WIFI Camera
ARTIST
YEAR
COUNTRY
MEDIA
Wifi Camera is a camera we have built to capture and form images from "wifi" waves rather than "light" waves. It reveals the invisible electromagnetic space generated by our wifi (wireless) networks that are increasingly found in coffee shops, offices and homes throughout cities of the world.
We take real time "photos" of wifi which show how our physical structures are illuminated by this particular electromagnetic phenomenon and we are even able to see the shadows that our bodies create within such "hertzian" spaces.
In the age of "englightenment", electromagnetic waves that we knew as "visible light" formed our most ubiquitous medium and was the medium of choice both in "recording" and in "representing", in the form first of drawings and paintings and later the traditional camera. Today, however, we find that we are creating and responding more and more to non-visual electromagnetic fields: those emanating from our devices and environments. What might an "electromagnetic" camera for our age look like? What sort of images might it capture? How might it reveal the obscure relationship that we have to our data environments?
One of the most important intentions of the project is to develop a 21st century notion of the "picturesque", which encompasses the space of our electromagnetic data bodies. As such, determining where we point our "wifi camera" (which, in its data-sniffing connotations has various intriguing privacy implications) is as important as determining how to construct it.
Supported by: Folly Gallery, Lancaster and Fast-UK, Manchaster.
Biography
Usman Haque
Usman Haque has created responsive environments, interactive installations, digital interface devices and mass-participation performances. His skills include the design of both physical spaces and the software and systems that bring them to life. He has been an invited researcher at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, Italy, artist-in-residence at the International Academy of Media Arts and Sciences, Japan and has also worked in USA, UK and Malaysia. As well as directing the work of Haque Design + Research he was until 2005 a teacher in the Interactive Architecture Workshop at the Bartlett School of Architecture, London.
He is a recipient of a Wellcome Trust Sciart Award, a grant from the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology, the Swiss Creation Prize, Belluard Bollwerk International, the Japan Media Arts Festival Excellence prize and the Asia Digital Art Award Grand Prize.
His work has been exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), Ars Electronica, Transmediale, Hillside Gallery (Tokyo), The National Maritime Museum Greenwich, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Itau Cultural, Sao Paulo, NTT Inter-Communication Centre, Tokyo and the Singapore Biennale.
His work has also been presented at international conferences including Siggraph, VSMM (International Society on Virtual Systems and Multimedia) and Doors of Perception.
Bengt Sjölén
Bengt Sjölén was born in Sweden in 1972. Bengt is a self-educated software and hardware designer with roots in the Atari/Amiga demo scene in the late eighties and early nineties. He has been programming games since he was 10 years old, starting with assembler on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum just because he was bored with the games available at the time.
Bengt currently works with collaborators all over europe on projects merging media art, technology and architecture experimenting with social and physical spaces. His work has been exhibited internationally in places like ISEA(San Jose, US, 2006 and Helsinki, Finland, 2004), Trondheim Senter for Samtidskunst(Trondheim, Norway) and Ludwig Muzeum(Budapest, Hungary). Bengt's work range from low-level hardware and software reverse-engineering to video graphics and 3D projections via 3D multiplayer game engines, physics simulations, audio software, linguistics, interaction design, experimental display and visualization technologies, interactive installations, bio-informatics, embedded systems, as well as digital, analog and wireless circuit design.
He strongly advocates the use of, and contribution to, open-source software and other non-proprietary technologies.
Founding partner of Automata AB and Teenage Engineering AB.
Adam Somlai-Fischer
Adam (Szabolcs) Somlai-Fischer (1976 Budapest) an architect and interaction designer, is interested in the cultural qualities of new technologies, and to explore these he creates installations and experiments that blend spaces, technologies and interactivity. A team worker, Adam collaborates with designers, artists and engineers, where motivations are shared to create projects from conglomerates of thinking cultures.
Examples include: Reconfigurable House and Reorient – spaces made of thousands of electronic toys; Aleph, an outdoor display built from kinetic mirrors; Ping Genius Loci – a field of outdoor analogue pixels; Brainmirror – a mixed reality experience presenting MRI through a mirror; Low Tech Sensors and Actuators workshop and handbook; and Induction house – a set of experiments for spatial projections. These projects were shown at the Venice Biennale of Architecture2004, 2006, NTT ICC Tokyo, ISEA 2004 Helsinki and 2006 San Jose, Ars Electronica 2006, Kiasma Museum Helsinki, Ludwig Museum Budapest.
Today he is directing aether architecture, an office for mediated environments, working as the program director of Kitchen Budapest medialab. He holds a a guest researcher position at the MOKK Media Research, and he is lecturing and holding workshops in architecture and design schools across Europe.
"The Future of the Present or the Present of the Future", a roundtable discussion with distinguished quests from leading media arts institutions around the world took place on June 10, 2008 at NAMOC Read more
