Social RFID Hacker Camp ’08

What?

The Hacker Camp explores various recent technologies, interaction design and social processes, and aims to realise a bunch of engaging interactive installations, wearables and spaces, for the visitors of PICNIC to play with. The projects realised in this Camp meant to be (and/or) amazing, subversive, beautiful and unheard of.

Who?

We collected a group of excellent coders, designers and physical computeers that know how to enjoy a creative and technical challenge. They were the participants to the Hacker Camp at PICNIC.

When?

The Hacker Camp was a feverish five days from 19 till 23 of september 2008. 5 days long, 24 hrs a day. So whatever the hackers' most creative and productive hours of the day are, they could use them. PICNIC took place this year from 24 till to 26 september.

Where?

We had the perfect Oostelijke Metershuis all for ourselves. This is on the terrain of the Westergasfabriek in Amsterdam, where PICNIC also took place.

Why?

The main thing is this special pleasure to work together with really good and creative people on beautiful and innovative projects. Also Mediamatic takes a DIY attitude to our technological environment. We think it important to understand the technologies that surround us also practically, and to explore and develop their cultural and social potential.

How?

Technical starting points are the possibilities of AnyMeta, the semantic CMS in which the online social network environment picnicnetwork and mediamatic.net are built.
We brought a huge amount of RFID readers and chips. Guests to PICNIC all received a RFID chip that directly connects to their profile page in the picnicnetwork. We also had all kinds of Arduino boards, RFID tags / readers and a bunch of sensors, to play and experiment with.