Colourful Wi-Fi Network

Wi-Fi networks are materialized media and Internet is the content. We used to go online by wireless or wire therefore we ignore easily the difference of the connection methods. The ignorance appear significantly after the popularity of Wi-Fi wireless. Because We don’t need to stay at the fixed point to connect to Internet so “place” is not dominant role to affect us cyber life. In contrast to 3G and GPRS, they allowed users to access Internet with high-end mobile phone and the expensive fee.

Wi-Fi has transformed importance of the place in wire networks into multi-places or Auge’s “non-place”. We can access Internet via different Wi-Fi hotspots. If Wi-Fi service providers still expand their Wi-Fi hotspots, Wi-Fi space for the users seem never-completed. Wi-Fi users can watch youtube, writing blogs, tweet and receiving email via Wi-Fi hotspots in cities. Wi-Fi networks are materialized by physical spaces and they also transform cafe, telephone booths, and convenience stores into visible and touchable Wi-Fi access points. Hotspot owners usually show advertisement in users’ login page. Internet is not media itself but the content of Wi-Fi. Municipal and commercial Wi-Fi providers have their different consideration about how and where they roll up their Wi-Fi services. Wi-Fi distributions are the reflections of political and economic complex. The more Wi-Fi access points they can install, the more content and information they can provide and control.

Our visualisation presents the route not the areas. Because the routes have directions and they can show the closeness of different Wi-Fi access points. House image aims to imitate the family member to express the membership in the same Wi-Fi networks.

3G networks didn’t reshape our routes and place.

Mobile phone networks seem to provide the same mobility of Wi-Fi but they didn’t reproduce our places and routes. 3G connection has the different login method so the users can avoid the advertisement page. They don’t need to incorporate the physical premises so they can’t reproduce our territory and places.

This paper will introduce how the collaboration of art, anthropology and linguistics visualise Wi-Fi networks as colourful house societies where cyborg live and behave by metaphor. Wi-Fi networks are becoming more and more ubiquitous in modern urban life and the influence reshape our space from physical world to the combination of real world and cyberspace. The special landscapes attract geographers, sociologists and anthropologists to study their social and cultural meaning besides scientific and engineering orientation. The social and humanistic studies focus how Wi-Fi as new-born technology to change our consciousness and daily behaviour. They depict Wi-Fi in one way from human being’s opinion. Actually, both of human beings and Wi-Fi networks contribute a new world appear – cyborg world. To decipher and explain the invisible and non-intuitive change, this paper adopts a novel and artistic way to analyze and represent this phenomena. After 1960s, conceptual artists develop plenty of expression to discuss, highlight or represent abstract concept and issue beyond just represent them by their pen, brush, hammer or other traditional tools. They are eager to apply action, body or multiple medium to express their opinions. Art can explore complicated and subtle social/cultural phenomena by creating visual, acoustic, physical and metaphorical artworks to break the boundary and connect invisible/intangible clues in a meaningful network to mark them. To practice the cyborg hypothesis, the artist were playing cyborg role to access and collect Wi-Fi networks in different cities. The performance and Wi-Fi data were converted in to colour charts which take Wi-Fi access points as house in anthropology study. Claude Levi-Strauss pointed out house is the elementary social unit for understanding social structure and relationship. The result will show Wi-Fi access point is the important medium as house to offer user as cyborg places and position in real world and cyberspace.

These public library provide/provided Wi-Fi services and emphasize it is free and open to all except for Taipei. But all of them stress all or almost all libraries has this service. The ubiquitousness is what they want to stress. This concept and point also appear in commercial corporates, for example all Starbucks Cafes in these cities provide Wi-Fi service by particular telecom companies. In London, BT replace T-Mobile to run Wi-Fi service at all Starbucks (http://www.brandrepublic.com/News/899492/BT-launch…). AT&T offer Wi-Fi access in American Starbucks (http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9958942-7.html).

These cities also have or had city-wide Wi-Fi plans which are implemented by volunteer in New York City, governments in Chicago, London ( both suspend), telecom company in Hong Kong, and BTO (build to order) between government and company in Taipei.

High density and ubiquitousness are pursued by these cities and they create a framework “Wi-Fi exists everywhere.” This framing strategy make us look house metaphor with “ubiquitousness” consideration. Originally, houses and Wi-Fi access points has limited space and paricular borders.

Actually, the “ubiquitousness” is an image like social control of country, and Wi-Fi infrastructure is like one kind of “Ideological State Apparatuse” proposed by Louis Pierre Althusser. Besides state/government, powerful telecom giants also give us this kind of ideology. Marx and Engels said,”…the ruling ideas: i.e. the class, which is the dominant material force in society, is at the same time its dominant intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production……” (Marx and Engels, 1974: 64-5; quoted from Williams 2003:37). The ubiquitousness is the ideal and it is always connected to the word “convenience.” In Chicago and London, city government aimed to push municipal Wi-Fi hotspots around the city or particular area (along south bank in London) but unpredictable expense force these cities to suspend their project. The same economical problem also appeared in Taipei but Taipei ask the private company to run this service. The company corporate with convenience stores, Cafe and different companies to maintain its business. Until now, the company Q-ware makes Wi-Fi hotspots penetrate into Taipei environment.

NYCWireless, a non-profit organization aims to help New York city to develop the public and open Wi-Fi networks. NYCWireless has the idealist’ goal and it is like that they ask everyone open their door to share Wi-Fi access.

Hong Kong’s telecom giant “PCCW” controls the market and they provide their Wi-Fi for university, companies and individual citizen. Hong Kong government installed their own Wi-Fi network in governmental premises.

The above governments, organizations and companies offer a framework for Wi-Fi building project. No matter the projects are successful or fail, all of them take Wi-Fi as a media which can materialize space ownership, Internet resource and communication.

But government or telecom monopoly can’t control Wi-Fi dominantly.

Adrain Mackenzie(2006) consider Wi-Fi owns a flow of meaning and he applied (1)ideas of place, such as airport,(2)forms of externalization, such as Wi-Fi network cards,(3) figures attached to social distribution, for example home users to “outline the growth and dynamics of Wi-Fi as cultural flow of meanings concerned with data and people in movement (Adrian 2006:796).” Wi-Fi is like traditional mass media which are only controlled by few administrators or companies. For example, NYCWireless’s open and free wireless project is an action to share the restricted resource to escape from telecom companies’ exploitation. As NYCWireless, Freifunk(http://start.freifunk.net/) also help residents to build and share Wi-Fi resource. Because Wi-Fi access points are cheap and easy available, they provide citizens to create their Wi-Fi network as telecom companies and government did.

FON(http://www.fon.com/en/) is famous for it provide their cheap Wi-Fi access point – FONERA – to help users share their Wi-Fi signal and users could be a free provider or a small telecom company to earn money. Since 2008, FON corporates with BT in UK to provide BT subscriber, including BT Total Broadband and BTOpenzone customers to share the service “freely”. As they said “BT FON is an initiative between BT and FON that aims to give all its members access to wireless broadband wherever they are in the world. This is possible because all BT FON members agree to securely share a portion of their Wi-Fi bandwidth through a separate channel on their wireless router with other members who are in range of their wireless router. These wireless routers become known as “BT FON hotspots(http://www.btfon.com/support/faqs#point01).”

http://processing.org/reference/color_datatype.html

processing cubricgrid is a good example for creating 3d urban landscape.

Media is a complex of information, tool and approach. The three aspects weave political, social, cultural and economic issue in a material/non-material web. This paper aims to present how Wi-Fi access acts as a media representation in tangible/intangible objects and spectacle.

Wi-Fi networks penetrate deeply and spread widely in Europe and North America, such as Wi-Fi community Freifunk in German and commercial BTOpenzone in UK. Popular Wi-Fi hotspots provide easy and location-flexible access to Internet. Unlikely mobile phone, Wi-Fi can create a space to gather users to share the connection and offer low-cost and multi-user facilities than traditional network cables. The ownership and membership of Wi-Fi networks are heterogeneous, such as commercial, personal, institutional, community or public use and the distinctions make Wi-Fi networks create social boundaries among Wi-Fi users. People obtain information through different media, Internet and TV, and the access relates closely to person. Wi-Fi access points integrate users into a bigger and complicated group level, like family member or company employees. Commercial providers try to occupy particular locations to monopolize Wi-Fi access and grassroots organizations want to make Wi-Fi free and liberal. Popular Wi-Fi facilities materialize Internet resource in our daily life and they also produce media spectacle in physical installations and social movement.

3. Politics and Ideology:

Many cities in UK, USA and Taiwan have their city-wide Wi-Fi plans, but most of them are aborted because of financial troubles. The abandoned plans leave facilities alone to produce ruin landscapes in cities like other seldom used public playgrounds and similar places. Most of municipal Wi-Fi plans claim they want to provide convenient Internet connection for citizens. In “Broadband Marxism”, Chris Sprigman considers Wi-Fi can provide cheap and convenient Internet connection to reduce digital divides. Most municipal corporate with telecommunication companies, the profit is their only consideration. In his film “War at distance”, Harum Farockie “sketches a picture of the relationship between military strategy and industrial production and shows how war technology finds its way into everyday use.” To promote Wi-Fi plans for money, governments and companies persuade we should use Wi-Fi everywhere but you need to pay higher if you want to use better Wi-Fi services.

If we are obessed with municipal Wi-Fi, we would obey the rules and regulations of governemtn and company. As Raniero Panzieri told “ [T]he extension of information techniques and their field of application, like the extension of the sphere of technical decisions, fits perfectly into the capitalist ‘caricature’ of a social regulation of production.” Municipal Wi-Fi will be ideological apparatus to decide how we think and behaviour as Louise Althusser pointed out.

4. Works

Wi-Fi-surrounded citizens live in an open system where Wi-Fi users have become cyborg under the interaction of real world and cyberspace. This project aims to visualize the relation and connection in Wi-Fi networks. To depict Wi-Fi landscapes, I create a website for you users type their Wi-Fi hardware code and see the colour translation on webpage. Because Wi-Fi aims to provide Internet connection, I choose Internet art as the representation to present this trait. The translated colours the combination of hardware code in real world and colour code in cyberspace. The colours don’t bear traditional colour meanings for human beings and they are metaphor which breaks the boundary of human beings and machines.