In this film, Wireless in the world 2, simple visualisations of radio ‘spaces’ are overlaid into urban spaces. The film has been made as a follow up to this video experiment and has been specifically designed for exhibition in HABITAR at LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial.

Here is an excerpt from the exhibition description:

“Utopian and radical architects in the 1960s predicted that cities in the future would not only be made of brick and mortar, but also defined by bits and flows of information. The urban dweller would become a nomad who inhabits a space in constant flux, mutating in real time. Their vision has taken on new meaning in an age when information networks rule over many of the city’s functions, and define our experiences as much as the physical infrastructures, while mobile technologies transform our sense of time and of space.”

There are photos of the exhibition by Edgar Gonzalez here. The exhibition catalogue with essays by Anne Galloway, Usman Haque, Nicolas Nova and others is available to download here.

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Right now I am sitting near fourteen objects sending and receiving radio signals, from Oyster cards to mobile phones and wireless routers in a multitude of overlapping and competing fields. Here we are creating communicative material that uses dashed-line abstractions to visualise the presence of wireless technologies in the everyday environment. What if we could see every field produced by an Oyster card or NFC enabled mobile phone for instance?

Using simple abstractions such as the dashed line and the kinds of visual language that we have previously proposed for RFID allow us to quickly communicate aspects such as the spatial properties of wireless technologies that are often overlooked. I’ve been using these images in presentations for a while, to sensitise designers and students to the spatial and embodied properties of RFID, Bluetooth and WIFI.

We are also experimenting with video, where the visualisations are part of an environment in a moving sequence. This is looking like a useful technique for making visual explanations of invisible materials.

Here are more images:

NFC phones and contactless cards.

NFC phones.

Wifi and bluetooth.

An NFC-enabled bus timetable.

An NFC-enabled ‘smart poster’.

An Oyster card reader and cards

Related things:

1. New film: Wireless in the World 2 In this film, Wireless in the world 2, simple visualisations......
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