 So please welcome Michelle for her talk about the urban organism hacking in Hong Kong. So thank you for coming today. First of all, you could be anywhere right now and you all decide to come here. So I really appreciate it. This talk will engage the practices and protocols of hacking in the context of Hong Kong and the relationship of that with the socio-cultural aspects of architecture and urbanism. Well, why architecture and urbanism? But for a brief background, I'm trained as an architect, but after about 10 years of corporate architecture, I needed to kind of expand my tentacles. So now I build buildings to maintain that technical proficiency and I work in creative media, which allows me to have more instant gratification and a more personal contact with individual people. And I teach in the Faculty of Design Environment at a university in Hong Kong. So the metropolis I'm speaking of refers to Hong Kong, if it wasn't obvious already. It is a city of contradictions, a culture of pastiche of a colonial system, Chinese traditions and with globalized modernity. So if the city slogan, Asia's World City, it maintains itself as an entrepôt, or in other words, the intermediary between China and the rest of the world. So before, we were trading opium, tea, sugar, textiles, and which now has transitioned to focus more on the financial sector, so cocaine, insurance and stocks. For many of those just passing through Hong Kong, which is frequent and obvious for anyone coming over to Asia, there's several factors that make it such an exciting prospect. So the hyper-density here is always a fascination. This isn't super relevant, but the image on the left is from Leandro Erlich. It's called The Room. It's a surveillance camera. Many surveillance cameras on one room. And the other one, there's just a position with our typical facades in Hong Kong. So the exciting prospects. One is the proximity to Chinese manufacturers. So it's close enough where you can hop over to Shenzhen, so the manufacturer hub. For just a few hours, you can just take a day trip. So if we have a MOSFET emergency, you can run over there within an hour and grab everything you need and go back. But we're also just outside of a great firewall. We don't have any of those issues. Or not most. And it's culturally accessible. That's number two. You won't feel incredibly left out with no Chinese language skills. You will still be a little bit left out, but not completely. You can still function and operate there happily. And then three is the stimuli. As with any metropolis, there's a factor of hyperactivity that has this distinct sense of infinite possibilities. Anything can happen. And this is the difference that I feel most, because you can make anything happen there if you're just willing to pay a little bit. Sometimes it's not a lot of money. And I'll go into this detail later, actually. Excuse me. In this sociocultural cornucopia, what gives way to these contradictions and complexities is a notoriously wide income gap. The soaring cost of real estate and as well as the pressure towards commercialism. The more we raise ourselves into the clouds, exploring the limits of an upwards trajectory, it also creates wider separations from one another. And in that segregation, it creates uniformity. The defining characteristics of any post-modern city is how control is leveraged in the hands of the bureaucracy. Urban policy, especially in Hong Kong, is a stringent arrangement serving only the private and the powerful. And without going into the boring details, but for the most part, the applied label here is called crony capitalism. So technological changes in the quality of public space make it increasingly more evident that the urban realm is a temporary experience that is imploded by the changes in the social contract. The enjoyment of public space is normally governed by authority. Public transportation, parks, and even the most mundane section of the pavement sender the responsibility of an organization. In this respect, the city relinquishes itself as a home or a collective space, but rather a temporary flow of people, information, and commodities. So did you know the parks in Hong Kong is nothing like the parks in Germany? We have signs that say no smoking, no drinking, okay, fine. No busking, no bicycles, no skateboards, no hawking, so basically no fun. The pavements as well, if you've been to Hong Kong where you see in the video, where pavements are about 1.2 meters wide before you reach up with the facade of a building next to you, that's because they are keen on maximizing 100% site boundaries which reach up to there. That's why we're all closed in, and because the pavement in front of every building is typically owned by the business in front of it. So that is actually their section of the pavement, not yours, but it's theirs. So while each technological revolution allows us to offset mundane tasks, we've also been offsetting the responsibility of monitoring these machines to large-scale institutions. Technology has been an extension of ourselves for a long time, but very few pay mind of what part of us it amputates. The quote from Gary Tobes, where he writes about sugar, like candy, the sugar. It's a substance that causes pleasure with a price that is difficult to discern immediately and pain of full only years and or decades later. That's from the case against sugar 2016. And if we consider cities moving more into the virtual realm, into cyber-urbanism with smart technology, we're heading into a world that is shackled by algorithmic conformity. For one example, by mass implementation of self-driving cars. And within these networks of organized complexities, we were never meant to be in concrete boxes, hovering in the sky, hermetically sealed from one another. For thousands of years, our genetic programming had us living in tribes. And while the world seemed to shrink in distance with steam engines, airplanes, and the internet, the space with and between each other expanded even more. So machines replaced our fingers, and we no longer needed each other to meet our needs, but instead on a system. Hopefully I've set the stage now for this very dystopian Blade Runner view, Esk of the City. So a certain level of uniformity isn't evitable. And to me, uniformity is not so bad if we can translate this to cooperation. And to begin our detailed understanding of similarities before we implicate and find the changes within the cracks. We have this inherent quality in us as small children, with such joy in playing with switches and boxes, pushing buttons and identifying objects as mine and yours. But because of this innate desire to make changes to our environments and leave a mark in this world, so our ability to make collective, two images disappeared, sorry, so our ability to make collective and flexible cooperation in large numbers is our strength in this world. And I mean that's why we're all here in this amazing event built by so many hands that are sometimes organized and sometimes not. Together we're finding a balance between the ecological and the engineered, or the organic versus the designed. And to me, the metaphorical link between the city and hacker spaces also have something in common with termites, ants, birds, mussels and mold. It's the experimental harmonic composition that arises from spatial self-organization. So it shows something that's difficult to miss once you cross the path. It's a horde of termites animating a still branch, both building and destroying the physical environment at the same time. And I enjoy observing termites and ants for their emergent, complex, co-operative, yet primitive behavior. And so in this line of thinking, the macro and micro of our environments. And that is one of the aspects that draws me to hacker spaces because they too are part of this greater concept of collective distributed action. Although parcel to this very messy human factor called the hacker community. So dim sum labs. Hong Kong's first and only hacker space. They started off like most hacker spaces with a few people getting together in informal places to chat about all things geeky. And the official location was secured in 2011 with about 10 different co-founders in a commercial building in Sarawong, which is near the center. So it's super convenient for people to access but also means there's a scarcity of space. It's kind of a funny name. The red part means dim sum or dim sum, touch your heart, literally. But dim sum actually refers to a particular cuisine or an activity in Hong Kong that potentially spend hours nibbling on things in bamboo, steam or baskets and whatnot. And when lots of people join together, you have this very diverse opportunity to taste an experiment so many different things. It's cute, right? Oh, I lost another image. So it was the image of dim sum. And I'm going crazy now. Okay, so as I described earlier, our proximity to China because of our limited space, because of the context where money is king and we are fools in this court, it shapes the culture of our space in ways like affording ourselves really cheap equipment and components. For example, our laser cutter was 4,000 RMB, which is about 500 euro, and components, so it's about 1,000 resistors for half a euro. But instead we spend the rest of the money on rent instead. And also what changes the culture is this very transitional atmosphere to move on to their journeys, their hobbies, or their lifestyle. And in Hong Kong, like the rest of the world, outside of Germany, hacking has a very different connotation than we'd prefer. So as I define it, it is the intellectual activity of exploring an object system or protocol beyond its intended means. Of course, most people don't see it that way. Which is why... Oh, get out of here, termites. Which is why there is a book called The Field Guide to Hacking. It's a handshake, if you will, to the greater community. How can we encourage others to hack without showing them how? So the book contains a collection of projects in an instructable manner, sort of. Essays and snapshots of the activity in our nebulous community. And it's ordered into six sections, each prefaced by an essay by someone who can explain some peripheral topics of hacking. It begins with a forward by Mitch Altman. Because if you're going to talk about community, how can you not involve Mitch? And if anyone doesn't know who he is, he also yearly organizes a hackers trip to China. So many of you have come to visit Dim Sum Labs in Hong Kong, which is amazing. Some of the projects, we start off with something very simple, like a button badge that you can solder yourself with links to GitHub repository and all the components that you need to do it, and potentially teach you how to solder it. Some projects are a little more functional. This is the kilowatt counter that we have in our space, where we monitor the use of electricity in the space. And that also helps if someone has left the air con on and it's empty, so we know. Some of the projects are a little more polemic. This is Naomi Sexy Cyborg Wu. She's quite well known if you follow her on Twitter. And if you want to check her Twitter, you'll find out yourself. And then some projects that are a little more artistic. So this is field by me and Savio. There's one here, which maybe I'll show you later if I have time. Mine is not very instructional, but I teach you how to hack it and how it works, which I suppose is more important. And then the essays not only provide respite from the sea of projects, but also a gesture for those who would like to know more about hacking, but perhaps not participate into it, participate in it physically. So this is when I write a little bit about urbanism and surveillance capitalism. This is from Dr. Daniel Howe, who teaches a class on hacktivism at the School of Creative Media in the City University, whose essay partners the relationship between artistic freedom and expression in Hong Kong. And Scott Edmonds, who founded the Bohemia Genome Project. He works on a different kind of code. It's a four letter code of DNA. And while cultivating a stronger relationship between locals and Hong Kong's history by way of citizen science. And on inclusivity, Sarah Fox writes about technology and recognition with respect to the feminist space. And then we round it all off with Louis Felipe Marillo, who writes about this from an anthropologist's perspective and empirically as a former member of Dimsum Labs. So I hope that throughout this talk and the book that it provides some insight into the backdrop of some of the issues that face Dimsum Labs every day. It's not the easiest task to have people on the other side of the world to have this empathetic sharing of our zeitgeist, but we try. So some of the things that have been asked to me is where can I find the book? So there's the website and there's the email. The next question is actually can I buy the book? Well, not really because I ran out. And because the publisher is called Dimsum Labs Press, which is just me. So if anyone knows a publisher, they would like to help me. Because right now I'm just printing it from Taobao. And if there's going to be another version, I kind of need more content. So if you want to be part of this and you're kind of part of the community, please let me know. Contact is there. So this is not really a conclusion, but I'm just going to assume it is. Hong Kong has become part of this geopolitical experiment. So we're on this precarious edge between maintaining its openness in the sense where individuals can maintain their cultural roots and our osmosis with Shenzhen or China, a city where it lives under the guise of China's rules and regulations, but as well as breaking beyond its limitations in the physical and the social sense. In Hong Kong, the type of travelers that I come across always have the same fascination towards the city. This kind of magical wonder as one travels up the escalator in the center of the city, leaning over the edge just to catch a glimpse of the sky as the towers are leaning towards each other. It's amazing on one hand because it's a massive scale of structures that we built with these comparatively tiny hands and similar with electronics and what not. We're encapsulating and embedding our perspectives within these artifacts that perpetuate around us. But I also see it as relinquishing our dominion. We are complicit to our own detriment by not really addressing who our environments belong to. So in all respects, the physical, the temporal, and digital strata that our streets are paved upon. That's it. So we now have time for Q&A's and I can see that we already have one question from microphone number two. Hello. So thank you for your talk. What would you say to a European who wants to live in Hong Kong? How do I get a visa and so on? I'm thinking of how to say this. Number one, you can just come. There's plenty of Europeans there. You can skip it and write in. Number two, there's, I'll just tell you, there's a way you can get your own visa because it's very easy to start a business in Hong Kong and then you can kind of hire yourself and give yourself a visa. Don't tell anyone I said that. Just between you and the internet. Speaking of internet, do we have any questions from the internet signal angels? No nods, no. So, there are still two microphones and we have time for questions. So please, if you have it, we have a question from microphone number one. Well, it's not a question. It's more, there is a publisher called the most large press and it's for geeky stuff. So if you want, well, looking for one, I would suggest that one. I did look at them. I haven't gotten that far yet because as I pointed out, I'm kind of doing everything myself. But if you know a contact. And microphone number two. Where do you see differences between Hong Kong and Europe? The fundamental activity of hacking, I think, is not that different. As in, we are all people trying to explore things. What cool thing can we come out of the stuff around us? The difference I find most is how we spend our time and how generous we are with ourselves. Because if you live in a very commercial city that is dominated by this mentality of finance and money and how do I pay rent and whatever, then your time becomes money. And you do feel, or you get the feeling that people don't want to extend so much because they're too busy with work. Or they have to go to dinner and then to basically volunteer in a space. And question from microphone number one. Hi, question. How famous are hacker communities in Hong Kong or the region in general? So if I would be looking for an alternative to the COWS Computer Congress here, what would I be looking for in Asia? If not Hong Kong and Singapore or Tokyo or Asia. Can you rephrase our question? My question is if I'm looking for a hacker event in Asia, what should I look for? Which city, what event? We don't have very many hacker events in Asia. There's some in Singapore and I suppose the Tokyo Maker Faire is pretty cool in terms of like artifacts and stuff. But we don't have as much of this community because hacking is very much so a western concept. And the way a lot of Asia if we include China and the rest of it it's not necessarily considered hacking. I mean if you understand the way Chinese do things, if we bring in the concept of Shanzai, they don't think that's hacking. That's kind of just part of the culture. That's what you do to make things work for yourself. So it's a little more dispersed and it's not that it's easy to find here. Shenzhen Maker Faire is also really cool. We have a question from number two. In here, how long do you reach out of that community? How do you reach beyond the hacker space from the university or from each other around the world? You mean reaching the community outside of the hacker space? So I'm hoping that's what the book accomplishes. Since I have pushed it through a non-profit architectural design non-profit. So that's reaching a different network. Unfortunately by doing that, and same with architects and education, hacking and hacker spaces is kind of this counterculture underground thing where it's cool now. So that's another thing I have to negotiate because I don't want it to be just a trend or a toy that someone says you're an alternative version of whatever. But more as a way of life, way of thinking type thing. We still have time for more questions and there is a question from microphone number two. Yeah, so I'm just wondering what the hacker space in Hong Kong is engaging anything politically and so just an example. If you say do you mean politically just directly against China and Hong Kong? Then I wouldn't say so much because the current member base is not very local and they have their own politics to establish. Although if you consider politics as in open source then there are people that do that. That's a very vague answer, I'm sorry. If the program just consists of people who really are from Hong Kong, I don't think hacking or learning about cooking is such a marginal thing. It seems that it's the trend is that a lot of rich Hong Kong parents they are very conservative with their kids into learning cooking and so maybe there is something that the space can look into. I agree with that idea but it's very big now to kids camps and coding and what not. Although I still believe that because you're introducing these kits to a child that you develop this and this is what happens that they still maintain that mindset and what I'm hoping is that they can change their thinking into what do I need this kit for when I can mix up all these other things that are outside of it. That idea is based on the educational system in Hong Kong as well where you know that it's mostly about regurgitation and less about critical thinking so that's what I'm kind of pushing them more towards in terms of actually doing it in education I try to do it with my students but I can really only do so much. Please don't be shy there is still time for questions and I'm quite sure that Michelle has more to offer you in terms of dialogue so get up behind the microphones if you have any questions and also do we have any questions from the internet? No questions from the internet. Michelle you brought along a thing that you have on the table do you want to share it with us? This is just in case I talked too fast or like didn't finish my presentation then I brought this thing so this is the book that I was talking about it's covered in stickers because it's my copy. So there's two pieces of copper on the front of the limited edition version I'm sorry you didn't get one the limited edition version and on the back there's supposed to be a PCB embedded into it so how it works is that as you draw a line with a graphite pencil connecting the two pieces of copper it changes the frequency of the sound that's coming out from the back PCB so then this version was turned into a through-hole mount version so it can be presented at Sonar Hong Kong so this is the through-hole version so I guess I'm just going to play with it for you and then you know they'll wind this up oh also this was built because the dim sum labs logo is a tasiu bow so a barbecue pork bun on a 555 IC timer so this whole thing is built based on that 555 just to be middle so this is volume then we can change the pitch and then the rate and then we have switches that can change it from a continuous manner to a step fashion yeah that's kind of it thank you very much Michelle and I think we should give Michelle another round of applause for an excellent presentation