Garry Ing
Garry Ing is a designer and technologist residing in Toronto. His previous work and collaborations has been with the Strategic Innovation Lab (sLab) at OCAD University, the Technologies for Aging Gracefully Lab at the University of Toronto, and Normative. He is a graduate of OCAD University, with a background in graphic design.
Presenting
MAC as a Place and Landscape
A media access control (MAC) address is sometimes encountered as a read-only hexadecimal string, separated by colons or hyphens, and often cited as a method to identify network interfaces in their physical instantiation; a port in which ethernet is stringed into, an adapter grafted to a computer. Though not immediately visible or understandable, their hexadecimal compositions are used in procedural means to block, allow, or trace the behaviour of a networked device and often times an individual. Though much of the attention with MAC addresses are in support of these uses, MAC addresses can also by interpreted as a peculiar landscape of manufactures and geographies.
This talk will look at MAC addresses through a publicly available dataset by the IEEE Registration Authority. The dataset is composed of organizationally unique identifiers (OUI) that is often used in network related software as means to clearly identify manufactures of interfaces. The dataset is a starting point in a series of attempts to make visible the architecture, geographies, and stories behind the manufacturing and distribution of network interfaces.
