Immaterials: Light painting WiFi- YOUrban

The city is filled with an invisible landscape of networks that is becoming an interwoven part of daily life. WiFi networks and increasingly sophisticated mobile phones are starting to influence how urban environments are experienced and understood. We want to explore and reveal what the immaterial terrain of WiFi looks like and how it relates to the city.

This film is about investigating and contextualising WiFi networks through visualisation. It is made by Timo Arnall, Jørn Knutsen, Einar Sneve Martinussen. The film is a continuation of our explorations of intangible phenomena that have implications for design and effect how both products and cities are experienced.Matt Jones of BERG has summarised these phenomena as ‘Immaterials’, and uses sociality, data, time and radio as examples. Radio and wireless communication are a fundamental part of the construction of networked cities. This generates whatWilliam Mitchell called an ‘electromagnetic terrain’ that is both intricate and invisible, and only hinted at by the presence of antennas.

YOUrban team,  built a WiFi measuring rod that visualises WiFi signal strength as a bar of lights. In order to study the spatial and material qualities of wireless networks, When moved through space the rod displays changes in the WiFi signal. Long-exposure photographs of the moving rod reveal cross sections of a network’s signal strength.

The size of the measuring rod and the light paintings it creates emphasizes the architectural scale at which WiFi operates, and situates the networks in the physical environments that they are a part of. The light of the measuring rod pulses as it is being moved, which creates dashed lines rather than solid ones. This creates a semi-transparent texture that allows the visualization to appear within the physical setting without covering it.

WiFi networks can, both practically and metaphorically connect different environments. The radio waves from WiFi base stations flow from indoor domestic spaces and semi-private work places, into public parks, streets and bus stops. A typical example of how WiFi networks can bring new functions to urban environments is the case of a university network extending into a nearby park. This makes it possible for students to use the park as a networked area when the seasons allow it. However, this password protected park-network is both technically invisible and practically unavailable for anyone else.

source: http://www.yourban.no/2011/02/22/immaterials-light-painting-wifi/