Most people think the identifier codes of Wi-Fi access points and their distribution are random, but actually they involved with the complicated human behaviours, business modes and urban plans. To depict the phenomena, we should know the composition of Wi-Fi identifier codes(aka MAC address or BSSID). The identifier codes are 12 digits of hexadecimal codes and the first six code is manufacture codes, such as some BTHomeHub access points’ manufacturer code is 00147f and it means ‘Thomson Telecom Belgium’ and the manufacturer code of BT Fusion is 001495 which represents 2Wire, Inc. The last 6 digits are the serial number in the factories. Above all, you can find the codes give us the information about the atlas of Wi-Fi manufacturers in different branches of Wi-Fi market and the business modes constitute of part of Wi-Fi landscapes.
borrowing Giovanni Coperario’s 17th books “Rules how to compose” from the library and it is so interesting to know the rules. I never know there are rules to “view” the notes in the scores.
Body and duration in digital art are less important than fine art. In fine art, artists used their bodies to create their works in a specific time duration, such as paintings, sculpture or performance art. Digital artists aim to applied machines to produce their works and play the works in a time-specific duration. I tried to bridge the gap via converting the body as a cyborg and move between Wi-Fi networks to perform the concept of moving in the cyberspace and record the movement via my electronic devices to create the visualising Wi-Fi networks as the painters painted what they saw. The different mediums between fine art and digital art should not become the barrier between them, and the combination could help artists to explore the world deeply and widely.
Claude Levi-Strauss (1983) considered the house as a social unit after reviewing the confusion of kinship in Franz Boas’s study on North American native Kwakiutl. Boas wanted to found the basic social unit according to traditional anthropological terminology, but he failed to locate ‘lineage’ and ‘clan’ in Kwakiutl society. He found a native term ‘numaym’ which involve with the kinship and society and it doesn’t fit any traditional categories. Levi-Strauss figured out ‘numaym’ is house which is comprised of house names, decoration, tangible wealth and blood relationship. The kinship in houses is dynamic with the political and economical activities through the physical and invisible house objects. He coined ‘house societies’ for this type of societies. His findings inspired the following anthropologists to study the kinship via the process of becoming kinship not being kin.
Modern Houses are not only homes but also a living machine as Le Corbusier mentioned in 1923,
The machine that we live in is an old coach full of tuberculosis. There is no real link between our daily activities at the factory, the office or the bank, which are healthy and useful and productive, and our activities in the bosom of the family which are handicapped at every turn.
Before Le Corbusier, houses are like artcraft, but he was fascinated with machines and factories and aimed to convert houses to machines. He wanted to change the world via creating houses as mass-production and brought the traditional world to the new order. Although his goal were not achieved but lead us to think what impact of technology affect the concept of houses.
Although Arjun Appadurai didn’t mention house societies directly, his global landscape analysis represented media and buildings which are constructed by the modern technology but organized as different ethnoscapes in the global cities. Houses are the popular buildings full of special decorations in modern societies as Le Corbusier’s ‘living machine’ which are shaped by specific ethnic groups as Levi-Strauss pointed out. He emphasized modern societies are not “tightly territorialized, spatially bounded, historical unselfconscious, or culturally homogeneous” which are similar to house societies in kinship study. House is beyond a territorially bound and cultural homogeneous unit because its members come from different houses and houses are adopted as an identifier by members to locate themselves in social networks and offer people the freedom to go out the physical house to participate the daily life.
Inspired by the previous studies, this paper takes Wi-Fi access points as houses in the modern societies and presents them as living machines via the repetitive grids which were applied in modern houses widely and artists used them to construct relational and rational artworks to construct the world in their ways, such as Donald Judd, Richard Paul Lohse and Josef Albers. Their works escaped from the representational social phenomena but produced new ways to view their world and this is important for this paper to connect Wi-Fi access points to houses with the artistic ways to display the new perspective to the wireless networks.
