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Bluetooth art

Wireless Application Programming with J2ME and Bluetooth

Ok so it's possible to make bluetooth stuff I think with java, that you then load on your phone and can use to go around doing damage to other people's phones - http://bluetooth.weblogsinc.com/2004/02/07/bluetooth-hacking-for-fun-and-profit/2#comments

But this is sooo unimaginative. Here is a braindump of ideas - the end idea being of being able to use this stuff for arts:

  1. For ages I imagined a way of talking that was like extended quick bluejacking. I thought I'd use it to find things out without talking to anyone - it would be about quickly noting metadata to do with a place or time or day, and sharing only that, automatically. It would be all about the social side of it - how much do you feel comfortable sharing with strangers, and how do you create social contact in spaces where that never happens? The interface should be simple and people should want to do it. Here's a similar thing

  2. Another network idea could be a p2p file system that ran over bluetooth, installed itself on your phone, you set the size you are happy allocating to share, and then you can search and retrieve. This would be okay for phones that had mp3s in them... No one could catch you!


  3. Next of course is a system for controlling at the same time something wider than your own network can see... so you don't have to see all the people who can see each other in order to access their phone or whatever... If you could do this, you could do a mass event where you were sending to everyone. So one application could be something like a stadium gig, and while you are there you can send people mp3s of bits of the gig etc. Or you could do what's insinuated by some of the pages you can quickly find online about bluetooth hacking - that you could infiltrate something and subversively steal everyone's phone number, or their contacts lists, or send them something like an image set forcibly as background on their display. Can imagine many reasons for doing this, but social or consumer pranks seem the most innocently fun...

  4. A very simple experiment would be a bluetooth virus - a bit of a proof of concept: it would load itself onto the phone without any hacking at all. It would send a message saying "the friendly virus load me please" and if typing a pin, it would load itself. It would then, until deleted try and access all phones in the range and do the same. It could be "help me send a message to kevin bacon" and a race against time to see who could do it in 5 moves...

  5. Finally the idea is to give people a simple chat system which is completely distributed, like NNTP newsgroups - so each person's software is a bit of a distributed app which is as big and powerful and fast as it is connected by all these phones and machines... A user would be able to type things and they would appear across the top of the screen. If on a computer it would show up as an API you could import into anything else. SO for example at the cube we could have a screen and project the contents of everyone's bluetooth chats, but they would all be asked to contribute suggestions, and these would be filtered and edited by the person on the computer that sends to the big screen. So they would be the main editors of the directing (so it could be coded signals as in louder softer faster slower for the orchestra to play) but the idea is to get the audience to be directly guiding the music....

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