DEF CON
DEF CON is the hacker conference that has met in Las Vegas every summer since 1993, and it is the badge that earns it a place in an art collection. What began as a printed name tag became, under Joe Grand — who works as Kingpin — the first electronic conference badge: a working circuit board you wear, with a puzzle built into it. Grand designed the badges for DEF CON 14 through 18, for DEF CON China 1, and returned to design DEF CON 27, the badge held here as SC.2026.006. Around the official badge grew "badgelife," an unofficial scene of independently designed, hand-assembled electronic badges made in small runs, traded and worn at the conference; SC.2026.007 comes from that world rather than from the conference itself. I was at DEF CON in 2007, where my friends and I came third in a competition involving automated sentry pellet guns. My friend Joe Grand, aka Kingpin, did the badges for years and took the medium to an entirely new artistic and clever level.
4 physical works
