 How cool is that? Dennis was born in 1984, so that should be a recipe for disaster, maybe, or maybe not. Yes, please take a seat. We're just about to start. It's about fiber and noodles and things, edible. It's going to be awesome. Really, you should sit down and have a look. Maybe we can encourage him to give him a big round of applause. Dennis DeBell. Thank you. Thank you. I'm really happy to be here. I'll explain a bit about how I got here later on. But first of all, really nice to have been given this stage to present my work, which I will now continue to do. So I also brought some goodies. And since we don't have a full house here, maybe if you are interested, you can hook me up or catch me after the talk. And we can exchange some goods, which I will also present. So first off, my name is Dennis DeBell. I'm an artist from Rotterdam, the Netherlands. And I mostly work with technology, because I'm interested in how technology shapes our world, but also how to make it your own and to grasp what's going on. Just curiosity, I guess. And I will show you some works that led up to what I'm going to present here today now, the fiberglass noodle networking. So I have to speak a bit. So I don't know if you can see it. That's sort of the idea as well. So in 2010, I did this project together with Jody. It's a duo of net artists. And we had an exhibition, and we were checking out the location through Google Street View. And yeah, we saw all these Google watermarks everywhere in public space. So we thought, yeah, I mean, it's an easy joke. But it's kind of nice to sort of reenact this copywriting of our public space for real using like a commercial airplane that flew with this banner that was 25 meters long and five meters high over the city. And it's also funny that this was in 2010. And we could only find pictures that were like one year old, so from 2009. So everything you see in Google Street View is also already outdated, of course. So it's sort of a fake snapshot of reality. And it's copyrighted by Google. Two years before, I already started sort of experimenting with food and electronics. And it was more like sort of an exercise in form follows function. So I had these crackers, and I used to do some little bit of soldering just to get to know electronics. Yeah, I put one and two together. And normally, you use this breadboard for to quickly prototype your electronic circuits. And then I saw these crackers. And I thought, wow, this is just perfect. So now you have an edible circuit board you can eat after your finished prototyping. So you will never be hungry while prototyping. In 2014, I participated in the Art Hack Day hackathon at the Transmediale Festival. This was this 24-hour hackathon where you had to make something. And I had this idea to combine our everyday technology like this iPhone with something super basic, something super archaic, like the most archaic form of communication. So I decided to make an add-on for your iPhone or any smartphone, which you could use to send smoke messages, so smoke signals. And of course, if you would want to communicate with someone, you had to agree upon sort of a protocol. So like one puff is hello, or two puffs is goodbye. And you could also communicate over very long distances if you link up together and pass on the message if everyone would use this. And I made some other sort of iPhone hacks. I took apart an old iPhone and turned it into like a spark gap transmitter using a short circuit on the battery. But yeah, I didn't really like it because it was a sort of dangerously thin line between sort of critique and advertising almost. So of course, Apple is already sort of a caricature of its own nowadays. I mean, come on, wireless earbuds or laptops with one port. So I mean, I like the joke is on them. I cannot make it more ridiculous than they already do. So I wanted something else. And this was the start of a collaboration project with Ruh Roskom Abing. I had made some sort of DIY smartphones using Raspberry Pi, et cetera. Then I met Ruh. And he had sort of similar ideas about technology and networks and communication. We were in the same sort of WhatsApp group where we used to share like weird pictures from stuff you would see on the streets. But yeah, we were totally dependent on the quirks of WhatsApp and then Facebook. We had to update our operating system to use the latest version, blah, blah, blah. We were really tired of this. And yeah, we sort of saw also that in this whole sort of app environment that the World Wide Web was actually already dead. So we started, we wrote a proposal to the Creative Fund, Creative Industries Fund of Netherlands together with Worm Rotterdam. Yeah, we wrote a proposal to create a sort of offline mesh network communication device, which we got a grant for for one year research and building prototypes. And this is one of them. So the project is called Messenger. So as in Mesh Messenger. After one year of coding, we sort of had it working. We had these little portable travel routers with open WRT on it. And they could mesh together. And if two of these devices would meet or would come close to each other, they would exchange files, synchronize their content. And yeah, after one year, we had this sort of crappy Python code and was sort of working. But yeah, but then, I mean, then you end up with sort of look at the nice interface we have to our app and it works. So we wanted to visualize how this system could be used. So we decided to sketch some scenarios and make physical prototypes, working prototypes with this scenario. And this is the first one. This is the Feline file sharing network. So it uses a Feline carrier to carry data through the neighborhood. And the idea is that you send out your cat at night, let it roam the neighborhood, and meet up with other cats and exchange files. So the next morning, when your cat gets home, you have the latest Game of Thrones or whatever on your cat. So there's a little router on its back and two battery packs. The cat didn't like it. So I guess, yeah, I won't be doing anything with animals anymore. This is over. This is another prototype. So we built this little open WRT router in the sole of the shoe with the idea that, yeah, like the carrier of the device. So the human or animal will become the network infrastructure itself. I guess nowadays you can do this with an ESP. That's the size of a postage stamp. But back then, we didn't have such nice goodies. There will also be a quiz, by the way, after the talk. So if you can guess the name of this prototype, you can win some PCBs I used to make this. So actually, this messenger project, it was a sort of parallel network. It had a hotspot on the open WRT device, which you could visit using any smartphone or laptop, any device with a browser. So we also had to sort of design this interface. But yeah, we sort of never got around this whole paradigm of the app, because it has to fit a certain screen, et cetera. And yeah, it has to be user-friendly somehow. But on the other hand, it was so user-friendly that none of our friends actually used the system we made. So it was a nice exercise, but excuse me. So that said, it was more sort of an exercise in user interface design, using very high-up layers to send data and to do some nice stuff. But yeah, we really wanted to sort of grasp the technology we were working with. So that's when we decided to get our radio amateur license and follow this course at the Vervon, which I can highly recommend. If you want to learn electronics or basic radio stuff, take this course. You will know everything within a year. It's super amazing. So we got sort of a bit more down the stack, so from software layers to more hardware layers. Excuse me. And we started researching obsolete networking technologies, such as packet radio, but also normal FM radio, and how to interface it with modern devices to create networks, transmit data, et cetera. And this is one of the projects we did. We made a little board combined with a cheap Baufang radio. You could actually still recreate 1970s aloe net computer networks using only this cheap radio and a small board that triggers the radio to transmit or receive. And this is all possible, because back in the day, you had a computer or a terminal, and you had a modem, and you had a terminal node controller that would switch on and off the radio. But nowadays, we just have a computer, and we use a sound modem. So this is sort of a piece of software that acts like a modem that translates binary data into sound waves, so frequency shift keying, which you can then transmit using any radio. And the software would also take care of the switching of the radio. Because the funny thing is, when making radio networks, they actually don't know where they are in the network. So they are sort of resilient. But there's also quite some overhead, especially when you use modern HTTP protocols, because there are constantly these acknowledgments, these exchanges to check if a packet arrived or not. So it's a bit slow and clumsy. But it's just amazing that the protocol we used, AX25, is still standard in the Linux kernel. So we made a little how-to book. I guess you can download it on my website. I'm not sure, actually. Then we did some more, made some more jokes. So this started as sort of a reaction on all the free hotspots. We haven't rotted them. So every cafe wants to sell more lattes. So in return, they give you a free Wi-Fi. So you can work there and spend some money there on coffee. And we thought, wow, it would be nice to what would the Wi-Fi logo be if you instead of wireless, you had to use a cable. So we made this GIF as a joke. So we used the Wi-Fi sort of logo. And instead of Wi-Fi, I set Ethernet. But then a bar in Rotterdam, Worm, they were actually really interested in the device. So they said, yeah, here's some money, build it for us. So we build this. It's the world's first Ethernet spot. You can connect to it. If you're in Rotterdam, it's in Worm. What's really nice about this is that it sort of started as a joke. But then we build it. And then you start to see what you've actually done. Because actually immediately the press was sort of alarmed. Because it was in sort of the nails that the Wi-Fi in the train was unsafe, like public hotspots were dangerous to use. So the press, the Volkswagen and the local newspaper, they came to interview us and said, so this is sort of a privacy act. So you cannot be hacked if you use this. So yeah, we were like, now you can be hacked. But I mean, at least you know that the one who's hacking is next to you, because the cables are quite short. And another thing is, of course, that most modern devices, they don't even have an ethernet port anymore. So yeah, it shows you how this obsolescence or planned obsolescence manifests itself really, really quickly. So this was three years ago. Yeah, it never gets used, of course. In the meantime, our collaborative research project was taking two years longer than actually planned. And we collected all our prototypes in this sort of booklet. I brought two, if you want one, hit me up. So it's a sort of collection of our prototypes. And it contains also sort of manuals and how-to's and schematics to recreate some of the things yourself. And there's also a nice CD-ROM with bonus material, so if you can still read it. For this project, we also went to China as every person who is working with technology should do. It was super crazy. It's all another talk. I'm not getting too much into this. But let's say maybe the picture on the right says enough. So we visited some factories, mainly of Sanjai products. So yeah, we were especially looking for weird stuff, weird combinations of electronics, phones with radios in them, et cetera. And we also found these stickers. So if you have trouble with getting a certification, you can just get a pile of stickers and put it on it. So they had like FCC stickers. They're a bit shiny. CEE Rose looks really dodgy. But on the other hand, of course, everything gets made there as well. So they actually need to make these stickers because all the manufacturers are actually there. So what did we eat while in China? Can anyone guess? Noodles? That's correct. So we found these cellophane noodles, or mung bean starch noodles, or in Holland they're actually called glass noodles. I have some wholesale package here. You can buy in any Chinese supermarket. Yeah, what fascinated me about it, that it's like super flexible. And it's actually super transparent. So if you shine a light on it, I don't. Yeah, I'm not sure if you can see it. Demo failed. So again, the fiberglass connection or the glass noodle, glass fiber noodle joke was sort of quickly made. Of course, a joke without a nice conclusion is not a very good joke. So yeah, I bought a packet of these guys and fired up the old Arduino, made a sort of light table setup, and tried to, with an LED on one side and an LDR on the other side, try to transmit some light through this fiber, this noodle. And actually, it actually worked like the first time. And I was quite amazed, but it worked very unreliably. So I guess it has to do with the calibration of the light, the ambient light. But yeah, I never really got it working. But I got some Morse code sent through it. But yeah, nothing I could show here, actually. So what I needed was a bigger noodle, at least that's what I thought. So I tried to, I say experiment, but it's more of sort of a tunnel vision in trying to get this thing to work. I experimented with making my own noodles. Wow, can you see this? It's a bit OK. Should have photographed them on a black background, I guess. So I first started with the main ingredient of these noodles, mung bean starch. And yeah, when you cook this, it becomes this sort of custard-like liquid. So this non-Newtonian fluid, that's fluid. But when you hit it or compress it, it becomes solid. But so yeah, I couldn't really work with it. So I mixed in some wheat starch, and it became like this yellow, like opaque stick. I tried some potato starch mixed with some dry stuff. Potato starch becomes this sort of glue you use for wallpaper. And it really worked out. Then I made this jelly, this wallpaper glue, and put it in the fridge, and then dried it in the oven. And yeah, it got close, but not yet. Longer, longer cooking. Didn't work out. Then I grew the genius idea to make a sort of metal mold and just compress all these noodles together to form sort of a super thick, super noodle. I actually brought one, but can't find it. Is it in here? Did it work? Not really. So I used gelatin as well, which was really disgusting. Please avoid using this. I tried agar agar, which looked really, really promising. It's actually the same stuff I showed here. So this is agar agar. It's used for feeding ground for bacteria, to test bacteria, and also in food. So I cooked this and sucked it up in a little silicone tube, and then pressed it out into ice cold water. And now you have this, which looks really good. But did it work? No. So I spent, I think, a year, year and a half trying these recipes, trying how to do this. And I just couldn't manage to send any light through it. Yeah, I switched out the LED for a laser. I switched out the LDR, the light dependent resistor for a light transistor, which works a bit like a solar panel, but then like one cell. But it just didn't work. And the problem was that my talk, this talk, was already accepted here, but I didn't really have anything to show you guys. So in sort of one last resort, I applied for this artist in residence at a class institute for molecular biology. I thought, yeah, I mean, these guys, they must know how this stuff works, right? But yeah, it was declined. So I found this video. This is actually how it's made. So he has this starch liquid, which is like this non-Newtonian fluid that's fluid. But if you hit it, it becomes solid. So he has some sort of funnel. And he just makes sure it stays together when it drips out. And he puts it in boiling water and chops it off, boils it for one minute, and then puts it in cold water. Yeah, I don't have these skills yet. And yeah, my house would become such a mess if I try this. It already is a mess. So when I try it with regular noodles, you can buy in the shop. And if you cook them, it actually really works. But for me, it was sort of a hassle to take a water cooker with me, cook some noodles here, and hope that it works. Because they also easily break when they're wet. And I didn't want to bring wet noodles in my bag. So I was looking for something that could bring reproducible results. So I found this. I looked into sugar, because it's also edible and translucent. I did some tests with just cooking sugar and making sort of like hard candy, in which you have to cook sugar until it's 300 degrees and then quickly stop it. But yeah, it just became like brown shit. It was an epic fail. But then I found out these YouTube videos of super nice ladies who decorate cakes. And they use these special sugar called isomalt, which is actually an alcohol. And it's a sort of relatively new sugar replacement, which is sort of interpreted by your body as a fiber. So your teeth, they won't rot, and you don't get fat. And it tastes delicious. And it's sort of nice to work with. It becomes like super transparent. So what you do is you buy a batch of this stuff. I don't know if you can see it. You put it in the microwave for like a minute until it starts to boil. Then it's like 300 degrees. Then you have to sort of cool it and pull it into noodles, for which you need actually this sort of rig, which is a heat lamp that will keep the sugar warm enough so it stays malleable. Otherwise, it just becomes super hard. I can show you the process. So you pour it, and then you fold it until it's cooled off a bit. And then you can make all kinds of nice animals for your cakes. But you can also make edible network cables from it. So on the right there, pulling the sugar in sort of the same way as you could make wheat noodles pasta. This was the first test. So this is using a Chinese laser pointer. And it looked so promising. And I hope it is. So I can do a live demo for you guys. So the setup right now is actually a one-direction setup. I could make this bi-directional as it is now. But yeah, it's a proof of concept. And it's still work in progress. So what it does, I use my computer with a sound modem. So a program called MiniModem that will turn binary data into audio frequency shift keying. So two tones that represents a 1 and a 0. You can just pipe any file into the program, and it will send out sound. Then I just connect the audio to a laser. Just pump the audio into the laser, so it gets amplitude modulated, which will send out this amplitude modulated laser light, which is received by the photo transistor on the other side. That is connected to LM386 audio amplifier that will amplify the signal generated by the light hitting the transistor and turns it into sound that I can put into a sound modem again and reverse the process, so turn it into data. So I have some gifts for, in case the demo doesn't work, but I guess we can just go straight to the demo. But here you can see sort of the process. So I have my 90 degrees noodle over here. Check and mount in this table. I'll just let you hear the audio for a second. Maybe it's a bit loud. So I will pipe the manual for MiniModem into itself and transmit it at 10 bouts, so 10 symbols a second. And it sounds like this. So this is the 1,200 hertz. So I wonder if it works. So I just put the laser in my audio output and the transistor in my audio input and power the amplifier and the laser. There's a lot of light here. I'm not sure it's going to work, but can you see it glow? Something is working at least. So Ruh wrote this nice sort of benchmarking tool so you can check out how fast you're transmitting. So you can test out different noodles or lasers. So I will just transmit the manual file into MiniModem and run the benchmark. So on the bottom here, you can see the incoming symbols. So it will take 10,000 seconds still to transmit the whole manual. It's a bit slow. Maybe we can try to do it a bit faster. So 100, 100 bouts. No, it's too fast. Oh, shame, shame, shame. OK, maybe we can do 20. Ah, oops. Oh, yes. So the question marks are just gibberish data. So yeah, this works. I'll just let it run, see if we can finish. Do we have a question? One moment, please. Can you talk into the mic? Yeah, I didn't see the microphone. Did you try polishing the end of the noodles to be flat at 90 degrees? Nope. It's, I was so happy it worked that it's just as is. It's actually not so transparent in the end. And also, you can, this isomalt keeps for years and years. But it's really susceptible to moisture in the air. I can already see it on these older samples. They're starting to become whitish. So you also always have to carry this silica bags to preserve your noodles. So what did I sort of learn from this? Making, like, real noodles, like this is mega hard. But I'm not giving up. I'm going to try it again. Modulating a laser on the other hand is super easy. It's actually fun to do. And actually this whole setup works way better without the noodle, just using the air to transmit the laser, then with the noodle. So yeah, I would suggest you looking into optical connections to play with that. It's really fun. The only problem is that laser is just as radio is a line of sight communication tool. So if you want to go around corners and meet your neighbors, or hook up with your neighbors, then you need something like this. Because the noodle, it can actually bend the light around corners. I don't know what the maximum angle of normal fiber is, but I think you can make loopings with this stuff. And besides that, it's obviously a nice conversation piece to talk about technology and food. So as I said before, I just had to get this working. It started off as a joke, and every joke has a sort of truth in it. So yeah, it must work. And it sort of does. It's also always fun to try something. No one thinks it's possible. Yeah, as you see, it's possible. I learned a great deal in sort of bare bones, networking, small electronics. And it's the best of all, it's sort of a great tactic to speak at festivals like this and meet super nice people in the meantime or in the process. Obviously, yeah, in sort of this DIY offline privacy, networking, arms race, pooling fiber is the next big thing. So what is the next big thing? I actually got accepted for an artist in residence in China in Beijing for next year. So I will definitely try to learn how to make proper noodles. I want to make it like full duplex, like do some proper make it fit into the networking stack, into the OC model. And of course, just make DIY regular fiber using glass like this guy on the right. The only thing is that these noodles, when making them, it's like 300 degrees and glass is a bit hotter, so I need some help with that, I guess. I see some questions. No, some people who are... Just a moment, please. Could you wait till the mic is on? Or please get a bit closer to the mic. Maybe you can turn it up. Give me now. Better. OK. Thanks. Have you heard already of the people doing 3D printing with Islamat? No. That could be a help for you. Please. Oh, that's super good. I was actually thinking of this, because it's about the same temperatures like PLA or... nice. So yeah, the schematics and the benchmark tool and Gerber files, you can find on my website, or this is the direct URL. Ah, then it's time for the quiz. So if you know the name of this messenger prototype, please walk to the mic and have a guess. And you can win a set of transmitter and receiver PCBs to recreate this yourself. Is it sneaky? No. No. No. No. No. No. Is it sneaker net? Yay! Nice. Let me see. Do you want to have some more questions? Yeah. OK. Yeah, I think it's time for questions, actually. There it is. So it's the schematics and bill of materials. Any more questions, please? Nobody. Wow. I have some more boards, so you can also kindly ask if you want one. How long will you be here, Dennis, and where can we find you? Yeah, a really good question. I will be here all day, but not tomorrow. You can catch me around the coffee tent, I guess. Yes, question? You have a question? Did you look into the different breaking edexes of the materials? No, but I should. Because I saw a similar technique to make like the hard candy that has dots in it. They also put it together, roll it and then stretch it to make layers. Yeah, actually this stretching is sort of... I'm not sure if it's positive or negative for the... I guess it only sort of diffuses the light more. But also it seems as if it's... Because if you bend it and stretch it, you will introduce like little air bubbles in it. Yeah, you stretch these air bubbles to create sort of canals through which light can travel, I guess. Did you try much thinner noodles to get a total reflection? What kind of noodles? Did you try much, much thinner noodles instead of thicker ones to get a nice total reflection between noodle and air? Yeah, I tried this one. But it's super hard to line up with a laser, actually. I can pass some around. Or maybe you can pass some around for me. Yeah, so for me it was just using brute force to try to pump as much light through something, a medium as possible. But yeah, the next step is definitely just trying to make my own like glass fiber. Maybe I should have started with this and then move along from there. But mostly most of the time I work the other way around and just come up with a crazy idea and try to make it. I was just wondering, do you have any plans to attempt to develop a transatlantic fiber optic noodle? That was the question of the day. I was sort of hoping this question would arise. So yeah, I already made like a mock-up. So this is sort of how it would look. This is the dissection of the multi-mode undersea fiber cable. So it's also shielded. There are multiple strands in there. Yeah, it would be nice, definitely. I think this is the future. No more. Okay. Oh, one in the back, yeah. Have you considered using licorice as shielding for this cable? No. I guess a bit of shielding would really help, indeed. But then, yeah, I could just fake it and use a normal electrical wire. So yeah, I wanted to show the sort of naked noodle to you guys. But good tip. Thank you. I'll write it down. I actually also looked into these media converters that convert like Ethernet to fiber. There are some projects by a Hungarian guy, I think, who converted these devices for optical connections. But I couldn't get it to work. I think it's really specific, like the wavelength. So if someone can help me with this, please show me the light. Okay. So actual professional fiber technicians have really sophisticated test equipment that will tell you all the characteristics of your fiber. Have you tried hooking this up to like a real OTDR or a real spectrograph? Does anyone at Camp have one? Maybe go and get a knock. Does anyone have one? I should... They're only like, you know, 50,000 euros. So like no big deal. I should visit the network guys, I guess. And I already saw these super nice kits, these boxes, that like to fuse the fibers in the field on Alibaba. I should really get one of those as well. Well thank you for your splendid creativity and I really loved your talk. Thank you so much. I hope you have a nice day here and give them a big applause. Thank you.