This "Pfingst"(pentecost)-hollyday weekend I attented SIGINT 2010. The event took place at the KOMED event centre located in the MP6 and MP7 buildings of the MediaPark in the centre of Cologne, which is in walking distance from my home. :)

In the last half year I found some interrest in the activities of the Chaos Computer Club (CCC), mainly inspired by the 26C3 conference, which I followed by video streams in late december last year, and because SIGINT took place next door, I had to attend! And it was great! :)

The SIGINT is a conference with a wonderful mix of technology, hacking, future, arts and politics related talks in a very great location with the postmodern flair of the MediaPark around. The composite of the attendee crowd (around 700 people according to golem.de) was also very interesting, mostly young hackers or geeks and generally computer and internet affine people, but also some politc or media related people as well as some artists were on this conference. The hackcentre in the basement of MP6 was the meeting spot and the epicentre of the conference, this was maybe but not only because the bar was also located in this spot. ;)

An also very positive feature of this conference is, that there is alomst no commerce, no blah blah bluff marketing people, no annoying advertisment company trade fair like bothes, the only bothes in the foyer of MP6 were from organisations which stand in for public rights or are clearly hacking culture related. I read in this post on golem.de, that the organisers of SIGINT did not took money from Nokia, which wanted to sponsor the event, because Nokia helps building internet censorship infrastructures. This anti commerce and in some sense post capitalism flair was very strongly in the air all the time and in almost every second talk of the conference present, which I enjoyed a lot. The conference started with a very intelligent and inspiring Keynote by Michael Seemann aka msprO, where he tryed kind of successfully to map on the basis of the OSI Layer model platform neutrality/independency,  to society and real life. I can't summarize this Idea precisely yet, bat an article on Zeit-Online elaborated on his speech and I would recommend every one to check out the recordings of the conference, as soon they are avialble.. (Edit: Here is the link to the video of the talk.)

An other very interessting talk was by Christian Heller aka plomlompom in which he endet up after a 45 min talk with the finding that everything is "just" information or perception of informtaion (at least I think I understood him like that ;-). This finding is clear to everybody who read Korzybski's "Science and Sanity" (e.g. "The Map is Not the territory"). The talk was very scientifically constructed and the hypotheses where worked out very sharp, all in all very good work. So also very recommendable for everybody to look out for the video captures of this talk.

Then there was Johannes Grenzenfurther from monochrome. He is a very funny guy, I think his goal is in hacking conference talks. He brutally and by this very funny shows what kind of bullshit all this conference tohuwabohou is or at least can be, by perfectly parody the art of conference talks. He is doing this by doing every cliche one can imagine from a "serious" person giving a conference talk, starting from slide design, overintonating banal stuff and systematically destroying all the bullshit buildings of the attendes listening to him...  very refreshing! So If you look for some great commedy and some meta understanding of conference talk bullshit, please watch out for the recordings of his tow talks 1 and 2. (Edit: here is the video of the first talk on guerrilla comunication.)

At day two which was the 23.5.! I enjoyed the talk "Wo sind die Fnords" by classless Kulla. You must know I am a great fan of Robert Anton Wilson and he got some very intelligent things to say about the book of the books Illuminatus!. I don't know if this guy knows it, but he really behaves like R.A.W. himself when he gaved talks, he was sitting there and looking from above all the time from right to the left and back from left to right above the heads of the crowd listending to him... very funny this, indeed! :) (Edit: Here is the link to the video of his talk.) 

And finally there was the talk Future 3.0 by Nick Farr. Where he elaborated on one theory on patterns in culture, technology and commerce, and actually made a lot of sense with this theory! He also gave a quite impressive Keynote on day two on "Hackers in Government", which I also would like to recommend everybody to check out from the conference recordings. (Edit: Link to video of Hackers in Government.)

To sum up, It was a great event and I'm sure that SIGINT has more potential to grow to a really international internet, technology, society, arts and future hacking event. If SINGINT takes place next year I will be there most probably! :)

Links:

• SIGINT Homepage
• SIGINT Fotos on Flickr
• SIGINT on twitter
• SIGINT on Zeit-Online (german)
• SIGINT on Heise (german)