Immaterials: Light Painting WiFi

Abstract

Blue bars of light are marching across Oslo. It is a whole new way of making data visible.

Designing for the Impossible: Creating a mobile application to track time dilation

“…We are working in the arena of making the invisible immediate. The arena where we are augmenting our senses through technology -such as experiments in making wi-fi signals perceivable (Arnall & Knutsen 2011) or detecting magnetism (Nagel et al 2005) -changes the context of how we live and how we may comprehend our world.…”

Computational light painting and kinetic photography

“…Light painting has been widely used in sciences, commercial photography, entertainment, and creative arts. Conventionally, the light source is moved by hand along some specific paths to create an immaterial structure, which is recorded in 2D images by camera long exposure [Acar and Kavuran 2016;Arnall et al 2013;Wada et al 2016]. Reed and Clemens [Reed and Clemens 2010] used a light source to write some characters in mid-air, in which the strokes are in pure hand-writing style.…”

“…A 3D model is composed of unordered triangles. In order to obtain a 2D contour of a model sliced by an arbitrary plane, one could exhaustively check every single triangle to see if the slicing plane intersects with it and collect all the intersection segments [Chalasani et al 1991]. In order to improve the computational efficiency, Tata et al and Vatani et al [Tata et al 1998;Vatani et al 2009] proposed some pre-processes to group all the triangles along z-direction.…”

Brave New City: the image in the urban data-space

“…For instance, the film, Immaterials: light-painting wifi (2010), realized by researchers at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, documents a research project in visualizing the spatiality of wireless networks. Via a mobile measuring rod, the researchers were able to visualize the strength and spatial distribution of wireless networks, literally spilling out from windows into streets and intersecting with each other (Arnall, 2011) (Figure 4). Another example is Gordon Savicic’s, Constraint City/The Pain of Everyday Life project, started in 2008: a wifi-antenna connected to a set of torso straps allows the artist (and those participating in his Constraint walks in various European cities) to experience the varying strength of wireless networks across a given territory as a corporeal experience of ῾tight lacing’ (Figure 5).…”