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.
