Well, that was entirely pointless. The meat of the post (the photos of disguised cell towers) would have been exactly as relevant and impactful without that pre-pubescent "hacking". (ooh! we can run six year old software (an openbts fork) on a raspberry pi! we are so cool!)
Art is one of the tools we use in society to alert each other about issues, i.e. social commentary. The point is, that it's rhetorical so you may be having a reaction that "Yes, I already know this", because you are working from a privileged position of knowledge inside the system being commented on.
Some fairly well-known examples of art as commentary:
Given that today we live surrounded by technology, it's not surprising that artists will use that technology to comment about and around our lives, particularly to announce to those outside the sphere of technology how networks, appliances and technological actions actually are affecting their lives.
Honestly this is a great piece of workmanship, having integrated the necessary equipment into something completely innocuous that does generally get ignored or overlooked. And the fact that the printer still works with this extra hardware, is a testament to how little you can assume any piece of equipment is safe/unmodified. Interfacing the cell interception with the printer is just gravy, a real undercover device wouldn't do that, but it's neat.
The disguised cell towers aren't "the meat", they're, as described in the post, just "conceptual background". Possibly irrelevant background, as they really aren't intended to be secret surveillance devices in those cases.
That's not why it's good, that's why it exists in that state. A lot of people don't know about stuff like this and won't want to trudge through a heavy technical post.
But send them a fake SMS and maybe they'll start listening.
