Who is Denisa Kera?
Something of a nomad with a cause. I travel around the world to visit and work with hackerspaces, Do-It-Yourself biology (DIYbio) labs and various other forms of grassroots citizen science movements. As a researcher, I’m curious to understand what is the best way for a society to interact with, adopt and integrate emergent technologies. I like these spaces, because they let everyone understand and take part in the process of designing, tinkering and playing with various ideas and technologies. I’m also excited about the prospects of such alternative R&D structure to support research in the developing countries, such as Indonesia or Nepal. In my day job I teach mainly stuff around innovation and design at the National University of Singapore, but I’m also an active member of the Prague based hackerspace, Brmlab.cz, supporter of the global network for open biology, Hackteria.org, and this new amazing network of mobile kids hackerspace, HacKIDemia.com. I’m also active in Tokyo, Singapore, Yogyakarta, Kathmandu and Shenzhen with various small projects from open science to open hardware. This summer I’m mapping the hackerspaces in the Balkans and becoming more curious about various initiatives in the Caucasus region.
Why are you crazy about hackerspaces?
The hackerspaces attract the most interesting people you can meet in a city, the pragmatic visionaries, who are not afraid to take any challenge, but jealously protect their autonomy and freedom. They actually preserve the original mission of the universities, which is academic freedom enabling citizens to develop skills necessary for taking an active part in the public life, the so called “artes liberale” – liberal arts or knowledge, which sets you free. Nowadays it means not only law and rhetoric, but also knowledge of science protocols, programming, hardware hacking, and this is the best place to gain such knowledge and skills on your own terms. Then you can make informed decisions on stuff like GMOs, or be able to set up an ad hoc, secure and independent network during acts of civil disobedience. Rather than expecting the government or some NGO to protect you rights, you are part of a small, resilient and independent community, which can deal with variosu situations, such as the ones we see now in Istanbul, but also disasters, such as Fukushima or the flooding in Prague. Groups of geeks empower citizens to get independent data, and you can see such projects not only in Japan with radiation http://www.safecast.org/, Europe with CO2 and dust monitoring www.kanarci.cz, but also in Indonesia with water http://lifepatch.org/. I admire these projects, they enable people to build sensor networks for sharing data about their environments, but I’m personally exploring more artistic and even science fiction themes. What drives people like me to these places is well summarized by a friend from Tel Aviv hackerspace, Yair Reshef ‘I tell ppl that in hackerspaces we don't *start* anything. we are here to fail. gracefully if possible. completed projects tend to showoff. people always look for the product. a goal embodied in an object. it should be effortless. effortless technology. being in the flow with the right tools and nothing better to do.’ Most of my projects are in some perpetual gamma rather than beta version, they are graceful failure, which I like to repeat and come back to.
Can you give us some examples?
With the Fablab Yogyakarta in Indonesia and Hackteria.org we hacked a mobile food truck and turned it into molecular gastronomy lab performing this posh cuisine on the streets of Indonesia, testing and showing how simple equipment, such as webcams can become microscopes. It is developing into a project supporting open hardware solutions for cheap lab equipment, but who knows, we may just continue in the mobile food truck fetish ideas. Last year, I also scanned my brain in London and performed “brain uploading” over Dropbox and Facebook to use these fMRI data in Prague for a workshop on data liberation for citizen science project. This will eventually develop into a cloud solutions for such citizen science projects thanks to Ivan Vanzaj from Singapore hackerspace, but I’m also excited about the brain hacking activities in Brmlab.cz and the work of Peter Boraros on TDCs there. This is just to give you some idea how fluid and collaborative these projects are. I also regularly take part in fluorescent organisms night hunt in Swiss mountains, last time it was with hacked Indian spiritual chants automata, and I hope soon to take part in the Brmlab’s hunts for meteorological stations. This is amazing, you are catching hardware like a prey and then developing it into something different, you make these thropheis you hunted into open hardware projects, you liberate it!
What do people in hackerspaces need? Do they have commerce abitions? Do they need marketing / business developmenmt / sales support? They are happy without money guys?
Now seriously, hackerspaces are so far the best response to the criticism that the pace of our technological progress doesn’t follow our moral and social progress… that somehow we are creating things and technologies, which do not make us better as individuals nor they help communities. The typical geek will never argue about this, she will find this whole discussion ridiculous. She never knows what she is building, she doesn’t make a distinction between scientific and social value, she accepts uncertainty and likes to explore the possibilities. She trusts the global community of geeks and enthusiasts who will test and take part in her adventure and challenge her and then they will collectively and tentatively decide on the next step. These spaces are democratic to their core, innovation becomes constantly evolving collective experimentation through tinkering and testing rather than a big theory of social order or some scientific breakthrough, disruptive technology etc. Hackerspaces are my playground or special zone, where I go to dream, where I feel free to test various crazy ideas around emergent technologies: right now I’m curious about microfludicis and lab on a chip technologies and how to use them for a puppetry show with small organisms, before I was looking into food applications, I’m still an advocate for open biodata and I’m interested in various forms of sharing biodata (fMRI and not only DNA), and in the most active project right now we are trying to connect open hardware with traditional crafts in Japan. What is great for me as a designer in these hackerspaces is that I get to understand and test how these technologies will work in various cultural and social contexts.
I do work a bit also on serious issues such as models and infrastructure how to support research in developing countries through DIYbio and hacker culture, and then biosafety and biosecurity codes of conducts for DIYbio and citizen science projects.
Future?
This year I’m often in Shenzhen where I follow the open hardware scene thanks to my hardware gurus, Bunnie Huang, who is setting up an amazing summer school there, and David Li from Shanghai hackerspace, and this amazing young muse and researcher, Silvia Lindtner, who infected me with a love for so called shanzhai phones, creative, DIY, cheap and crazy mobile phones. In Tokyo together with Jan Rod and Charith Fernando from Inmojo.com we are about to launch the Totematons.org, project where we are trying to look into how to support traditional artisan techniques with custom made printed circuit boards and open hardware and define some form of hardware artisanship, which will support old rituals with new technologies. I’m also preparing a workshop on open hardware for farms with Sakar Pudasaini from Karkhana.asia, an amazing hackerspace in Nepal, and I’m trying to be in Yogyakarta as much as possible because that is the most interesting DIYbio science thanks to HONF and Lifepatch.
Please show 5 projects (urls) that were born in hackerspaces that you likes and that are still alive
Safecast http://www.safecast.org
Kanarci http://www.kanarci.cz
Bioluminescence Community Project http://biocurious.org/projects/bioluminescence from where this was started http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/antonyevans/glowing-plants-natural-lighting-with-no-electricit
Bioekectronix http://hackteria.org/wiki/index.php/Bioelectronix and all Hackteria projects
Totematons http://www.totematons.org/ slef promo J
What are cool hackerpaces in the world? Central Europe? Asia / Africa …. Is there url with hackerspace lists?
Karkhana Collective in Nepal http://www.karkhana.asia
The House of Natural Fiber (HONF- Yogyakarta New Media Art Laboratory) http://www.natural-fiber.com/
HONFablab http://honfablab.org/
LifePatch (Citizen Initiative in Art, Science and Technology) http://www.LifePatch.org
Xinchejian, Shanghai hackerspace http://xinchejian.com
Seeedstudio Hackerpsace, Shenzhedn http://www.chaihuo.org