Inside Roanoke's Tubman Museum of Art.
artists take part in
a unique kind of exhibit.
[Just enough to slide it.]
Tanner Upthegrove, with
Virginia Tech's Institute for Creativity,
Arts and Technology, gives visitors an
opportunity to immerse themselves
in the middle of a cyber attack.
"This sonification is sound derived from data,
so network traffic data, firewall data.
And we take that data and turn it into sound.
And that's where the artistic and
creative side comes into play."
Tanner's tesseract project
turns data into sound,
then puts it in a 3D space.
"We have the innate ability to
hear sound around us at all times.
And this takes advantage of that by placing
different sounds at
different loudspeakers inside of the system."
The goal is to help open our ears to
what a cyber security attack sounds like.
"It touches all of us every
day. We all use computers.
We're all possibly at
risk of a cybersecurity attack.
Even the services we use are
commonly at risk of cybersecurity attack.
So this is a way to promote awareness of
these situations and
cybersecurity as a whole."
His second exhibit combines the use of
artificial intelligence
and a 5G network
to bring musicians in
different locations together to
perform in real time.
"If you're creating music on the fly,
If you want to change key,
then we can communicate
together in the same room.
But it's really hard to do that if you're
separated like during the pandemic."
His projects are among
five exhibits on display as part of
the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative
to not only help visitors hear
but see cybersecurity in a different way.
"I have an interest
in using other people's things to make work.
So this fit right in with that. Just like,
You know, borrowing their information
for an exhibit." Graphic designer,
Michael McDermott, will make you think
twice about how to toss your cell phone.
"There was more data than I could even look at.
It just was too much to see."
He bought dozens of discarded devices online
and curated a display
of personal information
former phone owners likely
think is inaccessible.
"We wouldn't go into a Goodwill and give like
our family photo album to
Goodwill probably, because
we wouldn't people seeing that, right,
There's gonna be stuff in there
or like our diaries,
we probably wouldn't give to Goodwill,
but we don't think about that with
our digital selves,
which has way more information
than any of those two things would have."
The Commonwealth Cyber Initiative funded
each of the projects through
its Building Bridges arts
and design collaboration program.
It brings together artists and
cyber security researchers from
Virginia Tech as well as
George Mason, Old Dominion, Radford,
and Virginia Commonwealth Universities. [Network
act as a cryptographer] Old Dominion's
Kevin Moberly use the grant CCI
provided to hire student artists and
game developers to create a game allowing
players to test their cybersecurity skills.
"We wanted to create
a game that was aimed at
late middle school and high school students
to
sort of educate them not about cybersecurity,
that kind of happens
as you're playing, but about what
working in the cybersecurity industry
is like, to sort of give students an
intro to it." "I was very aware of cybersecurity,
but it definitely wasn't like something
I was going after until
this grant became available."
Kate Sicchio combines her expertise
in dance and technology to
collaborate with a data researcher
to look at how to prevent
our movement from being
used to determine our identities.
"I really do think artists have a lot
to say about technology.
As a dance artist,
I really feel like I
bring so much knowledge
about movement and body to the table that
a lot of AI programmers, for example
like my collaborator don't have.
So I really think it's actually
important that artists have
a seat in these projects and really
like are seen as experts coming to the table,
not as like a decoration after the fact."
Artists who never considered themselves
cybersecurity experts
or even part of the solution,
are now helping a community see
cybersecurity like they've never seen before.
"I never thought I'd have this kind of
opportunity to work with
cybersecurity experts.
I'm not one, but I'm
starting to learn what that means.
So getting, getting to have
an artistic voice within
a community that may not have thought about
art in the past is really powerful.
We can convey complex ideas,
abstract ideas, to a general audience.
No more pictures of some guy in
a hoodie in
a dark room clicking at a keyboard.
This is something completely different."
CCI is different and unprecedented.
A consortium of Virginia
universities and colleges
working to make Virginia a
global leader in cybersecurity.