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Highlights from PICNIC ‘07, the tech/media conference held in Amsterdam last week:?

My New Hero: Hacker Pablos Holman. Bouncing around the stage in his black jeans, grunge tshirt and pony tail, Holman looked more like a tall 10 year old with ADD than a serious techhead. Espousing the hacker ethos (”ordinary people look at a device and think ‘what can I do with this?’ while hackers look at a device and think ‘what can I make it do?’) he showed off some of his favorite hacks: remote controlling a hotel tv set to get free movies and see what fellow hotel guests are surfing online; “Hackerbot”, a robot on wheels which drives up to people with open wifi and displays their passwords; and the crowd favorite: hacking into Cory Doctorow’s cell phone live on stage by spoofing his voicemail (Cory, who was in the audience, looked mildly amused).

My New Favorite Term: “Minimally Invasive Education”, courtesy of Prof. Sugata Mitra, creator of the “Hole in the Wall” project. In 1999 Mitra, an Indian physicist, placed a computer in the hole of the cement wall that separated his high-tech office with an urban slum. The result: children from the slum self-taught themselves to use the computer without the help of teachers, schools or textbooks. Over the years Mitra has replicated the experiment across India, proving that perhaps the only thing needed to bridge the digital divide are some inquisitive 8 year olds. (see this great post by Bruno Giussani about Mitra’s work from the LIFT ‘07 conference earlier this year)

My Still-All-time-Favorite Digital Artist: Jonathan Harris, whose work continues to inspire and provoke. In his latest digital incarnation, Harris turns his signature pulse-taking lens on himself (literally): The Whale Hunt is a photographic heartbeat of 3214 images, documenting the spring 2007 Inupiat Eskimo whale hunt in Barrow, Alaska.

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