Copy Bomb
The Copy Bombs are my way of contributing to the free culture movemnt by encouraging the public to share images, audio, text and video in an unhindered way.
The Copy Bombs are, at their heart, PirateBox installations.
PirateBox creates offline wireless networks designed for anonymous file sharing, chatting, message boarding, and media streaming. You can think of it as your very own portable offline Internet in a box!
When users join the PirateBox wireless network and open a web browser, they are automatically redirected to the PirateBox welcome page. Users can anonymously chat, post images or comments on the bulletin board, watch or listen to streaming media, or upload and download files inside their web browser.
By building these sculptures (well, I employed Matthew James Moore to make them) I aim to give more of a physical presence to the wifi network. It serves as an object to signal that media can be shared freely within the vicinity. Due to being powered by battery (which can last nearly three days) these can be located anywhere.
In practical terms to use the Copy Bomb only a browser is needed, which can be on a mobile or desktop OS. A user needs to join the CopyBomb Alpha/Beta/Gamma network and then point their browser to http://copybomb.lan. They will be redirected to the sharing site, which is a PirateBox with the theme/CSS changed.
Once there they can browse the current contents or upload their own. I have hand picked content from the following online open archives:
Amherst College Digital Collections
The British Library
Wellcome Images
York Museums Trust
In addition to this there is content from the University of Birmingham's Research and Cultural Collections and my own archive of previous artworks.
The content from the public archives was chosen based on how easy it could be to remix and modify it. So, many of the items can easily be isolated from their backgrounds and used in other projects.
