Oct 7, 2022: Parallel Artifacts: Luf Boat is part of the Can You See Me Now exhibition at weareaia.ch/can-you-see-me-now in Zurich until Jan 21, 2023.

Parallel Artifacts: Luf Boat #

Parallel Artifacts is a series of electronic objects designed to virtually relocate illicit museum artifacts to their original location by exploiting wireless geolocation signals on smartphone devices.

The first Parallel Artifact will relocate the Papua New Guinean Luf Boat from the controversial Humboldt Forum in Berlin to the temporary exhibition space in Zurich. If successful, devices at Humboldt Forum will begin to appear as though they were at the location of the Parallel Artifact in Zurich.

The exhibition is a proof-of-concept museum exploit with the ultimate goal of sending the device to Papua New Guinea where it would virtually relocate visitors at the Humboldt Forum to the Luf Boat’s place of origin.

Parallel Artifacts aims to increase historical awareness of colonized objects by overwriting the false reality of museum spaces with a more true simulation of an artifact’s original location.

Code: github.com/adamhrv/skylift

Oct 7, 2022: Parallel Artifacts: Luf Boat is part of the Can You See Me Now exhibition at weareaia.ch/can-you-see-me-now in Zurich until Jan 21, 2023.

Technical Notes #

Parallel Artifacts uses Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, not GPS. These are entirely different systems. GPS signals are transmitted from outer space at 1.57 GHz (L1) and 1.22 (L2) while Wi-Fi is a ground-based transmission at 2.4GHz or 5GHz. Bluetooth also uses the 2.4GHz spectrum. GPS is often used colloquially to refer to geolocation services, which use a combination of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, cellular, and when available GPS. However, space-based GPS is often slow or too attenuated in urban areas. This is why mobile computing devices use ground-based (i.e. Wi-Fi, Bluetooth) geolocation signals for core location services.

The technique used for Parallel Artifacts has worked in the past for DataPools (2018) and SkyLift (2016) though technology is always changing and it’s unclear if it still works in 2022. This is an experimental project.

Further technical information is on the Github page github.com/adamhrv/skylift/tree/master/archive

Disclaimer: Use at your own risk.

Related Projects #

• DataPools (2018): Wi-Fi Gelocation Spoofing to the elite pools of Silicon Valley
• SkyLift (2016): Original research. Geolocation spoofing to Julian Assange’s residence at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.
• Source code: Arduino, Python