From my experience in anthropology studies, I have found shortcomings and restrictions in this methodology. Anthropologists obtain abundant information by staying at particular spots for long periods to investigate and study the daily life of natives as living biographies. Under those conditions, anthropologists are passive receivers and interpreters. The text is full of native terms creating an exotic atmosphere, and every culture seems different from other cultures. The result is that every culture is seen as independent, with a difficult-to-compare existence, and hence cross-cultural studies become a battlefield of vocabulary without holistic viewpoints. In contrast, I wanted to reverse this method of study to create a specific way to conduct cross-cultural researches. This shift is different from traditional anthropology, so I needed support from different disciplines to achieve my goal. At the same time, I found that contemporary art offered me a possible way to develop my experiment.
Grids and layers were applied by Josef Albers and Richard Paul Lohse to study the interaction between colours and to transform 3-D to 2-D, similar to the way archaeologists and anthropologists position objects in the field and convert their fields to text. After the work of these pioneers, grids and layers were widely adopted in the minimal and conceptual art movements. I referred to the works of different artists and adopted colours (layers) and grids as my tools to create a hybrid of time and space as my study subject.
My doctoral project involved visualizing Wi-Fi networks in London, Taipei, New York, Chicago, and Hong Kong to explore how individual networks construct urban landscapes and their identities. According to Le Corbusier, houses are machines in which we live. I reversed his idea, assigning Wi-Fi users as cyborgs (cybernetic organisms) living in Wi-Fi houses. Then I applied the house society theory to visualise Wi-Fi access points as houses with colours and grids to construct 3-D-based 2-D landscapes. Colours were translated from unique Wi-Fi machine codes that represented individual Wi-Fi machines. The codes could also be tracked to the manufacturer, so the colours also offered a connection between individuals and capitalism. This work presents the different aspects of Wi-Fi machines as a house metaphor in their respective societies and extended anthropology to study material culture and human activity via multiple ways to reveal the connection between them.
