Jakob S. Boeskov

Jakob S. Boeskov is a Danish-Icelandic artist based in New York. His work has been shown in museums such as New Museum and Stedelijk Museum. He is best known for infiltrating a Chinese weapons fair in his ID Sniper project.

Jakob Boeskov
Born	23 March 1973 Elsinore, Denmark
Known for	Conceptual art, film and painting

ID Sniper

In 2002, Boeskov and industrial designer Kristian Von Bengtson created a fake hi-tech weapon called the ID Sniper rifle. This fictive weapon could shoot off GPS chips into demonstrators, so that the police later could locate them and "apply the punishment." Boeskov brought drawings of this weapon to a weapons fair in Beijing, China, where the weapon received positive reactions from real weapons dealers, politicians and policemen. Boeskov described the project "like being a sci-fi writer caught in his own novel" The project received worldwide press and caused Boeskov to receive purchase orders from military and security agencies from around the world.

Film and video work

In 2009 Boeskov wrote and directed the film Empire North which won the 2010 Danish:DOX Award at the CPH:DOX film festival. In 2010 Boeskov collaborated with Creative Time in New York with a video created in Nigeria together with director Teco Benson.

Other work

Although he is most known for his more conceptual work, Boeskov mainly exhibits drawings and paintings. In 2007 Boeskov started a short lived musical project called Black Scandinavia. The band performed with Gang Gang Dance in New York and Copenhagen. Boeskov also put out the EP T7: I Think I Scan with Timothy DeWit

Chinese hacker attack

On June 4, 2009, on the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests, Boeskov's website was hacked and infiltrated with malware by Chinese hackers, most likely the Honker Union. This cyberwarfare happened at the same time as Operation Aurora, a series of coordinated cyber-attacks on Google and other American companies.