The Urban Topography You Can't See

If you live in a reasonably urban location, chances are good that the complicated infrastructure that keeps everything moving doesn’t stop at the tangible. The friendly Scandinavians, always at the forefront of connectivity, set out to provide a visual representation of one such invisible network – the invisible terrain of WiFi.

Timo Arnall, Jørn Knutsen, and Einar Sneve Martinussen, of the Oslo School of Architecture & Design in Norway, sat down to tackle this problem, and designed a tool that measures WiFi signal strength and displays that value on a 4 metre tall pole that contains 80 lights. They then used long exposure photographs to capture cross-sections of the presence of WiFi in a given area in a project called Immaterials: Light Painting WiFi:

Immaterials: Light painting WiFi from Timo on Vimeo.

The intention of this project is to demonstrate the presence of WiFi and how it relates to urban environments and architecture. As Martinussen explains,

December in Oslo is dark, making it an ideal month for light painting. During a few weeks of walking, measuring and photographing we visualised a number of networks in the Grünerløkka area in Oslo. The visualisations illustrate how WiFi networks in this neighbourhood are ubiquitous, but also fragmented and qualitatively different. The strength, consistency and reach of the network says something about the built environment where it is set up, as well as reflecting the size and status of the host. Small, domestic networks in old apartment buildings flow into the streets in different ways than the networks of large institutions. Dense residential areas have more, but shorter range networks than parks and campuses.

Our expeditions around Grünerløkka, and the time-consuming work of measuring networks by walking with a 4 metre tall instrument gave us a sense of the relationships between WiFi networks and the physical environment. Architectural forms, building materials and the urban landscape shape how networks spread into the city, and can make WiFi seem spatially unpredictable. The light paintings show how the network's behaviour depends on where it is located and how the city around it is built.

The technology needed to realize this vision was inspired by a previous project called Ghost in the Field in which Arnall used light painting to explore the spatial qualities of RFID, looking at both different tags and different readers:

Immaterials: the ghost in the field from Timo on Vimeo.

Basically, December is a dark month in Norway, so you might as well make lemonade and create cool and informational imagery. The omnipresence of invisible technology is nothing new – radio waves have been cruising through the air for decades – but new wireless technology increasingly contains sensitive information such as credit card numbers. New United States Passports contain RFID tags, for example, an incredibly unsafe technology in that the tags are constantly screaming out the information they hold to anything that will listen to it, as demonstrated by Chris Paget:

On the off chance that your identity hasn’t already been stolen countless times, you might want to get out your toolkit and do some DIY identity protection. As Wired explains, the answer to those pesky RFID tags is as simple as taking a hammer to the suckers and mashing them out.

Love it or hate it, wireless technology is a cornerstone of modern cities, and I love the light paintings in the Immaterials project.