Wouldn’t it be nice to see ‘invisible’ WiFi networks? The project made by Timo Arnall, Jørn Knutsen, Einar Sneve Martinussen reveals some of the qualities of WiFi networks thus making them more understandable for common people. This thought provoking phenomenawas called ‘Immaterials’.
WiFi networks are physically invisible and technically inexplicable and complex, what makes them abstract for people. We don’t even realize how much digital structures affect our life and that all these electromagnetic fields and data traffic are interwoven elements of our daily life. This whole process of making the phenomena project through visualizations shows our interactions with devices and networks, basically how the environment is shaped by networks and the other way around, what helps us better understand our urban existence.
As you can see, the effects of this project are really awesome but the technique is pretty simple. They used the light painting technique and the WiFi measuring rod which included a probe, equipped with about 80 LED’s, a microcontroller and a WiFi module. The WiFi measuring rod was created to visualize WiFi signal strength as a light pattern. Light-painting on the other hand, is an interesting photographical technique which allows designers to create images comprising both the real world and the phenomena. The light-painting technique lets us explore and reveal how the invisible face of WiFi networks looks like and also shows how it relates to our environment. From now on we can see what we’re invisibly exposed to onregular basis.
