SweetWire
SweetWire is a music video project that translates a successful containment of a cybersecurity attack into music and choreographed motion. It’s funded by the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity. CLTC presented the work by Greg Niemeyer, Hallie Smith, Olivia Holston, Jackie Serrano, Oliver Moldow, and Joshua Hyman online. The whole event can be watched here:
Structurally, the music video is a dialog between hacker and target. The hacker becomes the data, and enters the target that way. Once in, the hacker reconfigures herself from the data and subverts the target. Eventually, the target collapses, but the bits reboot into a new space, in which we find the hacker again. The space is very different, but life goes on.
This approach casts cybersecurity as an ongoing dialog arising from the need to balance security and connectivity, and as a continuous effort to distinguish legitimate and illicit transactions. The name of the video refers to fictitious names of hackers and cybersecurity teams, who find themselves in this constant dialog.
The music for the video, by Hallie Smith, layers eight voices which diverge, cause much tension, and eventually converge at the end. A rough media sketch of one chord gradually matching a target chord also shows how the close coupling of sound and image in this project alludes to synesthesia: what does security sound like?
The sound and the visuals are closely coupled. The video unites three visual elements: a FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) spectrogram visualization of the music, LIDAR scans of a dance performance and LIDAR scans of a corporate building with an executive area, a server room, a shipping room, a production space, a marketing space, and an engineering space.
The LIDAR approach allows us to show the pointcloud of a body of a dancer moving through pointclouds of walls of the building effortlessly. When points of the dancer collide with points of the building, the points behave like particles and scatter. The points of the dancer also behave like particles, when they encounter elemental forces, which disintergrate the body pointcloud. These forces, which are generated by a physics engine, represent the defensive resilience of the cybersecurity team, whose role it is to keep the corporation operational.
The FFT sound visualization acts at times as a force shield for the body, and at times as a force shield for the corporation. The video is cut to the beat, showing different moments of penetration and repulsion, aggregation and disintegration. The dancer point cloud is at times shown moving left to right through the various sections of the building and at times shown moving from the z-depth of the image to the foreground. The point cloud also reconfigures from a human form to a spherical data constellation and back again.