MOOGZ is an ethical hacker who specialises in (legitimate and pre-authorised) attacks on nuclear installations and government facilities. He is also a sound artist who uses the sounds of the internet and everyday life to create sonic landscapes.
Our conversation took place in a magnificent apartment on the 33rd floor in Canary Wharf, London, where MOOGZ works and is also setting up a new creative space ‘Above the Clouds’ to host new tech, creative and augmented reality work.
I must admit that I particularly wanted to catch up with MOOGZ to find out more about the dark underbelly of the internet, and to see what might be really going on in the world of cybercrime and cyberintelligence, but I was also very taken by his sonic work [Malignancy], recorded over the course of 12 years as his mother Angela underwent radiotherapy, and so I want to find out more about how (and why) he chose to make recordings of such a personal and difficult journey.
This was one of the most singular of my podcast conversations, as I tried to get my head round the cops-and-robbers dynamic of hacking. Was MOOGZ really a good guy? Was he hacking me even as we were talking? I realised that I would never know. But a throw-away comment about a video made by Boston Dynamics has stayed with me ever since.
MOOGZ had literally just moved in when I visited, and there was no furniture to baffle the sound, so the recording has an echo-ey, slightly machine-like quality to it, which is perhaps fitting for the subject of our conversation.
Thanks MOOGZ!
You can listen to this episode here: https://soundcloud.com/robertgood_art/moogz
Next week: last but most definitely not least researcher, image maker and senior lecturer Philip Harris shares his love of analogue cine media and I find out that his use of old technology is most definitely not a nostalgia trip.
