Baden pailthorpe biography of donald
Turning cybercrime into art
Cyberattacks have become an almost everyday occurrence in Australia. In the past year, millions of people have had their private information targeted in high-profile hacks.
It’s this increasingly common type of cybercrime that has inspired the latest artwork of contemporary artist Dr Baden Pailthorpe.
A senior lecturer at The Australian National University (ANU), Pailthorpe has developed a public art installation to help audiences better understand cybersecurity.
“Most of us have experienced some kind of hack. We’ve all been targeted at one point or another,” he says. “My work allows people to experience cybersecurity in a way they might not have thought about before.”
Something you know, something you have, something you are incorporates passwords, cyberattack data and biometrics, and is split into three main sections.
Pailthorpe came up with the title while researching cybersecurity. Listening to podcasts about hacking gave him a sense of the language used in that space.
“Each section is a form of security that a user can have, and I’ve referenced these to structure my artwork,” he says. “I love the lyrical quality and the repetition of these categories.”
Something you know cycles through thousands of common passwords, simulating a brute force attack. This type of attack is very common and involves hackers using trial and error to crack passwords and login credentials. For this section, Pailthorpe used a set of the 10,000 most common passwords – comprising of people’s names, birthdays and favourite sporting teams.
The second section, something you have, visualises real cyberattack data. Pailthorpe collaborated with the ANU cybersecurity team to depict actual attempts to pass the University’s firewall.
“In the creative fields, we often explore the connections between different subject matters,” he says. “Part of our job is to make those connections tangible for people who don’t necessarily see them straightaway.”
geographical imaginations
As I am (at last) moving into the finishing stages of my ‘Dirty Dancing’ essay on CIA-directed drone strikes in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas, it’s time to round up some of the latest work on drones and civilian casualties across multiple theatres.
First, Afghanistan: the principal theatre of US remote operations. I’ve noted Larry Lewis‘s remarkable work before (here and here), based on classified sources, and in particular this claim (see also here):
Drone strikes in Afghanistan were seen to have close to the same number of civilian casualties per incident as manned aircraft, and were an order of magnitude more likely to result in civilian casualties per engagement.
As I said at the time, the distinction between an ‘incident’ and an ‘engagement’ is crucial, though most commentators who have seized on Larry’s work have ignored it and focused on the dramatic difference in civilian casualties per engagement. Despite my best efforts, the Pentagon were unwilling to clarify the difference, so here is what Larry himself has told me:
An engagement is probably intuitively what you would expect – the use of force against a target. The distinction is the term incident, which is borrowed from ISAF definitions. I should have said “civilian casualty incident.” This refers to an engagement that results in civilian casualties.
This means that, if you look at the collection of civilian casualty incidents, the average number of civilian casualties is close to the same for manned and unmanned platforms. At the same time, the rate of civilian casualties for the two platforms is markedly different, with unmanned platforms being ten times more likely to cause civilian casualties than manned platforms. That doesn’t mean that drones caused more civilian casualties than manned aircraft, by the way, since the denominators (number
“There is no particular event Baden Pailthorpe: Spatial Operations, Newcastle Art Gallery
Baden Pailthorpe spatial operations 7 FEBRUARY – 26 APRIL 2015 Newcastle Art Gallery 1 LAMAN STREET NEWCASTLE NSW 2300 | 02 4974 5100 | www.nag.org.au CURATORIAL FOREWORD In peace prepare for war, in war prepare for peace. It is a matter of life and death. A road either to safety or ruin. Sun Tzu, The Art of War I n the ifth century BC, Chinese philosopher and military strategist Sun Tzu wrote about the importance of information in winning a war. He told us to know yourself as well as your enemy - and that the best war fought was one where you beat your opponent before any blood was spilt.1 In the twenty-irst century, it seems little has been learnt about how to wage war. Both war and its effects remain a constant part of our lives. Newcastle Art Gallery is proud to present this ambitious new work by Pailthorpe. Drawing to conclusion an eighteen month project that commenced with an artist residency at the Australian War Memorial, it offers a timely relection on contemporary conlict and commemoration. More commonly known as a new media artist, it also represents a deining moment in Pailthorpe’s practice as he moves into the discipline of sculpture. To coincide with national debates around the centenary of the First World War, Newcastle Art Gallery presents Baden Pailthorpe: Spatial Operations, on display from 7 February to 26 April 2015. Featuring an installation of 210 papier-mâché helmets, the work examines military mythology and the ‘construction’ of the modern day soldier. Sally Cunningham Newcastle Art Gallery holds a small yet notable collection of war art that is indicative of its wide spread effects. Unique to this collection is its response to war in a broader sense. Not bound by oficial histories, it is through art that the underlying agendas of politics and religion, as well as the mythologies and legacies that frame our oficial war narratives are discussed. Featured in the Gallery’s modernis
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