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.
“Our branch has already installed Wi-Fi network of “Wireless City” advocated by Taipei City government. Our branch with main library, Wenshan, Tianmu, Wanhua, Sanmin, Mingshen, Zhonglu, Dazhi,Datong, Lizing, Jingxin, Donghu and Daoxiang branch have constructed Wi-Fi network by ourselves to provide readers Wi-Fi service. “(http://www.tpml.edu.tw/TaipeiPublicLibrary/index.php?subsite=chinese&page=chinese-question-coi.php; original language is Chinese and translated by author)
About the art
Art provides artists to create artworks to argue with issues which are even invisible, potential, and hard to notice. From 1950s, conceptual art applied different artistic forms to convey their concepts and ideas. Their artworks involved with contemporary closely and produce distinct systems to interpret modern societies. This art movement crosses the world and produces lots of important and spectacular artworks. Until now, artists face a more complicated world than before. We are not only living in our geographical place and particular time zone. Accompanying with globalization and Internet development, we are breathing in real world/cyberspace via ubiquitous networks, here/there with faster transportation and past/present/future under overabundant hi/story. Artists own various of medium and issues and need to think how and what we create art with our special moment and position in this globalizing world.
