it broadcast over the PA system. Although both are 'public', there's a difference in the nature of the beast.

      It's silly t

  • Wow... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by bepe86 (945139)
    If they make it so that it shows what exactly people are downloading, they can probably relabel it as a XXX cinema...

  • Shows Images, eh? (Score:3, Funny)

    by whitehatlurker (867714) on Saturday April 15 2006, @10:19PM (#15136221) Journal
    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".

  • packetbomb (Score:4, Interesting)

    by apostrophesemicolon (816454) on Saturday April 15 2006, @10:19PM (#15136223)
    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.
  • Taking goatse to whole new level!
  • 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.
    • Well I guess that wouldn't work so well if the designers run the data they capture against some randomizer. It wouldn't be 1:1 representation of the data but who cares, this is all eye candy anyway. I guess I kind of defeated my own idea.
  • Sorry, I just had to take a chisel at this one.
  • Is this supposed to be modern art? It just looks like naked chicks to me.
      • Wouldn't you love to setup one of these of your own? Hell it doesn't *have* to be open-source, but it'd be nice. I'd settle for a binary...

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