Hack to the Future

Philly's new "hacker studio" is part of a global trend combining technology and art.

by Rick Valenzuela

Photographs by Michael T. Regan

As you might expect from an engineer, Adam Lomazoff smiles wide and gestures emphatically as he talks about his toolbox.

He says it's an average set — "good enough for a mechanic but not too expensive" — but what gets him so animated is that his sockets are a mess. The plastic tray that holds them in size order has worn and torn away, such that the bits are "sitting in my toolbox, totally unorganized, and anytime I open it, I run the risk of them just falling out and falling everywhere," Lomazoff says.

CURRENT EVENT: Artist-in-residence Wil Lindsay discusses circuits with students at a recent LED workshop. Michael T. Regan

And while the tools themselves are under warranty, "this little piece of plastic, you can't just buy it as a replacement part, it's just not given away," he says. "So I basically have a toolset, $60 or $70 worth of tools, that's useless because I don't have this little 10-cent plastic insert."

But Lomazoff has a solution: He'll make one.

To do that, he's been putting in time at a new workspace called the Hacktory (thehacktory.org), assembling a vacuum-forming machine. The device will allow him to pop in a carved mold of what he needs, heat a sheet of plastic over it and suck that down on top of his positive model, creating a new tray.

At the moment, the machine is just several unpainted two-by-fours topped by a sheet of pegboard in a metal frame. But the work-in-progress mirrors the unfinished room in which it's being built. Lomazoff is working in the sunniest and largest of the Hacktory's three small rooms on the third floor of an industrial building. The hardwood floors are etched with traces of work and movement, and swaths of dried adhesive peek from behind wallpaper that's slowly curling away. On a whiteboard with "The Hacktory" fancifully scrawled in a corner, a brief volunteer schedule is listed in shorthand amid diagrammatical sketches of the vacuum-former's heating element. Under the board, a jumbled set of loose tools is neatly splayed across a table — yellow drill, orange extension cable, strips of shiny metal — all within easy reach while working.

The vacuum former is the first major machine project for the Hacktory, which is intended be part meeting place, part school and part garage where do-it-yourselfers such as Lomazoff can network and build things.

It's also among a surge of hacker spaces that independently have sprung up across the country and in Europe, says Ed Cummings, who sits on the board of the Hacktory's parent nonprofit group.

Cummings, also known as Bernie S., boasts prominent hacker credentials. He helps organize a major conference called Hackers on Planet Earth, writes for the well-known hacker magazine 2600 and appears on the weekly "Off the Hook" radio program, which discusses hacker- and security-related issues, on New York's WBAI-FM.

He lists similar hacker spaces that have opened within weeks of each other: DC401 in Providence, R.I., Noise Bridge in San Francisco and NYC Resistor, as well as Paris' /tmp/lab (pronounced "temp lab"), and C-Base and Bootlab in Berlin.

"What we'd eventually like to do is to link these hacker spaces together," he says. "There's a big opportunity for building a sort of global hacker network — in a positive sense, hacker — so these spaces can exchange ideas and resources."

Now, before some other news outlet sounds alarms, let's note how Cummings points out "positive sense, hacker." He's not making a distinction between "white hat" and "black hat" hacker. Those labels may seem necessary, but only because popular usage has seized on the mystery — and maybe hysteria — surrounding hacking. In the mainstream, the term is nearly synonymous with computer crime. Rather, Cummings and others associated with the Hacktory use the word in a more general, neutral sense that many say is, or should be, the primary definition.

Indeed, if you look to the Oxford English Dictionary as the arbiter of original meaning, a hacker is simply someone "with an enthusiasm for programming or using computers." In fact, it lists four such citations before its first use as a digital trespasser.

Jon McKamey, a Hacktory founder who goes by the name Far McKon, says that the term hacking now has several meanings, but that before it simply referred to "using things for a new idea that people hadn't come up with." Then, he says, "the darker aspect of it became more prominent and more popular."

However, more appropriate to the Hacktory could be the word's original meaning, according to some sources, as someone who makes furniture with an ax.

Harris Romanoff, one of the founders of the workspace as well as the monthly social group it extended from, Make Philly (makephilly.com), likens hacking to recycling. "It's very much about taking something that someone else has discarded, something that they view as a piece of junk, and saying, 'You know what? There's good parts in there. There's motors, there's circuit boards, there's plastics. There's metals that I can hack out, save, salvage and use in a new way to create something that I'd like to build.'"

Clarifying, he says hacking is about "taking that which has already been made and repurposing it."

The idea to gather such like-minded people together first occurred to Romanoff a couple of years ago, after reading the debut of the do-it-yourselfer quarterly Make magazine. He says he and a friend were kicking back over beers, daydreaming of how great it would be to find others who were into the magazine and into building things.

So around winter 2005, Romanoff says, they "posted on Craigslist and said, 'Hey, we're going to meet at the Dark Horse bar on this date, and anyone who's interested in this magazine, we're coming together to talk about stuff. Meet us.' That first night about 16 people came out in the snow and in the cold, and from there we pretty much started meeting on a regular basis."

MORTAL COIL: Detail of the heating elements on the Hacktory's vacuum former; the elements heat plastic, which can then be formed into custom shapes. Michael T. Regan

Several months ago, someone at the University of the Arts got interested in the meetings, says Cummings, an original member of the group. Now with a large fourth-floor room facing Broad Street at the school's Anderson Hall as a monthly meeting space, Make Philly is steadily growing. Recent attendance is consistently topping 50, and the group is planning to hold its 14th meeting Sunday.

The gatherings consist of three segments. They start with an "Open Make," a show-and-tell session where people present recent or in-progress works, or seek feedback and inspiration. Following that, a guest speaker gives a longer presentation; topics have ranged from how to weld to an overview of a relatively inexpensive printer that makes three-dimensional objects.

"And then perhaps most exciting," Romanoff says, "the third part of every Make Philly meeting is that we build something. And we're talking about pulling out boxes of junk and discarded parts, toolboxes — and there's a challenge: You have to build something within 55 minutes. And we break into teams, it's a mad frenzy, everyone is building something, and at the end we all sort of stand back, hit the [on] button and see what we've made, how well does it work, and see who really came up with a clever way to make something out of nothing."

Some of the challenges have included making musical instruments using the body's electrostatic current to play them, or building a ski lift that escorts wine corks up and off a track. Romanoff says one popular challenge resulted in a huge Rube Goldberg-style contraption: "Each team is given the idea of an input and output. So maybe your input is 'rattle' and your output is 'throw,' and another team's input is 'catch' and their output is 'pull.'" Then all the teams' devices were connected, he says, and "you watched the energy pass through." It took two attempts before the entire meeting's interconnected device completed its path, but Romanoff says that "only serves to raise the bar of excitement."

The collaboration is an important part of the meetings.

"It's serving as a forum for people to connect, to discover that maybe they could team up with this person on a creative project, that, oh, that person knows something that they've been looking to learn more about," Romanoff says. "Really, at the end of it all, Make Philly is about connecting folks who are looking to do creative things, things with their hands, things with their minds, and just come together, and have a common place to do that."

But the meetings also created an excess energy that needed its own outlet.

Make Philly founder Josh Kopel says the group introduced them to a lot of interesting people, but in that setting "we weren't able to do anything really technical." So he and Romanoff discussed making a workspace where people could share "a slightly higher-level technical skill."

On the Make Philly Web site, Cummings had listed under its links page Nonprofit Technology Resources (ntronline.org), a community group he's involved with. Founded in 1974, NTR helps other nonprofits with free or low-cost computer hardware, training and support, and it maintains a warehouse stacked with computer and technical parts. Eventually, the two groups connected.

Stan Pokras, NTR's director, says, "I've been wanting for a long time to have a machine shop and a way to teach kids how to do various kinds of tool-related activities, and we weren't able to do that ourselves. So when these folks [Romanoff, Kopel, McKamey and Vanja Buvac] showed up and said they wanted to teach people, learn, share tools, I said, great, let's work together."

NTR's space, at 1524 Brandywine St., is impressive. Operating out of what used to be a paint company, NTR has about 12,000 square feet of work space, and "another 4- or 5,000 square feet" of office space, Pokras says.

Vanja Buvac, a Hacktory founder and Make Philly coordinator, says, "As soon as we saw Stan's shop downstairs, we fell in love, right, because it's the ultimate hacker place."

Standing among scores of computer monitors piled head-high on palettes, Cummings says, "There's literally tens of tons of electronics hardware — circuit boards, computer monitors, audio, video equipment — that companies have just donated to write off instead of putting it in a landfill."

On the first and second floors are classrooms where NTR offers training, as well as monthly trouble-shooting sessions for the public called "Bring a Computer, Ask a Question." A storefront sells parts such as keyboards and cables, and large work areas are littered with long tables of half-opened computers. One whole room is dedicated to salvaging laptops as Linux machines, with the goal of getting them to low-income families.

On the third floor, the Hacktory is still coming into being, with volunteers pitching in when they have spare time to scrape paint and fix the place up, or to work on the vacuum former. In the downstairs classrooms, the Hacktory holds workshops, such as introductory how-tos on LEDs and Arduino microcontrollers, a small chunk of chip and circuits that can be programmed to control lights and motors, for instance.

The classes, and the Hacktory in general, attract people looking to incorporate technology into their art.

"There's a huge movement of using technology in various things, interactive installations, video art and so forth," Buvac says, "so there's a whole new medium out there, and art schools that specialize in interactive installations."

Michael T. Regan

Buvac fosters communication with the arts community for the Hacktory, helping coordinate shows or promoting classes that could help artists with their projects. Buvac also manages the guest speakers for the Make Philly meetings, and he invited Don Miller to demonstrate how to hack apart an old Nintendo game system to create new graphics and music.

Miller, who performs his audiovisual installations under the name No Carrier, says the overlap between artists and techies was a natural for him and his peers. "In the time period that I grew up, which is the 1980s, I didn't really see a differentiation between art and technology," Miller says. "I was always interested in art, but the art I w as interested in was always on computers or on video games, or on the television screen, or made with digital equipment."

Wil Lindsay, a multimedia arts professor at the University of the Arts, says that in a way, "the LEDs, the microcontrollers, things we use here at the Hackory, they're equivalent for a lot of artists to paintbrushes or video cameras." Lindsay has recently been named the Hacktory's first artist-in-residence, scheduled through November. His tenure there will include workshops on GPS units and microcontrollers that will build toward a show at Esther Klein Gallery.

Lindsay says the residency is a natural for him, and the community was easy to fall into. "It just happens that the folks at the Hacktory, a lot of them come from a programming or science background, and they speak my language."

On Saturday, the professor also helped teach at the Hacktory, during McKamey's workshop on LEDs.

Plumes of smoke rising from their soldering guns, 11 students of all ages hunch over long, cafeteria-style tables scattered with wires, lights and battery packs. McKamey and Lindsay walk around the classroom helping students alter their lights or the cycle at which they blink, but maintain a brisk teaching pace to cram in more material. As they work, the students are watched by tiny bugs with pipe-cleaner legs, black tape bodies and LED eyes. Making the bugs was an intro project for most of the students; they've now moved on to more complex gadgetry.

McKamey says there's often a distinction between engineering and designing something for commercial use and doing it as a work of art. "They're not the same thing, but there's so much of an overlap, and for a long time in our country we've said, 'Oh, you're one or the other.' And we're really concentrating on people that want to overlap."

It's not an entirely new concept. Kopel points to prominent hacker spaces in the Netherlands and Germany that appeal to that crossover. Here in the U.S., Cummings says, "there's been other hacker spaces over the years that have come and gone," but McKamey notes that those spaces "died out" with DSL Internet access.

Now, McKamey says, the focus has shifted to hardware hacking, or making modifications to physical things instead of, say, in a program, because "the stuff that's hard to locate, the stuff you want to pool resources for, isn't a high-speed Internet connection anymore, it's a fabrication machine or something like that."

Lomazoff sympathizes. "When you're in school, you have access to all these great machines and the great technology that your school's program can afford," he says. "But then when you get out of school, you don't necessarily have access to that same technology anymore, and sometimes that can really stand in the way of a project or some idea that you want to work on."

Lomazoff says they might have been able to buy a small, independently marketed vacuum former for less than $1,000. (Commercial vacuum formers cost tens of thousands of dollars.) But, he says, "if you build the machine, you can always build another one. Whereas if you buy the machine, you don't gain any knowledge. And I think the whole Hacktory idea is about gaining knowledge and insight as to what we're making and how we're making it, instead of going the route of buying things."

Standing over the vacuum-former-in-progress, Lomazoff is just about finished with the vacuum part of the device, roughly halfway to making his replacement ratchet-set tray. He's envisioned his personal end project, and collaborated on the machine that will help make that happen. As for what he pictures the Hacktory in general to be, or what he's likely to get out of it, Lomazoff says that when he's told others about it, "I sort of half-jokingly romanticize [that it's a place] where we build machines for making dreams come true."

(editorial@citypaper.net)