Pink Cell Tower
Extroverted Infrastructure
Oliver, 2021
INTRODUCTION
We would find it incredible that a corporation declares total monopoly over the colours we see and use, yet precisely that has happened with another part of the electromagnetic spectrum - radio - where big business now has exclusive rights over nearly all the frequency space public might otherwise use.
Pink Cell Tower intervenes upon this electromagnetic capture.
Pink Cell Tower is a fully-functional solar-powered cell tower built atop free and opensource software components and a minmalist hardware stack. Hot pink, designed to be seen, this infrastructural intervention represents an independent alternative to the innocuous, ‘beige box’, corporate-owned and state-monitored mobile infrastructure billions have come to rely upon.
The project was commissioned for Skulpturen Park Berlin, and installed in a central urban location in Berlin. As civilians are prohibited under law from deploying their own GSM/cellular infrastructure, approval from the Minister of Communications in Germany needed to be sought to realise the project. On giving approval, the project traversed a crucial legal boundary, incidentally setting a potent precedent for similar civilian-led mobile infrastructure projects in Germany.
OFFLINE WEBSITE AND CODE
Pink Cell Tower also serves a website with instructions to replicate it (from BladeRF SDR to mastpole design & antennae), and a downloadable ISO complete with source code to flash onto a Raspberry Pi.
PRECONFIGURED BOOTABLE ISO
Provided here is a bootable ISO image for the Raspbery Pi 4 (tested on Model B) and for use solely with the BladeRF Micro A4 and suitable GSM antennae. This will allow you to replicate the functionality seen with Pink Cell Tower in the Berlin deployment. It is a large download and the webserver has been set to throttle so as to allow for the rest of this and other sites hosted on this infrastructure to function.
The ISO is two partitions, one the bootable part, the other the actual OS. The decompressed OS partition is ~12G, 4.6G of which is used, with 6G to play with (logs, other data you wish to serve, etc). Unfortunately I didn’t have anything smaller than a 32G sdcard to play with, so it’ll expect that room during decompression.
Please only download this file if you have a Pi4, BladeRF Micro A4 and are prepared for a slow download on a sufficiently stable connection.
The file is available here.(sha256sum: 532d191d156f6cc18f93c1630fd0122ad36030f54da8e9ac181ff5faf378ad07)
To write to an SD card:
gzip -cd /path/to/pinkcelltower-1.1.img.gz | dd of=/path/to/sdcard
You may wish to add something like bs=4M to your dd command to speed things
up.
Only play with gzip and dd if you know what you are doing and most
importantly what you are writing to. On a GNU/Linux system, the sdcard is
typically found in the filesystem as /dev/mmcblk0. Please check dmesg to be
sure, and if on OS X you ought to check the system utility for the correct
device name to use.
In the next weeks I will add more notes to this page as regards setting up and running a fully fledged cell tower, with a focus on tuning and hardware.
WRITINGS
Served from Pink Cell Tower are a collection of critical writings for download. The texts generously provided are:
- Zielinski - The German Workers Radio Movement (EN)
- Thacker & Galloway - The Exploit (EN)
- Flusser - Kunst und Komputer (DE)
IMAGE COPYRIGHT
Photos 1 and 2 on this page by Philip Horst. Photo 3 on this page by Alexander Callsen.
COMMISSION
This project was commissioned by Skulpturen Park Berlin for their 2021 RETURN festival program, exhibited at Skulpturen Park.
