I’m not trying to argue, I’m just honestly confused by your assumption here.
Would you also assume, if an American artist projected something onto the German embassy in the U.S. about a German official and activities of the German government (and written in german), that the target audience was solely American?
Because that’s what the artist in Germany did. He picked one location in his country both representative of the act and sure to gain attention from those who committed it - the embassy. If his target audience had been just German, not international, he’d have selected a building where Americans wouldn’t be. He also probably wouldn’t have used english for the wording. That should be a major hint to you that he wanted an international audience to read his message.
I’m sorry if we won’t come to an agreement on this, but it seems pretty clear to me.
Vinnettou and Old Shatterhand are walking down a street. There is a group of employees in front of a building, smoking.
Old Shatterhand nudges Vinnettou, “translate!”
Hey Shaddack: I haven’t ignored your pleas. Here’s a link for an instructables page on projection bombing. If you’re really interested, that should get you started.
I do know about the Sault Ste. Marie Chippewas who are outraged at the collection of Native American scalps on display at the Karl May museum. They are asking the scalps be returned for proper burial. I don’t know what the museum has done in response, but so far it has defended it’s inaction and seems oblivious to its racist position.
I hoped for something lower-tech, something like a DIY projector.
I am attempting for a design, but so far failing on the optics; a low-cost low-quality really long-range gobo projector, ideally capable of displaying a billboard-sized image of a logo or few letters on a billboard-sized area a kilometer away. Low-cost enough that it can be abandoned in place if the tactical situation calls for a quick egress.
The idea is based on a variant of the DIY projectors that use a gutted LCD monitor. A high-power lamp, e.g. a growshop-bought metalhalide or high-pressure sodium. Possibly even an electric arc, or, for a short time, an illuminating-flare pyrotechnic composition. A condenser, possibly made of Fresnel lens, like the DIY projectors do. A small gobo, about inch-diameter, etched or laser-cut from thin metal. A long focal-length lens, maybe even from a salvaged magnifying glass; a large-diameter one I tried has focal length of 80 cm (low-res, lots of color and other aberrations, but hey, low cost!). A 4-5ft long stovepipe could house it all.
One problem with this is that the initial focal point where the illumination comes from is going to be moving. You source that can be housed in a reflector to focus on the focal point that the reflected light goes through in order to make the gobo readable (which is why you can’t just toss a flashlight in front of a template, all the light is going everywhichway), a reflector has to aim all that light around to get to the focal plane. Adding a moving source as it burns down into this equation is going to make your work a lot harder.
You need to get a reflector around the source and send a lot of light in one direction to get a kilometer away and some pretty bitchin’ optics. Even a 5 degree theatrical spot with 750 watts is only going to get you 530 lux at 50 meters and it’s going to be six meters in diameter.
You’re going to need to look into small, powerful sources and really good optics in order to hit something that small that far away. It seems cheaper to mount something to a van through a window and aim from closer. Aiming something from a kilometer away is really going to be more difficult than one imagines.
You might want to hunt at school supply resale stores (and thrift stores!), and get yourself an overhead projector. They contain a lot of useful parts that can be used other ways. The angled mirror is nice because it means you’re not messing around with sliding things in and out of the projector - they just lay on top.
As you mentioned, you can just build a box projector. Here’s a quick and dirty example for projecting a smartphone. You’d be replacing the phone with a high power light, and without a mirror, making the box into a slide box for templates/transparencies.
Combining the two sources will probably get you the most bang for your buck.
Let me know if you pursue this!
This has to be accounted for in the design. Typically, the burning “candle” of the material will not be too long. This may be alleviated by using some sort of a scale/balance where the burning off of the material (and the corresponding weight loss) moves the flare to maintain it in the focal point.
Has to be much less than 5 degrees. Almost parallel. Hence also the small size of the gobo; I did the calculations for a 12cm-diameter 80cm-focal length magnifying glass (though I am not certain I got it right).
I also thought about just using a green laser pointer with some decolimation optics. Not sure how well it would work. Or a bigger flashlamp, lots of brightness for a short time and then a few seconds pause.
Does not work in situations where there are police cordons around the buildings or the city has a “safe zone” established in this way. In other scenarios, probably yes.
Nobody said it will be easy Nor even possible.
The main purpose of the project is a cheapest, simplest possible design from (if possible) nonspecific or not-too-specific parts, so it can be duplicated almost anywhere without having to rely on things that take time to ship or have to be hunted for. If I was just designing it for myself, one-off, I’d go this way. But one projector does not make much difference in a worldwide context, especially in place where nothing much happens; many, some in the right places, could. (It’s mostly about a design easy to build on-demand where it is needed. Originally it was intended for the London Olympics but then the project stalled. Now active work is being done on other, lower-hanging fruits.)
The box projectors are what I am taking the basic design from. Source-condenser-mask (LCD, or in this case a gobo)-projection lens. Lots of things that can go wrong in the design, and the resolution will be rather poor if it will ever work with the given design specifications…
I’ve comd to think that the causality is actually the other way around. Or, to be more precise, only people who are open to broadening their mind benefit that way from traveling. But those can use other paths, too, like reading or discussing.
May I respectfully suggest that people are disrespecting European culture by suggesting that this is racist?
Viewed from the outside, the “Black Americans speak Ebonics and wear Baseball Caps” stereotype is a harmless stereotype on par with those that are happily and often proudly exchanged between European nations (e.g., the French drink wine and eat cheese, the Germans drink beer and wear Lederhosen, the British are always polite, …).
It’s definitely a friendlier stereotype than the “the French always surrender” and “the Germans all look like/talk like/are Nazis” stereotypes routinely used in American media (without any protests).
Is it true, then, that people from English-speaking countries “just don’t get why everyone else is upset”?
Countries DO NOT spy on supposed allies and friends at the level that the Five Eyes countries are doing. There is genuine outrage, tempered by a strong sense of “can’t do anything reasonable about it” in continental Europe.
The US is the only foreign country that is systematically violating my basic human rights.
Now, I live in Austria, and our spying capacities are definitely limited; but I’m quite confident that they are not even trying to spy on, e.g., confidential attourney-client communications in Slovenia. That would just be considered a crime, even though the victims are “just foreigners”.
Not “everybody does it”. I find this “everyone for themselves, there are no rules” approach to international politics more dangerous and more repulsive than any harmless stereotyping.
It’s more than a bit disingenuous to focus only on the Five Eyes. They aren’t the only countries spying - far from it. Here’s just one ABC news story that not only claims “some two-dozen” countries fly spy planes to intercept signals, they directly state:
Most modern air forces have them and many developing nations fly the planes. In East Asia, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Singapore, possibly Russia, and Australia, as well as Chinese and U.S. forces, are believed to have them.
The same story also describes the fact that China is one of the most advanced countries when it comes to spying. They don’t belong to the Five Eyes.
I also recommend people read this Time article. It may help to remind people that while Germany is harping on the U.S. for spying, it wasn’t long ago (2009) that they got caught (with France) spying on Britain. In fact, here’s a Telegraph U.K. report from 2009 about just that. At that time, Germany was one of 20 countries caught spying on Britain.
Now can we all please stop pretending that only the U.S. does it?
We are focusing on the US in order to not split the forces. Once this job is done, regroup and attack #2 in line. (Also, keep the disclosures from the other countries running. The ball is rolling, don’t stop it. But there is a certain wisdom in not splitting the forces and starting premature infighting. On the other hand, if framed not as country vs country but as people vs state services,…)
Like with making computer systems resistant to NSA. If the technology is difficult and expensive to break for them, it is difficult and expensive to break for everybody else. (Assuming the difficulty is in the technology itself, not in where it is located.)
It’s about the quantity not the quality. I’m getting tired of this lazy-ass argument by USians, who don’t seem to get the problem: Yes everyone spies - but not on every average Joe, Pierre, Hans and Mario (unlike the US). Mass-surveillance is the issue.
That said, in Germany - the target wasn’t you, it was a major political figure. Sounds a lot like what German spies were doing in Britain, doesn’t it? Not only that Germany will also track Americans’ cell phone if they’re in the country, and of interest.
Not only that, according to Germany, Germany wasn’t a part of PRISM, so no spying on the masses there.
What? PRISM was the program where the US government tapped the data/servers from US companies like Google, Yahoo MS, Apple etc. - unsurprisingly lots of “foreigners” (millions/billions?) are customers of US based tech companies.
Did you miss all those following leaks from the Snowden trove? Tapping of internet exchanges, undersea cables, NSLs, tapping all telephone calls from a “foreign nation” etc? Perhaps you should have a second look at all those leaks by Greenwald & Co.
I was about to edit to make my statement more clear.
If you were using a U.S.-based service, then you fell under PRISM, but anything produced solely within Germany didn’t. People forget online that they’re using an international connection, and they really shouldn’t. If I go to a site ending “.de” I’m now visiting Germany, and should recognize that. I’m not saying I should expect to be spied on - I’m saying that people forget there’s a geographic component to the internet.
Nor even possible. 
